Per Shams Charania of the Athletic and Watch Stadium, the Washington Wizards have formally sent in their papers to apply for the disabled-player exception for their loss of their point guard and franchise icon John Wall.
The exception is worth about 8.6 million dollars in cap-relief.
Sources on @TheAthleticNBA @WatchStadium: The Washington Wizards have applied to the NBA for an $8.6M disabled player exception for loss of All-Star John Wall.
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) January 10, 2019
This season the Wizards have been extremely dysfunctional. From the getgo, it seems as if Wall and Bradley Beal decided that they would not like to coexist, and it really hurt the team. The offense became slow and had very little movement. It was all isolation shots and oftentimes, forced offense. There was no flow. Defensively, there was minimal effort.
Dysfunction of this sort led Ernie Grunfeld to put all of his players on the trading block. At first, he only traded away Austin Rivers and Kelly Oubre. But Bradley Beal, Otto Porter, and John Wall still remain. However, since Wall is getting surgery, the team will not be able to trade him elsewhere.
It was highly unlikely that a team would trade for Wall anyways. By his age 33 seasons, he would be making up north of 50 million dollars a year. He's already shown regression to his game, and teams aren't willing to make that long-term gamble.
Likely, they'll end up trading Porter and/or Beal for younger assets or draft picks. Their head coach Scott Brooks probably won't be around for very long and the team will begin to retool and rebuild around Wall.
The Wizards are 16-25 on the season and currently sit 11th in the NBA's Eastern Conference.
They will face off next against the Philadelphia 76ers at home.
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