Former Star Reflects on Wizards' Playoff Shortcomings

Washington Wizards fans don't have much to reminisce over.

That's not to discredit what they're doing now. Their front office has embraced the hefty burden of kickstarting a rebuild, and they've done about as good of a job as anyone can ask of them by scraping together a collection of talented prospects accumulated over two years of tanking, but it's been long enough since the Wizards were good that Washingtonians are craving competent basketball.

The closest they've recently came to crossing that elusive 50-win threshold arrived with the John Wall-Bradley Beal-led operations, which peaked as one of the most competitive teams in the Eastern Conference. While Beal's still kicking around the league as a scoring specialist, his injury-ravaged co-star has since hung up his spurs and taken to looking back on his glory days.

He opened up on "Dawg Talk," Kentavious Caldwell-Pope's podcast, on why he and Beal fell short of their desired matchup against LeBron James' Cleveland Cavaliers. They saw themselves as among the best candidates to dethrone the NBA Finals regulars, and Wall maintains the belief today.

[Me and Brad] was a good tandem, but we just didn't know how to win and be those closers at the time," Wall said. "Then we started to figure it out a little later, and that's when I got injured.

"But the year we had Paul Pierce, I think him just showing up how to be a closer, be a worker every day, do those little things, and it still haunts me at times because I broke my hand in Game 1 against the [Atlanta] Hawks...So I missed like two or three games, and I just numbed the hand up and played through it, but I feel like that was our window to get to play the Cavs in the Eastern Conference Finals."