Wizards Get Another Brutal Bradley Beal Reminder After Injury

This is just the latest monkey wrench that's been thrown into Beal's plan to reinvent himself following his Wizards days, which weren't as all-around unpleasant as his last few seasons in Washington suggested. He once flourished as the No. 2 option next to John Wall, winning a few playoff series before transitioning into a 30-point-per-game scorer at the decade's turn.

That's didn't amount to much winning, though, despite the franchise's fruitless attempts to surround him with a competitive squad. They traded for other big names like Russell Westbrook and Kristaps Porzingis to try forcing playoff returns, and their track record of burning draft picks on win-now pieces eventually came back to bite them as the prospect of a full-on rebuild grew tougher to ignore.

Investing Past the Present

Washington finally went all-in on turning the page on the Beal era two summers ago, fully committing to bottoming out in an effort to secure favorable draft odds. After all, they wouldn't have gotten Beal in the first place had they not earned the No. 3 spot in the 2012 NBA Draft, and could only reliably get there again if they focused on the future ahead of the present.

Trading Beal to Phoenix netted them an even-more decorated guard in Chris Paul, who didn't last a week in D.C. before he was rerouted to the Golden State Warriors in exchange for Jordan Poole. He enjoyed an up-and-down ride with the Wizards of his own before he, too, was dealt, bringing fellow scorer CJ McCollum in from the New Orleans Pelicans.

He's now at the head of the Wizards' 1-10 start to the season, an unpleasant figure that has the squad right on track for more favorable draft capital. They're doing good on their promise to repopulate the roster with their own high-ended draftees, and even though they've suffered from some tough strokes of luck in repeatedly testing the lottery, Beal's certainly received the worst end of the stick since departing his team of 11 years.