John Wall Is The NBA’s Best Player And The Washington Wizards Are Winning The NBA Championship

It’s an amazing time to be witnessing this while living in #newDC.

Similar to Washington, DC as one of America’s superstar economic hub cities, the National Basketball Association’s Washington Wizards are currently in third place and rising (heeeey, #DCRISING) in the league’s Eastern Conference. Because of the dynamic offensive and defensive play of starting point guard John Wall, as well as tremendous role-playing by an outstanding supporting cast, the Wizards will win the 2016–2017 NBA Championship. It will be the team’s first NBA Championship since the year of my birth in 1978, and probably the start of a championship era for the franchise, coinciding with what portends to be an amazing time in Washington, DC in general. This has been a LONG TIME COMING, and here’s why all of this will happen.

John Wall’s surge comes after six consecutive seasons of play in the NBA wherein Wall has largely learned the level of leadership required to be a NBA Championship-caliber player on the job. Six years in the NBA is the longest Wall, an undoubtedly talented solo athlete, has played team sports in the same place. That’s important. Couple that with the Wizards signing legendary NBA star and vaunted team leader Paul Pierce as a guide for Wall during the 2014–2015 season, and the seeds of Wall’s evolution become apparent.

John Wall spent four years of high school at four different schools, and then exited the University of Kentucky after his freshman year. Comparatively, Pierce played only at Inglewood High School, and stayed three years at the University of Kansas. There’s a level of respect for the job that Pierce learned that maybe Wall hadn’t (and honestly never may) that Pierce may have transferred to Wall that in how Wall has transformed it into his own mantra for his own work as the Wizards superstar and unquestioned team leader is important.

“They still don’t respect me, [b]ut I mean, that’s something that comes with the games. I’m gonna let people know this season.” That’s what Wall told Sports Illustrated in their 2016–2017 season preview. There’s a lot of I/me and not we/they in his language, which to the average person would seem troubling. However, there’s something about his play, maybe in elevating the art of the assist to a solo victory, that’s impressive. In the same interview, Wall notes regarding playing with the team’s other burgeoning star Bradley Beal that, “when I step between those lines and I’m with my team, we’re a brotherhood. We’re not great, and I wouldn’t be myself, without him. He’s able to knock down shots for me, I knock shots down for him, we make plays for each other.”

John Wall was already a great individual scorer deserving of significant attention from opposing defenses. However, he’s now averaging 11 assists a game in 2016–2017, and given that he’s surrounded by a a group of dependable spot-up jump shooters and slashers like Bradley Beal, Otto Porter Jr., Markieff Morris and Marcin Gortat, Washington’s NBA franchise is consistently reaching another level of success.

Of course there’s analogies that can be drawn here to the Chicago Bulls of the Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen age. Could the Wizards duo eventally be similarly iconic? The roots are already there. Bradley Beal is certainly capable enough to be Pippen, a slasher/scorer/more-than-capable second fiddle to what ideally could be Wall-as-MJ, the superstar, the team igniter, the can’t miss player who fills seats anywhere and everywhere creating must-watch content at all times.

Given that Bradley Beal missed the last 26 games of his rookie season due to injury, this means that the 2016–2017 campaign is actually the fourth year that Beal and John Wall have played together in a Jordan/Pippen analgous manner. That being said, the 1990–1991 NBA season was the fourth year that Jordan and Pippen were guiding the Chicago Bulls, and they bested not just the defending champion Detroit Pistons in the Eastern Conference Finals, but also the still supremely gifted Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA Finals. Could something similar occur with Wall, Beal, and the Wizards besting say, LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers, plus Stephon Curry, Kevin Durant, and the Golden State Warriors? Most certainly.

Regarding LBJ, if the celebrated Cavalier and his team reach the 2016–2017 NBA Finals, it’s entirely possible that James himself, as well as other stars like Kyrie Irving, would’ve played 300 games (or the equivalent of nearly FOUR NBA REGULAR SEASONS) in three years. The same can be said for Stephon Curry, Kevin Durant, and the Warriors, too. By comparison, in the same time frame, John Wall and Bradley Beal have played in just over three NBA seasons. There’s a difference of 40 games, or half an NBA regular season, that could make a MAJOR difference.

There’s a key point to be made as well regarding how important a Wizards NBA Championship run would be to the Nation’s Capital on a socioeconomic front as well. Since the Wizards, née Washington Bullets won the NBA Championship in 1978, the franchise’s ability to engage with and market to the local fanbase has slipped from “hey, come see this championship team play basketball” to a series of ham-handed marketing-as-damned near Ponzi schemes that have included the following:

• putting the NBA’s tallest (7'6" Manute Bol) and shortest (5'3" Muggsy Bogues) players on the court at the same time in 1987
• Hiring 1978 championship team superstar Wes Unseld as the team’s coach in 1987 (a position he ignominiously held until 1994)
• Drafting YET ANOTHER giant, 7'7" Gheorghe Muresan, to the team in 1993

• signing the University of Michigan’s Fab Five alum Chris Webber and pairing him with Juwan Howard in 1994, then putting the cherry on top of the pie with the above “You Da Man” marketing jingle

• Going ALL-IN on the re-return of Michael Jordan to the NBA from 2001–2003
• Thankfully, the Wizards failed at attempting to lure Washington, DC native Kevin Durant back home as a free agent this past summer

In the four decades since the Washington Bullets won the NBA Championship, the Nation’s Capital has evolved past being a first-class National Football League town and third-class city defined by crime, drug abuse, and corruption. In 2017, America’s Capital City is now a third-class NFL town where in some quarters mentioning the team’s name is a demonizing offense. As well, DC is now a first-class city where astounding economic revitalization, massive waves of gentrification, and world class advancements in technology, food, music, and entrepreneurship. This is no longer a town where low-hanging fruit marketing schematics feel apropos. Moreso, this is a town governed by a sense of working hard, playing harder, and unified by a sense of demanding top-tier standards of excellence in all things.

If #newDC needed an athlete-as-representative, it’s John Wall. Wall’s success, not unlike DC’s as well, comes from the ability to discover, within himself, the energy to move from being one star in a room full of dimly lit bulbs to using his ultra-luminous star-presence to illuminate an entire franchise. Instead of failing with hackneyed marketing ploys, the WIzards have found, from within their own-drafted roots, the likely catalyst to the Washington Wizards winning the 2016–2017 NBA Championship.

As far as that Bulls corollary made above? Just as DC’s self-created success has lured big-money and high-impact investors and brands, do expect that John Wall’s leadership, Bradley Beal’s talent, and the Wizards figuring out how to win could, no, should, do the same.

JOHN WALL.

YOU DA MAN. YOU DA MAN.

THAT’S THE REASON (WE SHOULD ALL BE) WIZARDS FANS.