WASHINGTON — Bub Carrington does not regard his newest accomplishment as a big deal.
But the numbers reveal how rare his achievement is.
On Thursday night, when his Washington Wizards host the Denver Nuggets, he will play in his 125th consecutive regular-season NBA game.
Streaks like Carrington’s don’t happen often. He owns the NBA’s fourth-longest active consecutive games streak, trailing only the New York Knicks’ Mikal Bridges and the San Antonio Spurs’ Harrison Barnes and Julian Champagnie, according to Sportradar.
Bridges appeared in his 600th straight regular-season game Wednesday night. Barnes has played 348 consecutive games. Champagnie’s streak has run for 147 games.
Carrington, a 20-year-old guard whose rugged approach to the game belies his baby face, knows that sports fans obsess over streaks. After all, he grew up in Baltimore, the city that adores Cal Ripken Jr., who played in a record 2,632 consecutive baseball games for the Orioles.
Carrington doesn’t call attention to his own streak, and, during an interview Wednesday afternoon, he sounded as if he would prefer that everyone would focus on almost anything else.
The number of games he’s played in a row, he explained, is a byproduct of his love of the sport and the fierce work ethic fostered by his late father, Carlton Carrington Jr., a beloved youth basketball coach who was known as “Big Bub;” his mother, Karima Carrington; and his older brother, Kareem Montgomery, who played football at Lehigh University.
“I find joy in playing basketball every single day,” the Wizards guard said. “I don’t see it as a streak, honestly. I don’t see it as what everyone else does. This is my job. I made it this far so that I can play basketball, so I can be in the NBA and I can play basketball every day.
“Missing games, I didn’t know until I got here (that that) was a norm. Like, I thought playing was the norm, but it’s really not, in a way. The streak, that doesn’t really mean anything to me. It’s just me going out there and doing what I love to do. It’s normal. It’s normal playing every day, you know?”
To understand Carrington’s perspective, know this: He had to fight to reach the NBA.
In youth leagues, he often was one of the smallest players on the court, standing only 5-foot-7 as a high school freshman. He compensated by outworking his peers and outsmarting them through his feel for the game. Sometimes at 5:30 a.m., with his dad’s encouragement, he would do defensive slide drills in a sand pit to work on his conditioning, agility and explosiveness.
“We had a plan,” Carrington said. “Luckily enough, I was surrounded with people that understood what it took to be great, or to be better. I had an older brother who’d been through the fire, who’d been through the wringer, who played Division I football. He knew all the workouts, all the different things that you had to do to be better.
“My dad, obviously, knew a lot. He sent so many people to the league before as a basketball coach. I was young and I was still in school, so there were some weird times when we had to do the (work). But we knew exactly what we had to do, and we did it. Yeah, I had to do the extra stuff. I was a skinny kid, a late bloomer. Lifting weights, doing bench presses wasn’t going to help me at a young age. It was the running.”
Bub Carrington has made 41 percent of his 3-point attempts this season. (Geoff Burke / Imagn Images)
He continued working when he reached the University of Pittsburgh. Panthers coach Jeff Capel recalled that, on the day of a 7 p.m. game, Carrington would work out individually in the morning, participate in a team shootaround from 2 to 3 in the afternoon, remain on the court to take extra shots after the shootaround and conduct a pregame shooting routine at 5.
College games last 40 minutes, eight more than high-school games, and by January of his one-and-done season at Pitt, Carrington was wearing himself out.
Capel’s advice? Eliminate the morning workout and 5 p.m. shooting routine on game days.
“I think Bub, at a very young age, because of his dad and the people his dad had him around, he understood work,” Capel said in an interview with The Athletic. “He wasn’t afraid of it, and he fell in love with the process at a pretty young age. When he was here, we had to keep him out of the gym at times.”
It should be no surprise, then, that Carrington has kept working since he reached the NBA.
On Jan. 10, the Wizards opened a four-game West Coast road trip with a nearly five-hour cross-country flight from Dulles International Airport to Phoenix. Shortly after the plane touched down, Carrington and 10 of his teammates took part in an optional workout, with Carrington and rookie shooting guard Tre Johnson playing one-on-one against each other.
Carrington has not missed a single regular-season game in his pro career. On Monday, he became only the eighth player in NBA history to compile at least 500 career rebounds and 500 career assists before the age of 21.
Since the beginning of the 2015-16 season, only 73 NBA players have played in at least 125 consecutive regular-season games, according to Sportradar.
Carrington is about to become the 74th.
If you ask Wizards players how Carrington has done it, they tend to offer variations of the same answer.
“That’s who he is,” said wing Kyshawn George, who played against Carrington in college while at Miami and joined Carrington as a member of the Wizards’ 2024 draft class. “We saw it at Pitt already, and we saw it last year. His desire to go out there and compete every single night, that’s just who he is.”
“During the tough times, during the games, you can tell he’s happy about it,” veteran forward Khris Middleton said. “He’s happy that he’s experiencing it. That’s a big sign that guys who do that love the process, and you can see that he loves it. He loves being out there. He loves the tough moments. He loves the great moments.”
Last season, Carrington led all rookies in total minutes with 2,458.
There were occasions, however, when it looked like Carrington would miss a game.
On Dec. 30, 2024, Carrington hit his head on the Capital One Arena court while defending against the Knicks. Carrington was wheeled off the court, but tested negative for a concussion. Two nights later, despite a knot on his head, he played 31 minutes and helped the Wizards defeat the Chicago Bulls 125-107.
On March 20, 2025, Carrington’s dad died after a struggle against cancer. On March 21, with family and friends in the stands, Carrington played 26 minutes in a loss to the Orlando Magic.
“Those two games specifically, for sure, and a few other times, yeah, I’ve thought about (not playing),” Carrington said. “But it’s not in me to give up, and it definitely wasn’t how I was raised. My parents, and my dad specifically, used to tell me a lot, ‘Your best ability is availability.’”
Carrington paused for a second.
“Like I said,” he added, “I love basketball, so I’m going to do what I love to do.”