BROOKLYN — Something compelled me to get on the train, on Easter Sunday, to come up here. Like Richard Dreyfuss in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” I guess. I can’t explain it. My Devil’s Tower on this overcast, drizzly afternoon was Barclays Center — home of the 18-59 Nets, who were hosting the 17-60 Wizards.
And, Scott Foster.
The question is, why wouldn’t you come watch this?
It could be glorious. Two teams that desperately do not want to win any more games this season, the better to maximize their Lottery odds, in this, Year of the Great Tanking, had to play each other. The schedule demanded it. Washington had the worst record in the league entering play Sunday; Brooklyn was tied with Indiana for second-worst. One of them had to win the game. It was a wildly perverse thing to want to witness.
What would happen? Would the Nets pull people out of the stands to hoop? Would Washington play just three or four guys at random points, and hope no one noticed? The Wizards, listing all of their regular starters as out, and on the second day of a back-to-back that started in Miami on Saturday, with Washington giving up a buck fifty-two to the Heat, had eight healthy bodies available at tipoff. Brooklyn had 10.
But I wasn’t the only one intrigued! Wizards and Nets fans were locked in:
Wizards @ Nets today is the most ridiculous tank battle of alltime 😂
Ten players are listed out for Washington, nine players listed out for Brooklyn
Full injury report needs two pages ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/i7FvxfLhTu
— SleeperWizards (@SleeperWizards) April 5, 2026
If the Wiz do catch a win today, reminder the Nets still have:
1 vs the Pacers 👀
2 vs the Bucks (who are in full tank mode) https://t.co/OoSe9oxBV5
— Jared (@Free_Thinking1) April 5, 2026
And…a lot of people came to watch in person. Really.
It was Kids’ Day at Barclays, and they damn near filled up the place. There were spots of empty seats in the upper and lower bowls, but considering who was playing, it was still impressive that so many people showed up.
Erin-Michael Gill and his son Nicholas had tickets just behind the scorer’s table. Good ones. They got up Sunday morning in Great Falls, Va., went to Easter Mass at 7 a.m., and then drove four and a half hours from the D.C. area to get up here for the 3:30 p.m. tipoff. They both had on Anthony Gill jerseys. Anthony is Nicholas’ favorite player. The Great Falls Gills are not related to Anthony Gill, as far as they know.
“We’ve talked to the president (Michael Winger) and the general manager (Will Dawkins),” Erin-Michael said. “They all say the culture they want to build for the Wizards is the one Anthony Gill has. The guy is a good dude, rebuilding the culture, plays hard, you know? He’s the last guy on the bench, first guy out.”
But … four and a half hours? To watch this? How did Erin-Michael green-light this?
“Well, technically, Mom gave the green light,” he said.
But, Nicholas, you understand that it’s actually better for the Wizards to do better in the long term by losing now, in the short term, right?
“Ehh,” he said, channeling his Inner Silver.
Erin-Michael Gill and his son Nicholas drove four and a half hours from Great Falls, Va. to Brooklyn to watch Anthony Gill (no relation) and the Wizards play the Nets. (David Aldridge / The Athletic)
Was the game well-played? No. A lot of missed layups, after a lot of really poor defense, allowed many of those point-blank looks at the rim. Washington’s first-half D was especially egregious, and the Wizards quickly fell down by 16. Three Washington players who spent much of their season with the team’s G-League affiliate — forward Jamir Watkins, wing Leaky Black and center JuJu Reese — played more than 40 minutes Sunday, as the Wizards only played six of their eight guys well into the third quarter.
Of course, the game and 24-second clock also malfunctioned all afternoon, to the point where the refs turned them off completely early in the third, leaving the PA guy to count down the shot clock like it was 1968: 20 seconds…15….10…. The clocks recovered in the fourth, as did Washington, which took a four-point lead with less than four minutes left.
Yet, when Brooklyn rookie guard Nolan Traoré, one of the Nets’ five first-round picks in last year’s draft, hit a 3-pointer with 2:56 left to tie the game at 105, the Barclays crowd erupted. The home fans didn’t boo. There was no cynicism in Barclays. It seemed not to matter to the kids and those who brought them that this might deleteriously impact the Nets’ tank. Brooklyn went on a 15-3 run the last four minutes to pull away. Traoré looked like he could be a contributing player someday.
— CHUBBZ (@ChubbzNets) April 5, 2026
“I can speak for my team, and I was very happy with what I saw, from pretty much everybody, all the groups that played together,” Nets Coach Jordi Fernández said afterward. “For how long they’ve played together, we were competitive, executed, tried to do the right thing.”
The Wizards could be buoyed, as they’ve been the past few weeks, by the performance of rookie Will Riley, who scored 30 points in 35 minutes off the bench, becoming the first Washington rookie to post back-to-back 30-point games since Calbert Cheaney did so in 1994.
And they could hope to buck the recent odds of the team with the worst regular-season record not winding up with the first pick since the last, most recent attempt to discourage tanking, in 2019. That year, the NBA flattened the odds so that each of the three teams with the three worst regular-season records had the same odds, 14 percent, to land the top pick. The team with the worst record has yet to get the top overall pick since.
But, they lost. For the 61st time this season.
“We’re trying to build a culture here, and all of us are a part of that,” Gill — the basketball-playing one — said. “We’re trying to be professional, and we have to do our job at a high level. Again, if we’re in this organization long-term, great. But a lot of these guys are performing for different types of jobs. They could be somewhere else. Everyone understands the magnitude of it, and they’re trying to take advantage of it.”
And Washington “gained” a game in the tank standings, continuing to play the odds where the Lottery and draft are concerned. These are the same odds that are celebrated when winning teams find advantages along the margins, which tends to become greater when you have true superstars on your roster. The Wizards and Nets do not have one of those at present.
The NBA has given out 70 Most Valuable Player awards in its history. Of those, 26 have gone to players taken first overall in their respective drafts. Another 18 MVPs went second or third overall in their drafts. Another six were top-five picks. (This doesn’t include Hall of Famers like Wilt Chamberlain and Oscar Robertson, who combined for five more MVPs, and who were selected under the NBA’s old “territorial rights” process by NBA teams close to where they played in high school, and who obviously would have been taken first overall had they been available in a normal draft.
Yes, Denver took Nikola Jokić with the 41st pick overall in 2014, and the Bucks took Giannis Antetokounmpo 15th overall in 2013, and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander went 11th in 2018. That does not mean you can get league MVPs with any old pick. Usually, you don’t. Usually, you have to draft really, really high-star prospects in the first round to get one. Brooklyn and Washington thus soldier on, in the NBA’s wasteland, in the dregs of the season, hoping to catch a rising superstar the best way they currently can.
There were worse things you could do on Easter Sunday.