Bub Carrington said the quiet part on camera, then kept going. In a WUSA9 interview published Friday, October 2, the Washington Wizards guard explained why he expects this season to look nothing like last season.
“We just haven’t been told yet to go be the best version of yourself,” Carrington said. “We’ve all, in a way, been held back just because we were trying to get AJ Dybantsa. That’s no secret. But now, no one has handcuffs. Everyone is shackles-free.”
That is the quote in full, and the wording matters. Carrington described players being held back, which is a different sentence from “we tried to lose games.” Plenty of people read it as the second thing anyway.
What the record says
Washington went 17-65 last season, the worst mark in the NBA and the third straight year the franchise won 20 games or fewer. The Wizards then won the lottery and took AJ Dybantsa out of BYU with the first overall pick in June.
They also spent the year collecting stars who could not play. Trae Young appeared in five games for Washington. Anthony Davis never got on the floor at all.
You can build a case out of those facts without any help from Carrington. He just handed everyone a quote to hang it on.
Has anybody responded?
Not really. The Wizards have issued no statement about Carrington’s comments. The NBA has not commented publicly and has not announced a review, and per reporting from The Athletic, the league is not expected to discipline Carrington or the organization.
So nothing here has been established as a rule violation by anyone with the authority to make that call. A young guard described how last season felt from inside it. The league office has said nothing at all.
That gap is worth noting, because the NBA has fined teams over this general subject before, including the Jazz and the Pacers, according to Larry Brown Sports. No comparable action has been reported or announced in Washington’s case, and none should be assumed.
Why he said it at all
Because he was making an optimistic point. Carrington’s whole message was that the handcuffs are off, and that message only lands if the handcuffs were on in the first place. He was trying to sell this season. The admission about last season came along for the ride.
Washington’s roster now pairs Dybantsa with Alex Sarr, Bilal Coulibaly and Kyshawn George, plus Young and Davis. Carrington is right that this is a different team with a different set of instructions, and he is right that a 17-win roster was never asked to maximize anything.
The problem is that honesty about a rebuild lives in a different genre than honesty about a tank. Front offices spend years building language that gets them the pick without ever admitting the pick was the goal. Carrington skipped all of it in one sentence, on local television, 27 minutes into an interview.
He will learn to phrase it differently. He should not have to, but he will.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.