Wizards' Alex Sarr had a rough start, but No. 2 pick is showing signs of potential

There was no ambiguity about the dragging Alex Sarr got during and after his poor NBA Summer League performance in Las Vegas.

He. Got. Lit. Up.

A lot of y’all clowned him, especially after he went 0-of-15 from the floor in the Washington Wizards’ game against the Portland Trail Blazers in July. It was the most shots without a make in a summer league game since 2017, and very few noted that the qualifier “summer league” meant that the actual outcome was pointless. It was the process that Washington was concerned with when it came to Sarr, the second pick in the 2024 draft.

The Wizards encouraged Sarr to shoot whenever possible, to not only begin the process of getting comfortable shooting the NBA 3, but also raise his overall offensive floor, which was basically nonexistent as he ascended the ranks of the French national program, and then with Perth in the Australian Basketball League. And Sarr had major struggles his first couple of months in the NBA.

But December brought a significant uptick in play — and a sense of the 19-year-old Sarr’s two-way potential.

After 30 games, entering Wednesday, Sarr now ranks second among rookies in scoring at 11.6 points per game, behind the Philadelphia 76ers’ Jared McCain (15.3). He’s tied with Portland’s Donovan Clingan for third in rookie rebounding at 6.1 per game, behind the New Orleans Pelicans’ Yves Missi (8.5) and the Memphis Grizzlies’ Zach Edey (8.0). Sarr is 10th among rookies in player efficiency rating at 12.75, ahead of the Atlanta Hawks’ Zaccharie Risacher, taken first overall (9.58), the Houston Rockets’ Reed Sheppard, drafted third (7.32) and the San Antonio Spurs’ Stephon Castle, selected fourth (10.33). And Sarr doesn’t just lead rookies in blocked shots per game (1.8) — he’s seventh in the league, period.

“I feel like, no matter what, just coming every night to compete, no matter what happens, and then see the outcome,” Sarr said Tuesday after practice. “I would say, just thinking about what we’re trying to build, seeing what’s happening right now in the team, trying to stay together and competing every night. That’s really what it’s all about.”

Few folks watch a 5-25 team like Washington intently, if at all. The record becomes a de facto measuring stick of progress, or lack of it, to many. But the Wizards don’t have the luxury of drive-by analysis of their youngsters’ development. They continue to work, intentionally, to get their young athletes better. Slowly — a possession here, a quarter there — they are. And in one important category, Sarr is doing exponentially well.

All of a sudden, he’s splashing 3s at a high rate:

“I’m taking the same amount of 3s as before,” Sarr said. “The shots are just falling, I would say. Whether I was missing them or not the first month, I didn’t stop taking them.”

In November, per NBA.com, Sarr shot 25.9 percent on catch-and-shoot 3s. In December, he made 46.3 percent on them, and on good volume (4.6 per game). He’s making them from the corners and at the top of the key. His refined shooting mechanics clearly represent a found comfort level through repetition. He catches the ball on the right side of his body, and his shot kind of unwinds behind his head. But he shoots it the same way every time, and the shot now looks pretty good.

“You’re seeing the growth on a day-to-day basis,” Wizards coach Brian Keefe said. “Obviously, you see him becoming more comfortable on offense. We play through him a lot. He’s in the trail spot; he makes good decisions. He’s a good passer. Obviously, he’s shot the ball better. But he’s also driving the ball to the rim. You’re seeing a little bit of growth. But we’re still learning him.”

Sarr’s offense remains well behind his defensive footprint. He still struggles catching the ball cleanly in the paint, and he still doesn’t finish authoritatively at the rim.

But the nightly lessons learned are precisely why the Wizards have insisted, even when it looked particularly ghastly on the court the first two months of the season, on throwing Sarr, Bub Carrington and Kyshawn George out there as early and as often as possible. Washington’s front office, headed by general manager Will Dawkins and several others who were with Dawkins in Oklahoma City, is following the OKC model: take big swings on high-ceiling talent in the draft, then get the player(s) up to NBA speed as soon as possible.

Entering play Wednesday, Wizards rookies ranked first (Carrington, at 29.8), second (Sarr, 27.3) and fourth (George, 25.9) in the league in minutes per game among first-year players this season. And while most people will look first at Washington’s awful record, the Wizards are committed to what they should have done four or five years ago once John Wall tore his Achilles in his shower in 2019: embark on a real, down-to-the-studs rebuild through the draft.

That means sacrificing a season or two to get in prime NBA Draft Lottery position in 2025 and 2026, just as they did in 2024 when they took Sarr, who wanted to be here.

For rookies — really, for all professional athletes — the biggest adjustment is processing speed. Those who process what they see faster and understand quicker what the next action will be, based on what they’re seeing now, are the players who tend to make the biggest jumps. So, the Wizards are throwing the playbook at Sarr, just as they did with their top draft pick last season, Bilal Coulibaly.

Against the Knicks on Monday, the Wizards put the 7-foot-1 Sarr on New York’s 6-4 guard, Josh Hart, for multiple possessions — not just to see how Sarr guarded Hart, but to put him in multiple rotations where he had to switch onto a screening big man, get to the corner to close out on a 3-point shooter or stunt and recover. Again, Washington saw glimpses of this pre-draft when Sarr, then with Perth, switched out on Ron Holland, the blue-chip prospect then with G League Ignite, in the Fall Invitational in September 2023 and more than held his own on the perimeter.

Sarr did OK last month against Orlando’s Franz Wagner, too. (On a related note, Wagner wound up scoring 23, and the Magic beat the Wizards by 27.)

“I feel like we’ve kind of worked on that already, so I didn’t feel too out of my comfort zone doing that,” Sarr said. “But it’s just being able to roam around, covering ground on the court, being able to go and help wherever, at any time on the court.”

Last year, Washington put Coulibaly on everyone, from Jayson Tatum to Giannis Antetokounmpo to Damian Lillard. He did OK sometimes, but most nights he got smoked, as you’d expect.

A year later, Coulibaly is still a work in progress, but he can put a defensive possession together like this:

Watch Bilal Coulibaly’s defense on this possession. pic.twitter.com/6uL2j6bwuU

— Bijan Todd (@bijan_todd) December 31, 2024

Against more comparable big-man matchups, like when he took on the Knicks’ Karl-Anthony Towns on Monday, Sarr has been up and down.

He blocked a Towns putback attempt in the first quarter Monday:

But in the fourth, KAT weight-roomed him to the front of the rim:

“We have some glimpses where he comes off the dribble full court and makes a move and throws a pass without looking, and you’re like, ‘Hmm, that’s different,’” a team source said of Sarr. “And he switches, blocks a shot, contests a shot, and you’re like, ‘OK, he’s going to be all right.’ But you have to live with the two out of five games where he looks … like a rookie.”

Having such a young core means the Wizards continue to celebrate pedestrian achievements. Their bench still cheesily stands and applauds the low man (the big man on the weak side of a defense who is often the first person who has to help defensively). Monday, it was Jonas Valančiūnas called for defensive three-second violations. The call is rare these days in the NBA, as veteran big men like Valančiūnas have mastered the “2.9” art of ducking in and out of the paint before they’re deemed illegal.

But in Washington, the applause reinforces the lesson for Sarr and where he needs to be defensively for the team not to be exposed in half-court possessions in the future.

“I mean, it’s definitely, like, silly,” forward Corey Kispert said. “But it’s more of a wholesale, large-picture-purpose, process thing. We want to be a team that’s in the paint and a team that’s crowding the paint and making it look crowded. Those defensive three-second calls are pretty rare on the large scale of the season. You’re trying to make a fun, silly situation out of something that can kind of help us in the long run if we just continue to get a little bit better at it.”

Washington signed Valančiūnas for three years and $30 million in free agency last summer to help Sarr’s transition, so he wouldn’t have to take a low-post pounding early on. The Wizards love what Valančiūnas brings to the locker room and how he settles things down on the floor, and they want to keep him around. But as the trade deadline nears, JV’s name is mentioned in trade rumors.

For now, Valančiūnas continues in his mentor role for Sarr.

“I’m just leading by example,” Valančiūnas said. “Yeah, I’m talking to him, and, if I see something, I correct. But he’s a smart young gentleman. He knows what he needs to do. He follows the lead.”

In the Wizards’ dreams, the throughline of their current young core’s development would, in the next three years, match up and become consistent in service to the next group of talent in the next two drafts: a Cooper Flagg, Ace Bailey or Dylan Harper in 2025, or an A.J. Dybantsa or Cameron Boozer in 2026 — assuming the Wizards don’t have to convey their ’26 first to the Knicks; the pick is protected 1-8. (Let’s just say that I’ll be, uh, shocked, if that ’26 pick conveys to New York.)

By, say, the start of the 2028-29 season, when the $800 million renovation of Capital One Arena is supposed to be complete, Sarr and Carrington will be 23. George and Coulibaly will be 24. The hope-they’ll-be-difference-making players brought aboard in the ’25 and ’26 drafts will still be teenagers.

As Sarr and the young athletes improve, in fits and starts and in relative obscurity compared to much of their brethren, a franchise keeps up hope for a relevant future — one possession at a time.

(Photo: Stacy Revere / Getty Images)