Wizards can seek trade to transform roster, but biggest problem sits above players
The most prominent symptom of the franchise’s primary malady: team president Ernie Grunfeld, who has been in the job for 15 years, or about a half-decade too long.
Grunfeld went out and made Howard a top free-agent target last summer, awarding him a two-year contract.
Now, the Wizards are 7-12, on pace for a 30-win season and their first sub-.500 season in six years. Seeing as the Wizards were already a mess of dysfunction last season, signing Howard was akin to trying to put out a tire fire with kerosene.
But, lately, this has been typical of the Grunfeld era. The players don’t much like each other, and never have. Meanwhile, Grunfeld adds more prickly personalities, like Howard, to the roster (Clippers guard Austin Rivers, brought in this summer, fits that bill), and the chemistry problems balloon.
Owner Ted Leonsis, amazingly, has stood by and watched his franchise slowly and embarrassingly circle the drain for better than a year now. In fact, according to The Washington Post's Candace Buckner, he gave Grunfeld a secret contract extension last fall and graded Grunfeld’s offseason an "A" when asked about his moves this summer.
If you’re wondering what kind of genius owner could keep Grunfeld in place this long, the answer is Leonsis.
No one should be surprised, now, to see the Wizards bungling and in-fighting through the first month-and-a-half of the season.
Grunfeld has handed out generous contracts that have not held their value. Ask around among front-office executives, and it’s not merely the size of the contracts for the top three Wizards that is frightening. It’s that improvement among the three has been minimal during their time in Washington.
"It’s not where you want to see a guy go to get development," one executive said. "I don’t think they’re bad guys, but they must be frustrated. Beal has gotten better, but he does a lot of work on his own, not with the team."
It’s a grim picture. This is a group that doesn’t much like each other, that is being paid too much, that is underachieving and that has fostered very little internal individual improvement. It was only natural, then, for Grunfeld to layer Howard on top of this mess, and for Leonsis to applaud the move.
The Wizards would like to clean house. When it comes to players, that won’t be easy. But Leonsis should acknowledge that the team is a mess by removing the architect of that mess. It all comes back to Grunfeld, whose firing is past due. 
That's why it would've just been a 1 year "prove it" deal, there's always a risk with player options as we've seen with Meeks, Smith etc.
