Trae Young hasn’t played an NBA game yet in 2026 as he has recovered from knee and quadriceps injuries, but on Monday, we got two pretty significant bits of news about the former All-Star point guard:
- Marc Stein reported that he has been “repeatedly advised” that Young and the Washington Wizards are expected to come to terms on a contract extension that is “widely projected” to be a three-year pact. Young has a $49 million player option this offseason.
- Hours later, ESPN reported that Young is expected to make his Wizards debut on Thursday when Washington faces the Utah Jazz. Young later confirmed that report on Instagram.
Stein’s reporting isn’t binding, of course. Nobody has put pen to paper here on a new contract. But rumblings about a new deal between Young and the Wizards aren’t new. On Jan. 9, Tim Bontemps and Brian Windhorst reported for ESPN that “the strong expectation around the league is Young will sign an extension with the Wizards.” Young is extension-eligible now, and given both Atlanta’s reported reluctance to give him a new deal and Charania’s reporting in January that Washington was his preferred destination in a trade, it’s not hard to imagine that the two sides have had a basic framework in mind since the trade.
The sequencing in that respect seems a bit backward. Shouldn’t the Wizards have wanted to see Young play for them, examine his fit with the existing roster and then determine if they want to keep him for the long haul?
The answer is probably yes, though these situations can be complicated. Trades involving stars often come with understandings about future contracts. That usually happens because teams are reluctant to give up meaningful assets for a player they aren’t sure they’ll be able to keep.
Where the Young situation differs, though, is that the Wizards didn’t give up notable assets to get Young. The Hawks cap-dumped him for CJ McCollum’s expiring contract and Corey Kispert, a reserve shooter. Interest in his services appeared to be limited. Aside from Washington, no other team is known to have made a serious offer for Young this season, and with the Hawks uninterested in paying him, Young didn’t exactly have much leverage in securing another payday upon the expiration of his existing contract.
This was one of the theoretical benefits of acquiring Young. He was a low-risk, high-reward target. His defensive vulnerabilities and limitations as an off-ball player on offense made him a tricky fit for most win-now teams in a league increasingly moving away from heliocentric offense, but he’s still a 27-year-old four-time All-Star. By all means, get that player for nothing. See how he fits. His presence could potentially be quite beneficial as a table-setter for Washington’s young players, who could use his veteran presence as a developmental aide.
Maybe he works out. If he doesn’t, his existing contract makes it pretty easy to cut bait. He is owed nothing beyond the 2026-27 season. This is notable for a few reasons. The first is that the Wizards start to get more expensive after that. If Young signs a new three-year deal, for instance, his next contract would overlap with rookie extensions for Alex Sarr and Kyshawn George, both of which should be pretty big.
The second is that Washington’s roster has already changed meaningfully since Young’s acquisition, and it is going to change more by the end of his current contract. Since trading for Young, the Wizards have also traded for Anthony Davis, who is owed more than $121 million for the 2026-27 and 2027-28 campaigns. Perhaps more pressingly, you could argue that the most important player for Washington’s current rebuild isn’t even on the team yet.
That would be their 2026 lottery pick. The Wizards have done well to hold Young out as long as they have, as that pick is top-eight protected and they needed to make sure they won’t hand it over to the Knicks. It is, broadly speaking, safe now. The 16-win Wizards currently have the fourth-worst record in the NBA, which would guarantee their pick falls no lower than No. 8. Even if they slip to No. 5, they’d have a 99.4% chance of keeping the pick. Considering the No. 6 Pelicans don’t own their pick and therefore have no incentive to lose while every team “below” them in the lottery standings has an advantage of at least five wins over Washington, the Wizards should feel relatively confident that they’ll keep their pick.
But what are they going to do with it? That will depend on the lottery drawing of course, but there is a good chance they wind up with a high-usage player that needs the ball more than an offense led by Young is capable of giving it to him. The Wizards would have to reap some significant benefit in order to justify guaranteeing Young his payday before seeing how he fits with that draft pick and the homegrown core.
This is where things get tricky. We don’t know what a Young deal will look like yet, and yes, there is a price so low that the reward outweighs the risk. It just seems unlikely Young is willing to eschew free agency for such a price. More likely, a deal looks a bit more like the one Rudy Gobert signed with Minnesota before last season. Gobert, like Young, had a player option worth max money at the end of his previous deal (in his case, it was for $46.6 million). He declined that player option and dropped his salary for the 2025-26 season down to $35 million. That dip meant quite a bit to the contending Timberwolves, who needed to clear money to re-sign Julius Randle and Naz Reid while staying below the second apron. In exchange for that pay cut, Gobert got two more years worth $74.5 million.
Say Young signs a deal structured similarly. He’d decline his player option and take a pay cut next season to reflect the limited league-wide interest in small guards at the moment. In exchange, he’d get two extra years of security, aligning with Stein’s reporting that an extension would give him a three-year deal. The key difference here is that Washington has no obvious need for short-term savings. They could have still planned for cap space after the Young trade, but getting Davis afterward vaporized most of their remaining flexibility below the cap. Even with Davis, they’re far enough away from the luxury tax that they can use the full mid-level exception and leave some wiggle room for trades. Having any player at a lower salary than he could have earned is nice, but there’s not a specific type of move that’s immediately visible in which getting those short-term savings would be necessary, though that can obviously change based on further transactions.
It seems as though the Wizards are moving forward expecting Young to be a foundational player for them moving forward. It’s not a crazy expectation given how much he’s accomplished, but it’s not a sentiment many other teams appeared to share when Atlanta was shopping Young a few months ago. If he had much of a market, it probably would have cost more for Washington to trade for him. He certainly could prove the market wrong, but the downside risk of paying him before doing so vastly outweighs the premium it would cost to keep him if he does. It’s better to give a giant contract to a sure thing than a pretty big one to a coin flip.
Again, nothing here has been finalized, but the reporting has pretty consistently suggested an extension is the likeliest outcome. Given where they are and how much their circumstances could change in the next season and change, that just seems a bit premature. The Wizards are still figuring out what they have. They’re still evaluating their recent draft picks and in a position to make another high one. A long-term commitment to Young only makes sense once they’re sure he fits with what they’ve already built, but if the reporting here is any indication, it seems like they may have been leaning that way before even seeing him suit up for a single game.
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