Here's Why the Wizards Decided Not to Trade for James Harden in 2012

Can you imagine a backcourt featuring John Wall and James Harden? It almost happened in 2012, according to Wizards owner Ted Leonsis.

James Harden guards John Wall.
USA Today Sports

Image via USA TODAY Sports/Geoff Burke

James Harden guards John Wall.

Can you imagine what the NBA’s Eastern Conference Playoffs would look like right now if the Wizards had John Wall and James Harden on their team? As it stands, the Wizards already have a strong team that appears to be ready to take the next step and make a real run at the Eastern Conference Finals—although, at this point, they’ll have to dig their way out of a 2-0 hole in their playoff series with the Celtics to do it—but they could have had two legitimate superstars anchoring their backcourt at the moment, if a potential trade with the Thunder had gone through back in 2012.

That trade has been reported on in the past. According to a Washington Post report from December 2012, the Thunder agreed to send Harden to Washington, D.C. in the summer of 2012 in exchange for first-round draft pick Bradley Beal and second-year player Chris Singleton. But several sources who spoke with the Post said Wizards owner Ted Leonsis deaded the deal because he didn’t want to commit to signing Harden to what would amount to a five-year contract worth approximately $80 million. Leonsis eventually shot down that aspect of the report and said he had no problem spending money to improve his team, but he didn't deny that a trade was in the works before he nixed it.

SB Nationpublished a long feature on where the Wizards are at today on Thursday, and while it doesn’t spend a ton of time focusing on the potential Harden deal, it does feature a quote from Leonsis, who acknowledges that the trade did in fact almost happen. The SB Nation piece as a whole revolves around the idea of the Wizards building their current team from the ground up and taking their lumps along the way, and Leonsis discusses how trading for Harden wouldn’t have followed along with that plan. Or rather, "The Plan" that he had for his team. It’s why he says he said no to a deal with the Thunder when it was proposed.

"Filtering it through The Plan, it was, 'Can you have two ball-dominant alpha people on the team?' It was hard," he told SB Nation. "We envisioned what’s happened now, which is a point guard who has the ball a lot and a shooting guard. And boy, if that worked, they’d play well together for a long, long time."

The truth is that there’s no telling whether or not a backcourt featuring Wall and Harden would have actually worked. There’s also no telling how acquiring Harden would have impacted the team over the next five years. It’s easy to look at the way Harden is playing now and say, "The Wizards would be even more amazing this season with him!" But in reality, Harden getting traded to the Wizards, instead of the Rockets, would have had all kinds of ramifications on both the Wizards and the rest of the league. So it’s impossible to know what the Wizards would have had with Wall and Harden in 2017.

But that won’t stop some fans, inside and outside of Washington, from speculating about what could have been.

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