The Bub Carrington Conversation No One Wants to Have
This is also me not having the conversation because I do not want to have it.
There’s a talk to be had about Bub Carrington and I don’t know what that talk is. He’s seated in another room, awaiting questioning while I stand outside, pacing the hallway.
Carrington is coming off of one of his best shooting months in his career — well timed in-terms of the narrative. He averaged 46.8% from deep on 3.9 attempts a night, 54.8% from inside the arc. It is difficult to ignore that it is a more limited volume, his overall lowest since November. But you still want to admire and reward his efficiency.
Some people say the best ability is availability and Carrington seemingly takes that to heart. The iron man of the Washington Wizards, he has appeared in every single regular reason game possible since entering the league. With that status comes a certain kind of quiet credibility. Not the loud, declarative kind that forces its way into conversations, but the steady, ever-present hum of someone who is always there, always available to be evaluated, for better or worse.
So, what do you do with a player who is always present, always competent, and occasionally—briefly—something more? Maybe more important, what do you do with a player who keeps answering questions you’re not really asking?
On the season, Bub Carrington is averaging 10.2 points, 4.6 assists (2.3 turnovers) and 3.5 rebounds — not necessarily the stark improvement from his 9.8 points, 4.4 assists and 4.2 rebounds from his freshman campaign. It is worth noting the decrease in his minutes — dropping to 27.6 minutes per game — along with his move to being the primary point figure of the second-team unit.
When drafted in 2024, the question lingered about how Washington would use him — whether it be the combo figure he looked most natural in or if he would suffer through the torture of converting into point guard. And it is safe to say that it has mostly been the latter — not in some dramatic, catastrophic sense, but in the slow, procedural way a player gets nudged into responsibilities that don’t quite align with their instincts.
Carrington has been expected to organize, to initiate, to steady. To turn possessions into something orderly rather than something alive. And that hasn’t necessarily been his agenda, better known for the fast paced decision, the highs and the very extreme lows that follow.
He hasn’t necessarily settled in the ways maybe expected or intended. Carrington has improved as a passer. The reads are cleaner, the mistakes less frequent. There is a visible understanding of spacing, of timing, of where the ball is supposed to go. But there’s a difference between knowing the right play and forcing the right reaction, and Carrington rarely crosses that line.
He keeps defenses on their toes in the same way a defensive driver reacts to someone speeding on the highway. He rides the tailgate in the left lane, forcing the driver in front of him to make a decision.
Eventually, the lane clears — not because Carrington broke it open, but because the situation resolved itself. A defender recovers. A help rotates. The possession finds its way to a safer outlet. Pressure is applied, briefly felt, and then released without consequence.
Washington often allows him to be this wildcard figure, willing to live and die with the consequences of the action, something you can admire with a developmental situation. The let him try the awkward jump pass when a simple setting of the feet gets the ball into Leaky Black’s hands cleanly on the wing. It’s the kind of play that tells you two things at once.
First, that the freedom is real. That Carrington is being given room to explore the edges of his game, to try things that aren’t fully formed, to operate without the immediate fear of being pulled back. That matters. For a young guard, especially one still learning the language of the position, those reps are oxygen.
But it also tells you something else — something a little more uncomfortable: that even within that freedom, the outcomes rarely stretch beyond the ordinary. The skip pass works. The ball gets swung. The possession continues. Nothing breaks. Nothing bends. It’s development in the most literal sense: adding layers without necessarily changing the shape.
What is seemingly so frustrating about Carrington is that when asked with doing the simple things this season, he has shown so much growth. He is the best on the Wizards when it comes to the entry pass into the low post — which isn’t necessarily a high bar to surpass but it speaks to something being there for him.
Why not let him grow his foundation there?
In some ways, Carrington’s biggest problem is that he’s a dog being asked to sit and instead of sitting, he’s doing a flip. You’re impressed by the trick being completed — who wouldn’t be impressed — but that also isn’t the point of the exercise. You need the basic commands under control, the foundation for development and additional improvement.
This also isn’t all on Carrington — it is disingenuous to ignore that Washington has struggled with their development of guards and guard attributes. Frankly, it is quite concerning with Tre Johnson — as he battles through injury management while requiring the reps to develop — that is ability to develop an offensive rhythm is continuously halted by strategic decisions, rotation management or a quick pull to “end on a good note.”
What Washington fans don’t necessarily want to address right away is that Trae Young and Anthony Davis returning from their respective injuries won’t make things easier on these young players. It’ll actually be far more challenging for them, much more restrictive in ways that don’t always show up in the box score.
Not because those players are selfish or obstructive, but because gravity has consequences. When established, high-usage players return, possessions begin to organize themselves around them. Decisions tighten. Margins shrink. The game becomes less about exploration and more about execution. We saw it briefly with Young in the line-up — where players often a beat behind what Young was already seeing on the floor.
For young guards like Carrington, that shift can be suffocating in a very subtle way.
The reads become more predetermined. The leash shortens without anyone explicitly saying so. The tolerance for the awkward jump pass, the mistimed drive, the experimental possession — it doesn’t disappear, but it changes. It becomes situational rather than foundational.
This is where it becomes incredibly difficult for Carrington, who is already struggling to follow the safe, the functional, the “slows” of the game. Because if his current version is built on the concept of minimizing mistakes, what happens when the cost of those mistakes increases?
Washington really hasn’t thought about addressing those questions. As the basketball world collectively looks at the young talent of Washington and points to them as the dark horse of the eastern conference next year, there is an assumption baked into that optimism that development is linear, that opportunity will naturally expand, that players will simply grow into more as the team becomes more competitive.
But that’s not how this works. Opportunity doesn’t expand — it consolidates. Possessions don’t open up — they get claimed. And roles, once loosely defined, begin to harden into something far less forgiving.
They are developing players in an environment that will eventually demand hierarchy, without forcing those players to declare themselves before that hierarchy arrives. They are allowing Carrington to exist in this middle space — useful, improving, reliable — without requiring him to answer the harder question of whether he can command anything.
And when that moment comes, it won’t ask politely. It will define him.
Because the league does not wait for you to figure yourself out. It assigns you a role based on what you have shown, not what you might become. And right now, Carrington is showing a player who can survive any lineup, slightly stabilize a possession, and quietly fade into the background when something more forceful is required.
There is a path where that becomes a long, productive career. There is also a path where it becomes a ceiling he never quite realizes he’s hit. And that’s why the conversation feels so difficult to begin. Not because there isn’t enough to say — but because saying it out loud forces a kind of clarity that neither the player nor the organization seems ready to confront.
Washington will have to make tough decisions with this next draft cycle. And those decisions won’t just be about who they bring in — they’ll also be about who they’ve already been developing.
Because every new guard, every new initiator, every new bet on upside doesn’t exist in isolation. It crowds the room. It sharpens the questions. It removes the comfort of ambiguity.
Carrington has benefited from that ambiguity up to this point. From the space to exist without definition. From the ability to be evaluated in pieces rather than as a whole.
That space is shrinking. And when it does, the conversation you’ve been avoiding doesn’t get easier — it gets louder. This is why Bilal Coulibaly’s struggles became so incredibly concerning to start the season — and his resurgence in recent months hasn’t necessarily cleansed the stench.
Because at some point, Washington has to decide whether Carrington is part of what they are building or simply someone who has developed alongside it. Whether his steadiness is something to lean into or something that quietly limits what they can discover elsewhere.
Those are not the same thing.
And they require a level of honesty that goes beyond percentages, beyond availability, beyond incremental growth. They require intent. The door has to open.
And you have to walk into that room and ask the question you’ve been circling this entire time — not about what Bub Carrington has done, or what he might still become, but about what his presence actually means.
Not for a game. Not for a stretch. But for the direction of everything else. Because if the answer is that he helps you get where you’re going, then you commit to that and let it shape the rest. And if the answer is that he simply makes the journey smoother, quieter, easier to manage, then you have to decide how much that really matters when the destination still isn’t clear.