The Washington Wizards have been one the NBA's biggest disappointments this season. It’s been a depressing development for a franchise that seemed poised for a breakthrough after 46-win regular season ended just shy of the Eastern Conference Finals, an exit that may have been premature due to John Wall’s broken hand. Though injuries have been trumpeted as the main culprit for this year’s malaise, the Wizards transition from up-and-coming to unfulfilling is much more complex.

Before going to any further, let’s take a deeper dive into Washington’s injury misfortune. According to a site that tracks the data, the Wizards do in fact lead the league when it comes to games missed due to injury, with the recent release of Gary Neal, a productive but sidelined reserve, acting as a microcosm of their season. There’s no denying that Washington has been snake-bitten when it comes to their health, but simply cursing the basketball gods for looking unfavorably upon them is something of a cop out. Since diving into murky waters that is evaluating a franchise’s performance staff is a fool’s errand (let’s be clear though, leading the league in missed games is something of a black mark on any staff), let’s look at this injury wave in a different light.

Entering this season, two of the team’s key, offseason acquisitions had health issues that necessitated surgeries. Jared Dudley, acquired in a trade with Milwaukee, was dealing with a back issue while the 33-year-old Alan Anderson had a procedure to deal with bone spurs in his ankle. What seemed to be a mundane operation turned into a second surgery for Anderson and he has played in all of six games up to this point (Dudley, in all fairness, has recovered just fine and been a productive rotation cog in 62 of the team’s 63 games).

Those two health question marks were joining a team with Nene and Bradley Beal. The former’s annual absences due to injuries are almost something of a running joke. In just five of his 14 seasons, the Brazilian big man has played more than 68 games -- none of which has occurred during his time in the our nation’s capital. Beal’s first few seasons have been more a red flag than an indictment. But after appearing in just 41 games, a healthy (pun intended) chunk of which saw him in a reduced role coming off the bench, Beal is well on his way to earning the dreaded “injury prone” label.

Given the presence of Nene and Beal alone, the Wizards should probably have expected they’d be in the top half of team’s when it came to time missed by key rotation members. Throw in those two veterans coming off surgeries and that forecast should have been even more likely. Obviously that it’s hit to this extreme is something on the wrong side of variance, but that shouldn’t cloud the  fact that extended absences from key rotation members was very likely.

And whenever there is a run of injuries testing a team’s depth, you really see the true impact of a team’s front office and coaching staff. The front office shows their worth by who they have assembled in roster spots 11-15 and coaches prove their value with their ability to plug these stopgap players into their systems without the team skipping a beat. On both counts, it seems hard to give the Wizards a passing grade.

Journeyman Garrett Temple has started 40 of the 61 games he’s played in (more on him a bit). The 34-year-old Drew Gooden, who has posted a PER above 12 once in the past four years, has appeared in 28 games with predictably laughable results. The biggest contribution Kris Humphries and DeJuan Blair (who only played in 58 total games during his time in D.C.), free agent signings from the previous off-season, had this year was that their contracts helped facilitate the arrival of Markieff Morris.

Counting on these players to round out your rotation or plug holes in it once injuries strike is asking for trouble. Of all those players, Temple is the only one that has seemed to justify his roster spot. Despite the fact he’s shooting just 38.5 percent from the field and 31.9 percent from 3, Washington is about 3.5 points better when Temple is on the floor, though that number is likely inflated by the fact that 1174 of Temple’s 1555 minutes this season have been with the Sisyphus-like Wall on the floor with him. It’s not outlandish to suggest that any old replacement-level player could have similar success alongside one of the league’s best point guard. The inability of Temple and others to adequately fill in the cracks when injuries struck was a big factor behind the deadline day trade for Morris -- a curious fit at best with this Wizards team.

Because of their lackluster play, Washington’s coaching staff often absorbs a fair amount of criticism. And to be frank, there isn’t much that stands out about the Wizards approach game to game. The team relies far too much on long 2’s -- 6th in the league per NBA.com data -- which are a byproduct of a playbook littered with complex, aesthetically pleasing but ultimately ineffective sets. As clever as it to see Beal (when healthy) or Otto Porter, use some misdirection to curl off a screen for a jumper, it doesn’t matter much when it’s a 20-foot jumper. It’s also, to be polite, head-scratching to see old-school floppy action called for someone like Dudley, a stick-and-shoot, 3-point specialist, to wind up with this shot:

Judging by the result, it looks like a fine play. After all, Dudley sank a jumper with nary a defender in sight. But looking at the call in context is where you see the flaws that routinely hinder Washington’s staff. Ramon Sessions, orchestrating from up top, is an excellent pick-and-roll guard. Nene is one of the best passing bigs -- in almost any situation -- you’ll find in the league. Dudley is in at power forward in an attempt to stretch the floor.

While rookie Kelly Oubre and Temple round out the quintet of Wizards on the floor, it still seems like a curious mesh of play-calling and personnel. Now to be fair, you can jump on a single play in any game, even one being coached by one the NBA’s elite class of coaches, and nitpick the logic behind it. But this particular play is just a microcosm of one of the more notable “leaks” (to use a poker term) afflicting Washington’s staff.

Yet both the coaching deficiencies, unrealistic health expectations and glaring lack of depth all fit into what is perhaps the biggest (and often overlooked) factor in the Wizard’s disappointing season -- the hasty change of an identity that brought them success in the first place.

It’s no secret that when you have a special player like John Wall, you build your roster and system to suit his strengths. In Wall’s case, that means an open, up-tempo style with lots of perimeter shooting and pick-and-roll savvy bigs.  For pretty much the entirety of his career up until last year’s playoffs, Washington has failed to do this. But what the team found by moving Paul Pierce to the 4 during last season’s surprising postseason run may have almost been fool’s gold.

The Wizards success during the regular season was primarily because of an outstanding defense. According to our RealGM rankings, Washington finished the year ranked fifth in defensive efficiency. The driving force behind that stingy D was the frontcourt pairing of Nene and Marcin Gortat.

When those two bigs shared the floor, the Wizards defensive rating was a miniscule 95.7 -- a number that would rank second in the NBA this year behind only the Spurs if it held up for an entire season. Washington’s success was fueled by having those two, non-shooting bigs on the floor together for 17.7 minutes per game.This season, that number has dipped to 10.7 in just 7 games because of the team’s shift to make lineups more suited to Wall’s skills, on offense of course.

Now look, going forward, this roster should be molded to bring out the best in Washington’s All-Star point guard. Two non-stretch bigs, like Nene and Gortat, have and would forever cramp’s Wall’s style. The Wizards obviously needed to make a change with their personnel. The problem is, when that change involves “stretching out” a player like Humphries to fit into a particular mold, your roster isn’t ready for that change.

In a sense, Washington didn’t err by moving to a style that with proper execution (again, coaching) fits Wall in theory. It’s that they did it both too quickly and without a real commitment. This roster was still one that was suited to have two traditional bigs on the court -- as long as Nene’s health permitted of course. Dudley’s presence certainly gave the team the versatility of going small at times, but by and large this roster was still essentially the same one that won 46 games by stopping opponents from scoring, not from piling up the points themselves.

While it’s definitely an ambiguous term, identity is a real thing when it comes to basketball teams. In an attempt to revamp quickly around Wall, the Wizards have lost theirs, losing their defensive calling card to move up a sole spot -- from 22nd to 21st -- in offensive efficiency.

This isn’t to say Washington stubbornly needed to stick to something that garnered them 46-wins in an otherwise non-descript season. Clearly the NBA is trending toward smaller, shooting-friendly lineups -- like the ones that Wall would be best around. At some point, the Wizards needed to make that change.

But given the constraints they faced in their roster building, this summer wasn’t the time for it. With very few salary commitments this upcoming summer, the team would have went all-in on players and a coach (Hi Mike D’Antoni) that excel in a system that’s more Wall-friendly. Trying for the best of both worlds -- and yes the other stuff, like injuries -- is why a Wizards team considered to be a rising force in the East, could end up falling back into lottery land this summer.