With the New York Knicks sweeping their Eastern Conference finals series with the Cleveland Cavaliers, one of the NBA’s most incredible postseason streaks of recent vintage will continue. For the 18th straight season, a former Washington Wizards player will appear in the NBA finals.You heard me.Starting with the 2009 finals between Kobe Bryant’s Los Angeles Lakers and Dwight Howard’s Orlando Magic, a former Wizard has played for an NBA title every year. It’s ironic, considering Washington has been one of the league’s least competitive franchises for generations. The Wizards haven’t reached the finals since 1979. Since 1980 — that’s 46 years, by my American University math — the Wizards have made the postseason just 16 times and have never reached a conference final.Sure, there’s some luck involved. But the streak exemplifies a maddening bent toward mediocrity that had been — until the last few years, when the Wizards finally undertook a down-to-the-studs rebuild under president of Monumental Basketball Michael Winger and general manager Will Dawkins — the franchise’s calling card.For many years, with ownership content to settle for teams just talented enough to potentially sneak into the playoffs, Washington would churn its roster, never building around top prospects for long. Even when the Wizards drafted or acquired promising young talents such as Chris Webber, Rasheed Wallace, Ben Wallace or Richard Hamilton, they’d give up on the players much too soon, dealing them for veterans with just enough tread left to keep the Wizards semi-interesting. The Wizards were cutting-edge practitioners of this for decades.Then, when those vets were inarguably on the wrong side of their primes, off they’d go — often to better teams, where they could play smaller, more tenable roles, rather than being asked to carry the load like they were in D.C.This year’s ex-Wizard escapee is Knicks guard Landry Shamet, who appeared in 46 games for Washington during the 2023-24 season, the first of three horrendous Wizards campaigns as the franchise began its long-overdue multiyear tank to rebuild through the draft. The Wizards waived Shamet the following summer, and he signed with the Knicks in September 2024. This postseason, Shamet has rediscovered his mojo and is shooting the lights out off the bench — he’s 21 of 35 on 3s (60 percent) going into the finals. (Shamet shot 33.8 percent from behind the arc in his season with the Wizards. Figures.)(One could argue that the San Antonio Spurs also have a former Wizard on their finals roster in veteran forward Kelly Olynyk. But Olynyk, who was traded last summer by the New Orleans Pelicans to Washington along with C.J. McCollum, never played a game for the Wizards. It was, uh, understood that Olynyk would rather play for a contending team this season, so three days after the trade to D.C., the Wizards sent Olynyk to San Antonio in a multiplayer deal.)Shamet joins an eclectic list.There’s veteran center Thomas Bryant, who played 56 games for an Indiana Pacers team that made the finals last year before falling to the Oklahoma City Thunder in seven games. Bryant was also on the Denver Nuggets’ 2023 championship team. Before finding greener pastures, Bryant played in Washington for parts of four seasons, appearing in 155 games from 2018 to 2022.Center Kristaps Porziņģis, who was a key part of the Boston Celtics’ title team in 2023-24, and center Daniel Gafford, who started for the Dallas Mavericks during their 2024 finals run, are both ex-Wizards bigs who frequently squared off in practice while playing together in D.C., with KP starting and Gafford his backup.“I mean, going into a season, you always think we have enough talent to make the playoffs,” Porziņģis said in 2024. “So, that was the goal. It wasn’t, realistically thinking, of course, that we were a championship-caliber team (in Washington).“But making the playoffs, maybe making a push, it gives you motivation, you know? I think that was the mindset there.”There’s guard Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, who started on Denver’s 2023 title team after an offseason trade from Washington in 2022; guard Ish Smith, who finally got a ring with the Nuggets in his 13th NBA season, after playing for 13 teams — including the Wizards (140 games over parts of three seasons), and forward Jeff Green, who played the “Unc” role in Denver at age 36 after playing 77 games for the Wizards four years earlier. Caldwell-Pope was also on the Lakers’ 2019-20 championship team before joining the Wizards.