If you want to strip what’s left of the Titanic, call the Washington Wizards front office. No one is better at salvage operations.

There was no way the Wizards could let everyone come back to D.C. on the team charter from their five-game road trip, which starts Tuesday in Dallas. At least one significant trade before the Feb. 9 deadline was necessary to better set up things both in the short and long term. Tommy Sheppard started the ball rolling Monday afternoon by dealing 2019 first-round pick Rui Hachimura to the Los Angeles Lakers, one of Sheppard’s favorite trading partners, for guard Kendrick Nunn and three future second-round picks.

If that seems kind of meh for the ninth overall pick in the 2019 NBA Draft, Sheppard’s first as Washington’s general manager, and a player in whom the franchise spent an inordinate amount of time and resources marketing to the Japanese basketball market, as well as the team itself, that’s … accurate.

(Apropos of nothing: Were the 2020-21 Wizards, which went a COVID-19-shortened 34-38 in Scott Brooks’ last season as coach and lost a gentleman’s sweep to Philly in the first round, some kind of special group or something? The Lakers now have four players from that team — Russell Westbrook, Hachimura, Thomas Bryant and Troy Brown Jr. — on their roster. I watched and covered a lot of that season’s games. Westbrook had a great, historic close to lead them to the play-in round. And that was about all. If you told LeBron last summer, ‘Hey, you can have a third of the 2020-21 Wizards to play with next season, and absolutely none of them are Bradley Beal,’ I wonder what his response would have been.)

This is, though, not a win for Sheppard. This is getting out while the getting is good. And while there’s certainly intelligence at work in not throwing good money after bad picks, it doesn’t change the fact that a top-10 selection from less than four years ago was given away, having done very little while he was here.