Steve Settle’s brief stay with the Washington Wizards ended almost as soon as training camp began.
On Saturday, the team announced it had waived the 6-foot-10 forward after signing guard Jazian Gortman to an Exhibit 10 contract, a corresponding roster move that closed a camp invitation that had only been extended a week earlier.
Washington had brought Settle in on September 27, placing him on an Exhibit 10 deal alongside Reece Beekman, Trevor Keels, and Chris Livingston.
Those contracts are non-guaranteed camp agreements, designed less as promises of an NBA roster spot than as a formal path into a team’s organization.
Players on them are commonly waived before the regular season, then become eligible for a bonus of up to $91,000 if they remain with the club’s G League affiliate for at least 60 days.
For the 25-year-old Settle, that affiliate is the Capital City Go-Go, and that is the outcome both the transaction and his recent track record point toward.
The timing makes the waiver feel less like a verdict on his game than like the ordinary sorting of camp.
Settle went undrafted out of Temple in 2025, then signed an Exhibit 10 with the Miami Heat, was waived, and spent his rookie professional season with Miami’s affiliate, the Sioux Falls Skyforce.
Across 46 G League games, he averaged 7.4 points, 3.5 rebounds, and 1.1 assists, useful production for a stretch forward still learning an NBA spacing system, but not the kind of résumé that usually survives a numbers crunch in October.
What the move does preserve is geography. Settle is from Glenarden, Maryland, and played at DeMatha Catholic in Hyattsville before starting his college career at Howard.
He appeared in 66 games for the Bison, earning second-team All-MEAC honors twice, then transferred to Temple and started nearly every game he played over two seasons with the Owls.
In 2024-25, he started 31 games and averaged 12.6 points and 6.2 rebounds, shooting 41.6 percent from three and leading Temple in rebounding and blocks. An American Athletic Conference all-tournament selection the year before, he finished college with more than 1,400 points and 700 rebounds between the two programs.
Returning to the Washington organization, even on a camp deal that lasted only days, puts him back in the DMV for his second professional season. Exhibit 10 waivers are rarely final chapters.
They are how teams stock their G League clubs with players they have already evaluated, and how those players stay attached to an NBA franchise while chasing a two-way or standard deal.
Settle’s path so far has been that circuit: undrafted, Heat camp, Skyforce, Wizards camp, and now, in all likelihood, the Go-Go. The waiver ends the camp experiment. It does not end the larger one.
