Ted Leonsis gave the most succinct answer he ever will. The loquacious owner was asked whether he considered broader changes to the Washington Wizards — specifically, removing Ernie Grunfeld as team president — and Leonsis didn’t hesitate or back in to a response.

“Not really,” he said.

He paused as if to leave his answer strong and curt, but Leonsis doesn’t know how to be curt. You can’t ask him “How’s it going?” without receiving a thoughtful and methodical reply. He probably should go by “Theodore” just to hint at his abundant repertoire of syllables. So he had to talk more about his rationale for keeping Grunfeld and the front office intact.

[Wizards, Scott Brooks get what they both wanted]

“Because we were executing to the plan,” Leonsis said Wednesday after the Wizards introduced Scott Brooks as their new coach . “If we had varied from the plan and the plan didn’t work, then I think it would’ve been in my realm of responsibility to take a look. But we were executing a plan that we agreed to when I bought the team five years ago.”

While his words won’t satisfy a seething fan base that worries the John Wall era has stalled at familiar mediocrity, they do provide valuable insight and a way to hold Leonsis accountable. He’s not judging Grunfeld on all 13 of his seasons in Washington. Leonsis is evaluating the work done during his ownership period. Right now, he sees Grunfeld as a personnel executive who implemented the plan well enough that he deserves to complete the final stage of the roster overhaul, which is to utilize an estimated $27.4 million in salary cap space to make the Wizards a true contender.

Leonsis considered the plan as he developed opinions on why the Wizards finished 41-41 this season and missed the playoffs after advancing to the second round the previous two years. He wondered if it was still the proper approach and concluded that it was. He looked at the roster, which was mostly a young core surrounded by a slew of veterans on one-year contracts or in the last year of longer deals, and concluded that talent wasn’t the primary reason for the Wizards slipping this season. And for any concerns he had about talent or depth, he kept returning to the fact that, to maintain salary cap flexibility, the Wizards had to be conservative for a year.

[Scott Brooks’s path to the Wizards started in the CBA draft’s second round]

Ultimately, Randy Wittman and his coaching staff would pay for the underachieving. To upgrade the level of coaching, Leonsis approved Grunfeld’s desire to go all out for Brooks, the former Oklahoma City Thunder coach who had developed a young team and won big with it. The huge contract (five years, $35 million) didn’t bother Leonsis. Even before you consider the Kevin Durant Coincidence, Brooks’s hiring gives the franchise a stronger leader and perhaps a better pitchman to lure free agents this summer.

The plan continues. Leonsis refuses to stray. As the founder of Monumental Sports & Entertainment, he owns the Capitals, Wizards and Mystics. Next year, he’ll add an Arena Football League team to his collection. If he has learned anything about being a professional sports owner, it’s to create a vision, build a strategy and remain steadfast in execution.

Sports can drive you crazy because seldom do teams travel on a linear path. The competition is tremendous, and so many factors play into winning and losing. When building a team, results can’t be the sole measure of progress. In some stages of construction, results often serve to test conviction.

[John Wall: Hiring Brooks is not a move to lure Durant to D.C.]

The Wizards thought they saw a future full of nothing less than a long postseason streak and free agents lining up to play with the back-court tandem of Wall and Bradley Beal. Well, circumstances intervened. Now what do they have?

Commitment, Leonsis says, to a plan that should work long term. After this past season, there’s plenty of skepticism, and it’s appropriate. It’s one thing to have a plan that looks fantastic on paper. But Grunfeld and the Wizards still have to find the right talent.

Brooks looks at the roster and sees six intriguing pieces: Wall, Beal, Marcin Gortat, Otto Porter Jr., Markieff Morris and Kelly Oubre Jr. I’ve done some nitpicking, especially over the Wizards’ past five drafts, and detailed how they could’ve been even better. But they’ve done enough for Brooks to declare, “This team is ready. It’s had playoff success.”

The hard part is finishing the roster without duplicating parts and making sure that any new talent fits with the current players. The struggles of the 2015-16 season offered reason to believe that a new chief personnel executive might be needed to complete the process. But in Leonsis’s view, Grunfeld has done exactly what they discussed five years ago.

[Scott Brooks hiring shows Wizards are ready to spend big this summer]

I asked Leonsis about the dichotomy between the Capitals and Wizards this spring. The Capitals were the runaway best team in the NHL for most of the regular season. They have advanced to the second round of the Stanley Cup playoffs and could bring a championship to the District. The Wizards are still en route to, uh, somewhere.

Is there anything about getting the Capitals over the hump that applies to the Wizards? Leonsis returned to implementing and believing in a plan and referenced some mistakes he made with the Capitals, including the trade for Jaromir Jagr, which deviated from how the Capitals wanted to build. Every time the Capitals went a different route, Leonsis said, it hindered the franchise from building the strongest possible contender.

“The one thing that I will say, from a leadership standpoint, is that we articulated a plan in the NHL with the Caps and the only times we deviated from the plan and it didn’t work, that’s when I felt that management was at risk,” said Leonsis, who didn’t renew the contract of longtime general manager George McPhee and fired Adam Oates as coach in 2014. “We said we want to be young. We wanted to have depth. And we wanted balance, and we wouldn’t trade young for old. On a few occasions, when we traded young for old or rental players and it didn’t work, that ended up being a setback for us.”

Leonsis doesn’t want to make the same mistakes with the Wizards. When the Wizards traded a first-round pick for Morris in February, the owner scrutinized the deal to make sure it was “on strategy.” He realized the acquisition of a versatile 26-year-old forward fit with the team’s direction.

“I’ve said, with the Wizards, ‘Let’s stay on plan,’” Leonsis said. “And for the most part, we’ve stayed on that plan. If they had gone off the plan, we’d probably be having a different discussion right now.”

The plan, for better or worse, will not change. You can accuse the Wizards of a lot during this frustrating wait, but a lack of faith won’t make the list.