WASHINGTON — I’m certainly not the first person to say this, but the Wizards are broken.
Yes, they’ve qualified for the playoffs for the second straight season. Yes, they look to be no worse than the fifth seed, and could even snag home-court advantage for a round if a few things break their way.
The thing is, I’ve seen this all before. I’ve watched a team with a recent history of losing finally pick itself up, led by its young stars, and make the playoffs. I’ve been excited, optimistic even, but ultimately disappointed when they bow out in the early rounds, left with an unnerving feeling that they still have somehow underachieved.
See, I’m a Warriors fan. Golden State was quite respectable under old head coach Mark Jackson, but far too often the offense would stall and sputter, handing their hopes and dreams off to Steph Curry 24 feet from the basket with an expiring shot clock. The defense would let itself get screened and switched into mismatches, relying too much on Klay Thompson to single-handedly shut down the opposing team’s best scorer.
At the end of a promising but disappointing 2013-14 campaign, the Warriors stunned the basketball world by firing the well-liked Jackson, who had overseen the team’s recent rise. In his place they hired Steve Kerr, a longtime NBA veteran, but one with zero head coaching experience.
Kerr brought a fluid, pass-heavy offense that spread the floor and maximized cuts to the rim and open shots from the three-point line. On the defensive end, he used his team’s tremendous versatility to switch on every screen, turning a mediocre unit into the best in the game. Days before the Wizards backed into the playoffs in the inferior East, the Warriors clinched the top seed and home-court advantage through the Western Conference playoffs, setting a new franchise wins record.
It’s not that Jackson wasn’t a good motivator. And he was well-loved by the players, especially Curry and Thompson. He just didn’t know how to best utilize them.
Now, with each passing, frustrated postgame news conference, it becomes clear that Randy Wittman doesn’t have the acumen to understand what’s wrong with his team.
“We’ve gotta have guys step up, no question,” he opened after Washington’s most recent dud, a 99-91 home loss to a Houston Rockets team missing a top defender and limited to fewer than 20 minutes from star center Dwight Howard. “We just couldn’t get into any rhythm offensively, and focus offensively. We were running things that I’ve never seen before.”
Honestly, that was probably a decent strategy to improve the offense. As has been pointed out before, most of Wittman’s designed sets eat up the shot clock with no apparent end game other than a low-value midrange jumpshot. That’s how you end up with a shot chart like this one, as opposed to the economic, reasoned, well thought-out selections of the Rockets.
If only there was some simple way to explain why the Wizards are struggling … #shotselection @BulletsForever pic.twitter.com/XycevCnDGe
— Noah Frank (@NoahFrankWTOP) March 29, 2015
“When you play every team, you’ve got to understand how you want to attack them from an offensive standpoint,” Wittman said after the loss, sounding like he was discussing the opposite chart. “Then you gotta go out on the floor and do that. We just kind of played offensively tonight.”
Whatever they did, the Wizards didn’t play to their strengths. It doesn’t take an analytic genius to realize that John Wall is one of the best in the league with the ball in his hands, in a spot where he can use his speed and vision to create open shots for his teammates. But don’t take my word for it — just look at all the categories in which he ranks in the top five in the league.
And yet, the Wizards rank 28th of 30 NBA teams in total player points off drives (801), ahead of only the lowly Timberwolves and Knicks. They are one of only three teams to average fewer than 20 points per game off drives. Considering they also don’t rotate the ball well around the perimeter, that leaves them with a lot of catch-and-shoot opportunities.
The problem is, Wittman’s offense doesn’t design three-point opportunities, and even if it did, his team isn’t very good at hitting them. Washington ranks 21st in effecting catch-and-shoot field goal percentage (49.6) thanks to all the poor percentage shots they jack up. They are one of only three playoff-bound teams to rank in the bottom third of the league in that category.
Washington has larger personnel issues as well, which is not Wittman’s fault. They need fewer one-dimensional players and more flexible ones, such as Otto Porter (or DeMarre Carroll, or Harrison Barnes, or Chandler Parsons), who can ease matchup issues on defense while creating them at the other end of the floor.
But that can’t be addressed until next season. In the meantime, with eight regular-season games left, what are the Wizards doing right now to improve their attack?
“Well, we’re going to go figure it out.”
Ah.
That’s Wittman vocalizing what many of us have long feared — that it’s too late to salvage this team this season. Maybe the Wizards win a playoff series, like they did last year. They could very well draw Toronto in the first round, a club that’s struggled to an 8-13 record since the All-Star break. Then again, the Raps swept the Wizards in the three-game regular season series. Maybe they get a slumping Bulls team that drops to fourth; maybe that would be worse.
The truth is, only two teams have a reasonable expectation of winning the Eastern Conference, and the Wizards are not among them (they are the Hawks and Cavaliers, if you’re interested and paying attention).
We’ve covered this ground before, but the Wizards are just 10-22 against teams with winning records. They’ve only beaten two teams above .500 since mid-January — a Memphis team sitting all of its stars and a Portland squad that nearly overcame a 25-point deficit — both at home.
It might be best for the long-term future of the club to bow out in the first round, just as the Warriors did a year ago. Maybe that will help make the call to hire a coach (and perhaps a general manager) who understands his players’ strengths and weaknesses an easier decision this offseason.
