What was the 2025-26 Wizards season? While it technically met the definition of a basketball season—15 guys (give or take) put on a uniform and played 82 games—the end result was known before anyone took to the court. The goal was to lose. Maybe the goal was also to develop the Wizards young talent, but, as became clear, this was a distant second on the priority list for Coach Brian Keefe. This was not a season to remember, but before we forget it and move on to the lottery balls, I thought it could be fun—or at least a fun challenge—to capture what happened.

In honor of Dave Barry and everyone reading this with 36 tabs open, let’s recklessly stumble down memory lane. As summer ended and September turned to October, National Guard troops were seen loitering around Navy Yard to make sure the Nats didn’t try to make a last minute run for the wild card. Not to be outdone, Chuck Schumer, in response to a massive groundswell of liberal outrage seven months earlier to literally do anything about the attacks on the District’s main source of employment decided all that standing around looked pretty fun. The government entered a shutdown on October 1 and would stay shutdown for the next 43 days. Nearly 900,000 Federal workers are furloughed. The National Zoo closed. Arena Stage offered free tickets to federal workers for its production of Damn Yankees, which would be fun except that basketball season was starting at the….

End of October

The Wiz start the season with a loss to the Bucks during which the team shows flashes of potential. Kyshawn George drops 21 points. Tre Johnson comes off the bench for 16 points (4-of-8 from three) in his NBA debut, which is the most points by a Wizards rookie in a debut game since 1992. Khris Middleton, the former Buck, is honored during half time while Giannis is seen Googling “apartments in NYC.” The roller coaster of emotions was already picking up speed into the second game of the season against Dallas during which Kyshawn goes 7-of-9 from three and ends with a cool 34 points. Two games in, there was already chatter online about whether or not the team would be too good to tank. League watchers are largely talking about Commissioner Adam Silver announcement that the NBA is moving into an “on-going” review of Kawhi Leonard’s no-show contract with the “sustainability-as-a-service” company Aspiration. This takes us to

November

The government shutdown ends but Alex Sarr’s shutdown of people in the paint is only beginning. Bilal Coulibaly announces that all of his fingers and toes are intact. But the real highlight of the month as everyone is surely still talking about is the Wizards defeat of the Hawks for their first-ever NBA Cup game win. CJ McCollum scores 46 points. Hawks coach Quin Snyder in a post-game presser says, “They think me mad—ownership does; but I'm demoniac, I am madness maddened! That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself! ... I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer.” When asked to explain, he says he won’t rest until he has CJ McCollum and Corey Kispert on his team. Adam Silver says the league’s on-going review of Aspiration is now both on-going and active. Here at Wizards Points HQ, we note that the team seems to be reducing its shot attempts as games progress, which is kinda of fishy. The madness continues into…

December

The Wizards win six games in December. They get revenge on the Bucks and beat the Raptors by double digits. The team moves from one-game to two-game winning streaks. Tre Johnson goes 5-for-5 against Phoenix on December 29th. At one point, Drew Gooden says on the broadcast that you can see Alex Sarr “improving 11-minutes at a time,” which makes less sense the more you think about it. Despite the wins and Gooden-isms, the team’s weaknesses are becoming more obvious as they allow roughly 120 points per 100 possessions and Bub Carrington finds ever more innovative ways to throw the ball into the crowd. Cam Whittmore is declared out of the lineup indefinitely with a blood clot that had previously been hindering his ability to pass the ball or get back on defense. Coach Brian Keefe, when asked about the world historical score differentials in the team’s losses, gives a summary of the Wikipedia entry for “basketball,” noting that you’re not allowed to “kick it,” which the team has been working on. The Knicks win the in-season tournament, which everyone is still talking about. Here at WP, we suggested the team should push for the NBA cup as a goal to truly mark the end of the tank era. Elsewhere, the LA Clippers owner Steve Ballmer says he introduced Kawhi to the “Netflix but for trees” company, Aspiration, but didn’t know anything about a contract. Before you can say “trade deadline” it is somehow already…

January

The Wizards send CJ McCollum and Corey Kispert to Atlanta for Trae Young. General Manager Will Dawkins says he’s proud to bring in a player of Young’s caliber but who won’t have functioning knee ligaments for at least until the team makes a few personnel moves. Bub Carrington’s three point shooting improves even as the refs have to tell him to stop passing them the ball. The team announces that they’ll have a John Wall day. This is—and I’m being serious here—probably one of the most meaningful moments of the season. Wall’s exit from DC left everyone with hard feelings. There hasn’t been much to support in DC since Wall’s prime, so bringing him to remind fans of the good times makes sense. The team honored Wall’s time in DC on January 29th and he was brought in to do halftime commentary on Monumental’s TV broadcast. Bringing Wall back into the fold is a way to close on one chapter of the team’s history before truly starting a new one. On the court, history can’t move fast enough. The Wizards continue to get bullied except by the Bucks, where Giannis is heard saying, “eh, I’m walkin’ here!” while wearing a vintage Gem Spa hat and Kyle Kuzma (8 for 18), during a sideline interview, notes that raw milk is the best way to improve your jump shot. DC was hit by a ton of snow, but things really got cold in….

February

The AJ Johnson era in Washington officially comes to end as he is traded to Dallas for Anthony Davis. Khris Middleton, Marvin Bagley, and Malaki Branham (sent to Charlotte) are also swept up in trade, which brings Jaden Hardy, D’Angelo Russell, and Dante Exum to DC, at least on paper. Anthony Davis declares that “DC is a definitely a place with a basketball team” and then quickly returns to Texas because, as Will Dawkins explains, that’s where the doctors are. The Washington Post fires 300 staffers, including most of its sports reporters, which is a real shame because they were doing the lord’s work covering the Wizards. February is a short month, and most of the league was counting down the days until the All Star break, but the Wizards actually had their best month, only giving up 114 points per 100 possessions. February also featured my favorite game of the season, 116-112 bonkers win over the Sacramento Kings. Will Riely played 30 minutes and went 4 for 8 from three, Anthony Gill played 27 minutes and only shot the ball three times, and Coach Brian Keefe announced the team’s entry into post-modern lineups. Did they make sense? No. But in a way, what even is a lineup? More questions were raised in….

March

Trae Young plays more defense than anyone on the Wizards without actually logging minutes when he steps in to support his teammate Jamir Watkins after a bad call. Young is ejected from the game, the crowd goes wild, and it’s clear Trae is down for DC.

This was the month that everyone kept talking about 83, which is approximately how many talking heads had takes about Bam Adebayo’s historic scoring night against DC. Anthony Davis appears on the bench but mostly seems to spend his time texting Giannis screenshots of the trade machine and Googling, “rly fun pranks.” March 25th was the last win of the season for the Wizards against a deeply tanking Utah Jazz. This takes us to the end in…

April

T.S. Elliot called it the cruelest month, but with seven straight losses and a secured last place finish, the month ended as a relief. The team did it. We tanked. We were the best tankers. Truly banner-level stuff. Juju Reese was brought in to play center in a move that started as an obvious publicity stunt to get his famous sister, Angel, to buy a Wizards jersey, but ended up with Juju averaging a double-double in totally pointless games. The Aspiration scandal still hasn’t been resolved. The lottery system has been, if not exactly overhauled, amended. And the Wizards, Jazz, Pacers, and handful of other teams responded to incentives so strongly that it’s likely this will be the last real tanking-as-a-strategy season for at least a few years.

What did we learn this season? The Wizards have re-signed Brian Keefe as coach. Ted Leonsis is still talking about the team like they’re a tech company. We’ve put our hopes and dreams on some ping pong balls and an 19-year old. The team’s big trade moves were for fading, injured stars. It feels like all of those sentences could have been written at any point over the past 15 seasons. Yet, the situation is different. We actually went for it. We tanked. There is no more ‘what if.’ On to summer league and another year of wildly inappropriately high expectations.

Thanks for reading and thanks for sharing. Stay real.

The NBA’s proposed anti-tanking reforms are consistently framed as competitive balance measures. The league wants parity. It doesn’t want one-third of teams crashing out in February, or earlier. Commissioner Adam Silver has hemmed and hawed about tanking’s implications for the integrity of the game. He has vowed to fix it, “full stop,” while also hedging that it’s actually “a decision that needs to be made at the ownership level,” which is to say there will not be any stopping, fully or not. As the New Yorker’s Louisa Thomas recently noted, “There’s an obvious, simple solution: abolish the draft.” Thomas is right about the draft, but abolishing it doesn’t address the underlying stratification that makes the lottery so consequential in the first place

At a time when there has never been more excitement at the top of the league standings, the same handful of teams seem to dwell in the basement. And yes, each year, there is some breakout team that manages to stumble its way into the first round of the Eastern Conference playoffs—arguably, the Wizards’s whole identity has been to be the best stumblers. Winning a championship requires a lot of luck, as well as talent, but good teams aren’t falling into or through the playoffs. Look past the championship and count who actually makes the second round. Over fifteen years, it’s been a predictably small group. The rhythm of each season determines who sits where after the music stops, but the players rarely change.

I don’t want to debate draft reform or proposed solutions. It seems like everyone has their preferred ideas, from scrapping it all to Nate Silver creating a new currency and auction process that is so convoluted I assumed it was an April Fool’s joke. Instead, it’s worth asking if any measure will address the bifurcation of management talent and team competence that seems to exist in the NBA. Can the Wizards actually beat the odds and get onto a competitive track past the first round of the playoffs?

If we look at the past 15 seasons, most teams who have been elite, 50+ win seasons rarely swing from good to bad, but instead remain contenders, winning 40-to-49 games, and occasionally fall to the middle of the NBA pack, with 27-to-39 wins. Lottery status, which sounds like a fun scratch off game, is sticky: season-to-season, teams who are in the lottery with 26 or fewer wins, stay lottery teams. Yes, it takes time to rebuild, but once you’re in the basement, it’s hard to make it to contention. As we’ve covered elsewhere, there just aren’t that many generational talents who truly turn teams around. For every Wemby, there’s a Zion Williamson—guys who are definitely talented but don’t bend the arc of a team in any meaningful way.

The figure below shows how the tier a team is in any given season over the past 15 years relates to the tier that same team is in the next season. The bottom right shows that 44 percent of lottery teams in any given season remain lottery teams the next year. At the top, 56 percent of Elite teams stay Elite. The floor traps almost as reliably as the ceiling sustains. For the Wizards, recent history has played out in three acts: two lottery seasons at the start of the Wall-Beal era, with a brief contender run, but never quite touching elite territory, and, like any good tragedy, the team is unable to escape its fate and has returned to lottery status over the past three seasons.

Of course, it takes a little time to adjust to, say, getting a number one draft pick or landing a super talented first rounder.1 We can take the figure above and play it out over five years: even two years after the fact, one in five lottery teams are still lottery teams. The graph on the right is the one that Wizards fans should keep in mind, though.

Good teams are able to build around their picks quickly and are set on a path that puts them into contention by the second-to-third season and elite status by the time their lottery picks are ready to sign a non-rookie contract. Well managed organizations tend to evolve and adapt to the tools they have on hand while laying the foundation to better use those tools. This is true for everything from youth hoops to the workplace to a small market team like the Spurs. As much as I like what Wizards General Manager Will Dawkins has done, the team’s history gives me pause. Even if DC lands the number one pick, will the org truly adapt and manage itself (and really, here I’m talking about money, which they’ve used pretty well) to move onto a promising trajectory?

This is all to say that tanking is annoying, but it’s not as bad for the game as the fact that some owners haven’t built strong organizations. It’s a lot easier for a weak org to respond to the incentives around draft picks than to respond to the low likelihood incentives around becoming a contender. The teams make money either way. Multi-sport owners who have at least one solid team might feel less pressure on the winning front too, especially when so many NBA teams are losing. In the case of the Wizards, both the Caps and Mystics have championships that anyone in middle school or older actually remembers. My daughter told me she prefers the Magic because they have a better logo than the Wizards. This is the world we have created for ourselves.

My concern with all of the tanking discourse is that while trying to adjust the particular incentives around lottery picks, it misses the general split in the league between good and mediocre teams. Since 2010, four teams have never made it to the second round of the playoffs.2 It has been almost a decade since the Wizards were there, more than a decade for the Bulls. At least Chicago has the MJ mythos to keep them going. For the Wizards, the draft is as much an excuse to avoid discussing their long run trajectory as it is a pathway someplace else. What we’ve seen this year is that tanking is easy, it’s the winning that’s hard.

• Now that Corey Kispert is gone, Anthony Gill has the best hair on the Wizards.

• Coach Brian Keefe is haunted, whether metaphorically or by an actual ghost, that man has seen something from the great beyond.

• I don’t have time to get into the math here, but t-shirts under jerseys actually make players look shorter/stringier.

• It’s creepy when children in the little kid dance troops at half time have a ton of make up on.

• The Wizards should have a one-season slogan for next year to officially mark the end of the rebuild era. Just riffing here, but maybe, “We will never, ever tank (again)” or maybe something simple like “Towel Time!”

• Kyshawn George is the hard shell taco of the team—people forget how good they are and how good they can be. I’m not talking about Taco Bell—though there is a time and place (the place is Taco Bell)—but a good homemade or well prepared restaurant dorado. When the crunch hits, it hits.

• Trae Young walked so Lamelo could run.

• Ted Leonsis needs to be reminded once a season that he broke ground on a new stadium complex in Virginia for as long as he is using half a billion dollars in DC taxpayer funds to add a new facade to Capital One Arena. It doesn’t have to be a big deal of a reminder, but it should be during a game—maybe a little montage or something.

• Bilal should become a more dominant dunker rather than a better distance shooter.

• If the league truly does address tanking, this year was a bit of a squandered opportunity to do wacky stuff. I would have loved a game where all the Wizards wore the same shoes, same headband, etc. just to mess with the other team. We could have brought on some French-speaking 10-day contracts and gone with an all Francophone line up. The team really should have done more Rookie of the Year style stuff to make this season memorable. I want us to get fined not for benching guys but for high jinks.

“Defensive stats.” This was basically John Hollinger’s response to a question on stage at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference a few weeks ago about what, if he could wave a magic wand, he would make better in the NBA analytics. Some guys behind me laughed because it was the obvious answer. We know defense matters. We just have really shoddy ways of measuring it. Advanced stats are slightly better than box score stats but also fall flat. The eye test can take you pretty far but it’s hard to unsee four Wizards in the paint as Boston’s Baylor Scheierman takes an uncontested three.

The brain tends to overweight those four-guys-in-the-paint moments rather than the accumulation of little shifts that stop plays before they really happen. And this is the whole issue: a real measure of defense needs to be counterfactual based. What would have happened if the defender had gone left instead of right, made a read one way instead of another, fanned out instead of going to the paint. Whether we use the box score or something more advanced, we’re basically in Plato’s cave, watching shadows on the wall, trying to interpret the outline of something we can’t quite grasp.

There is one player who seems to have an outsized shadow given the amount of time he plays. Wizards opponents are 7.3 points worse (per 100 possessions) when Jamir Watkins is on the court. Watkins is the best defender the Wizards have coming off the bench. When you adjust for who he shares the court with and minutes played, he’s among the best defenders on the team.

Of course, “among the best defenders on the team” on a Wizards squad that is by design among the worst defensive teams in the NBA might not be saying much. But Jamir started the season in the G-League! He wasn’t meant to be in the top 10 best anything. Jamir (and his non-guaranteed contract) is a contender for keeping around when the time comes for Wizards General Manager Will Dawkins to make cuts this summer.

Sure, defensive stats aren’t great, but just look at the figure below. If a player gets blocks and a player gets steals, you might go so far as to say that player is doing something directionally correct when his team doesn’t have the ball. When you normalize to 36 minutes, Watkins has a nice balance of blocks (1.14) and steals (1.9). On an apples-to-apples basis against the rest of the league, he is getting stops and shifting momentum well above the typical bench player overall and certainly compared to the rest of the Wizards bench. He’s in a similar place as Bilal Coulibaly (both for these per 36 stats and other measures), but with a higher effective field goal percentage to boot.

If you go to NBA.com and look up the Wizards players defensive rating, which per their definition is how many points (per 100 possessions) a player’s team allows while they’re on the floor, you’ll see Jamir ranked number one among current players.1 While defensive rating tries to normalize over 100 possessions to make players comparable, it is super noisy for any number of reasons. On any given night, a player’s number swings wildly: a 10-minute stint against a hot-shooting lineup can produce a rating of 130 (bad), while a lockdown game might yield 95 (good!). A simple average treats all of these equally and ignores sample size, which we kind of hand wave away by normalizing on a per 100 level. Still, players with fewer games get unreliable estimates, and there is no way to separate signal from noise. This noisiness—the fact that defensive rating can jump around—is especially an issue for the tanking Wiz, where teams may play differently against them and, on the flip side, where Coach Brian Keefe is throwing out some truly bizarre line ups.

To account for this, we can use a model the shares information across the Wizards roster.2 Players with fewer games are pulled toward the team-wide average, while players with large sample sizes are allowed to deviate. This gives us honest estimates of each player’s true defensive level. Jamir has played the 11th most minutes across the full season (so including now-traded guys like Khris Middleton). Using a model helps us better adjust defensive presence beyond what we can get from NBA.com.

The results confirm what the NBA’s numbers suggest: Jamir is the team’s top overall defender based on how many points the other team scores when he’s on the court. The model gives us a confident ranking, not a corrected number. The model is saying “even after accounting for small samples and game-to-game noise, Watkins comes out on top of the roster.” It’s basically a gut check against the flaws in the NBA’s defensive rating stat.

I am pretty surprised to see how well Gill and Vuckvevic do, but they are both slightly better than the team average (observed ratings of 117 and 116, respectively, compared to a team average of 119). Sarr and Coulibaly, in contrast, actually have a worse than team average defensive rating and get a ton of minutes, which the model identifies and ranks accordingly.

The Wizards aren’t trying to win, but playing Jamir more could make the losses a little less embarrassing. Watkins has played the most two-man minutes with Will Riley, a player who has impressed on offense and depressed (me) on defense. As a shooting guard, Jamir’s two-man game is of particular interest to me since that’s a role that helps facilitate but also involves a lot of off ball movement. People have looked at the “synergy” between players, which I have simplified for the Wizards to simply consist seeing if a pair performs better together than their individual effects predict.3

Jamir has shared the most minutes with forward Will Riely, then Bub Carrington, and then Justin Champagnie. Way down the list, in fifth is Tristian Vuckevic. But when we look at their mutual support of each other, these two actually make each other about .7 points per minute better than would be expected on their own. This is notable given how little they’ve played together. I know the Wizards aren’t trying to win, but to me this suggests Coach Keefe should—while he’s just throwing out whatever mad libs line ups he wants—pair these two to get more reps in.

The pearl clutching about tanking would be a lot more palatable if it were accompanied by some discussion of what happens to guys caught up in a process beyond their control.4 Most of the current roster won’t be in the NBA in a few years. This is true regardless of who owns what protected draft pick or how many teams are trying to lose in March. But the current Wizards roster will almost certainly be overhauled in the next two years. This is an opportunity not just to “flip assets” but to identify the talent we have now.

Jamir Watkins is exactly the kind of talent we should foster. Maybe with more minutes he hits a wall, but the data and my enjoyment of his late game dunks suggests otherwise. When Wizards general manager Will Dawkins is deciding how to build around a new draft pick, he should consider that Watkins seems to be a smart player, with real athletic ability. More than that, he is a guy who is still hustling, mostly takes highly efficient paint shots, and helps make up for the weaknesses of other young guys around him.

They say teams tank, players don’t. But as the end of the season is almost within view, it is kind of amazing that any one is still going out and trying as hard as Jamir Watkins. This post could easily have been just a bulleted list of his hustle stats, of this or that figure against x or y player. And it kind of was that. But it’s tough to make an argument for a player like Jamir without falling into calculator crusading a bit because he is a bench player on a bench team. We’re still in need of better measures of defense, especially in contexts where teams are trying to lose. We might be watching shadows on the wall, but I hope the Wizards front office sees the light on Jamir Watkins.

Quick note: this post is heavy on viz and diagrams, so some email apps might cut off the end of the post. Read online or via the Substack app to make sure you see the whole thing.

The Wizards signed a player who promises to potentially add pick and roll opportunities, increase paint presence, and improve the team’s depth. After the initial excitement of the new signing, though, the question of, “is this guy really going to be worth 60-ish million?” continues to linger. Especially given the player’s injury history (a whole season gone due to various ailments!). Especially, when, after being signed, he isn’t actually healthy enough to play, which might be ok from a tactical standpoint, but doesn’t exactly instill confidence. The pushback to this hesitation is “experience.” Sure the guy is currently unable to walk onto a basketball court, but he’s done it in the recent past and done it well, so imagine if he can do it again. The added depth will also help young guys develop and tick some much needed boxes to take the next step. I am, of course, talking about Ian Mahinmi.

Mahinmi’s bank account is likely among the few who look back in fondness at his tenure in Washington. He signed with DC in 2016 after seven respectable but not amazing seasons in the league.1 The idea that Ian brought depth for a defense-oriented team might not be totally similar to the current situation the Wizards face, but it certainly rhymes with the recent signings of (injured) Trae Young and (injured) Anthony Davis. This isn’t a Wizards specific issue: teams often sign experienced (though oftentimes deeply flawed) players with the hope that they’ll share some of their wisdom with young players. The specific cases of Young and Davis are more complex given the rebuild but the broader idea that the current squad of 19, 20, and 21 year olds could use veteran mentorship is often accepted without being tested.

And yet, the history of the Wizards is filled with “veteran presence.” The veteran presence practically haunts of the hallways of Capital One Area. Last season, veteran Malcom Brogdon’s face flew on a banner over F Street presumably to celebrate the influence of the 24 games he clocked in his single season on the Wizards. Anthony Davis is a top 75 player when healthy, but that “when healthy” is a big caveat. Before he was traded at the deadline, CJ McCullom was a respected vet. Sometimes just being around someone who knows who knows how to deal with a specific on (or off) court challenge can be valuable. But is it valuable enough to take a roster spot?

Since 2010, vets, which I’m defining as players with eight or more seasons, take up about 34% of team minutes on average. As you’d likely guess, there’s a wide range in this number: the 2023-24 Bucks had 90% of their minutes go to vets, with only Malik Beasley cracking the top 10 in minutes per game among non-vets; while The Process Sixers basically had no vet minutes in their 2013-14 season. And then there’s our beloved Wizards. As you can see from the figure below, they’ve bounced around in vet minutes share over the past 25 years.

Unpacking relationships

In 2014-15, when Paul Pierce called game, the team swept Toronto in the first round of the playoffs. But the next best moment of the Wall/Beal Prime-era had below league average veteran minutes in the figure above—the main talking point about that team was how young they were. There are so many factors that could influence whether veteran presence has a positive effect. One of the key ones, keeping with our example from above, is that Paul Pierce was an elite vet and still had some gas in the tank career-wise, while the vets on the ‘16-17 team—Ian Mahinmi, Jason Smith, and Marcin Gortat—were, uh, not elite according to traditional stats or rings or ability to win late in games (they’ll always have a place in my heart, though).

This is the point in the post where I normally gloss over the many hours I’ve put in trying to model and analyze NBA data. I’m going to unpack this process a bit here. If you don’t really care, feel free to scroll down, or better yet, share this with someone who might be interested.

At a basic level, we want to understand the effect of veteran minutes on the change in young player skills, which I’m going to measure through the change from one season to the next in a given player’s net rating.1 This seems ok, except you run into a Wizards shaped wall: team quality. A vet going to a poorly managed, or, if you can imagine it, tanking team is unlikely to have quite the same effect as one demanding a trade or getting moved under the cover of night to a playoff contender. Is this because of the vet, or is it because the team is a mess? If we don’t account for this, we will have some measure of vet presence on young player development but it’s going to be a mess because we’re picking up all the stuff around this relationship. The figure below shows this. I ran this model and it suggests a one percentage point increase in vet minutes-share is associated with about +0.07 net rating points increase for players with four or fewer years of experience.2

From here, the question is how to account for team quality. This is sort of the whole reason I started this newsletter: most basketball discourse is focused on “good” teams. But assumptions and models break when we can’t assume the guys on the court (or the guys in the front office) are top notch.

One way to account for team quality is win percentage—good teams win more of their games than they lose. Ok, so we throw that into our model and it eats it up with our vet presence minutes-share numbers and spits out some measure of the effect on the change in net rating. Good? Not so good.

Ok, so we throw in win percentage because we feel like it helps us get at team quality but we’ve actually just created a trap for ourselves. Yes, we’re accounting for the missing variable of team quality, but win percentage this season has a second job. It’s not just a symptom of team quality, it’s also likely caused by the veterans themselves. Good veterans help you win more games. A better winning environment helps young players develop. Win percentage (shown in the middle below) is the path through which vets help young players develop. In a model, when you throw in win percentage (people will sometimes say, when you control for this variable), you’re essentially asking: “holding win percentage fixed, what’s the relationship between vet minutes and young player development?” Controlling for win percentage is like asking whether good veterans improve a team’s record, controlling for wins. The wins are the mechanism to improving your record. The model is providing an answer to a question that no longer makes sense. If veterans help by improving win percentage, you’ve already stripped out part of the mechanism before measuring the effect. You’re left measuring only the direct path (whatever veterans do that doesn’t run through team wins), which is smaller and might actually be near zero.3

When you toss in win percentage to our stylized model as a way to account for team quality, the effect of veterans suddenly turns negative! Now we’re saying young players on teams with more veteran minutes improve 0.23 net rating points less year-over-year than those on teams with fewer veteran minutes. Suddenly, it looks like having Paul Pierce next to a young John Wall might have stymied his development rather than set it on a promising path. Except, we know we have biased estimate here.

So, we’ve gone through one model that was too hot, one that was too cold. Let’s figure out a way to account for team quality that is just right: accounting for time.

Win percentage is actually a fine proxy for team quality. Good teams win basketball games. I feel pretty ok saying that. Bad teams also win games, too, just not as many. We can still use win percentage, just not for the games players are currently playing. Last year’s win percentage tells you about organizational quality, without being contaminated by what the current veterans are doing. By the time this season’s roster is assembled, last year’s record is already locked in. So we use it as a proxy for team quality while leaving the actual veteran effect untouched. Using last year’s record instead of this year’s lets us avoid the “quality controlling for wins” confusion of the above model.

The figure above, though, is still a simplification. The point is that this stuff is hard to figure out. You can ChatGPT your way to answer, but there are lots of answers that mix up causality and don’t get you closer to a reasonable approach.4 Now let’s turn to whether or not these young Wizards are going to get anything out of playing with Trae Young and Anthony Davis.

Back to the Action

In our actual model, we include a bunch of stuff that also affects changes in young-player net rating in order to isolate the effect of veteran minutes, including draft round, minutes per game, games played, position, and more.5 One thing that should be obvious but the model uncovers: veteran minutes are not equal. Good vet minutes are good, bad vet minutes are negligible-to-negative. There might be culture reasons to keep a vet around to influence young players, but as far as on court performance, vet quality matters.

Take a typical second-year first-round pick. If he spends the season on a team in the bottom 10 percent of good veteran minutes, the model predicts he improves less than a point in net rating year-over-year. Move him to a team in the top 10 percent of good veteran minutes and the model predicts roughly three-to-four more points of improvement. The bad veteran plot on the right runs the same exercise in reverse: more bad veterans, worse predicted development. Notably, being around a bad vet who doesn’t get much playing time is still positive. This is what I call the Anthony Gill effect: it can be good to just hang with a guy whose experience gives him some perspective on the ups and downs of the 82 game season.6

We can then take our model results and see how the current crop of Wizards young guys would do under different vet scenarios. Our beloved Bub Carrington currently has a net rating of -14.4, which puts him at 500th out of 540 players for whom we have individual net rating data (or 7th percentile). This means that the Wizards lose by around 14 points each game (~100 possessions) when Bub is on the floor. This highlights why net rating is a tough stat—I want it to be clear that Bub is not the reason (at least not always) why the Wizards are losing. But what if Bub had the chance to play with a talented vet? What if that vet had fluffy hair and got cold a lot. What if that vet was a multi-All Star player? It’s Trae Young. What if Bub played with Trae Young?

For each current Wizards young player, the model predicts how much their net rating would change year-over-year under three scenarios: their current positive vet minutes environment (this is pretty limited), league-average veteran quality, and 75th percentile, good-veteran quality (playing with AD and Trae). For Bub, the model suggests he could improve by nearly 13 points in net rating relative to his current rating. This is a huge jump! It also means he’s still a net negative player as far as net rating is concerned, but it’s a major improvement and likely means a great third year for Carrington.

Alex Sarr (current net rating of -11.6) and Bilal (-10) would both, under a top vet scenario, become positive players on both ends of the floor. While Kyshawn George (currently at -11.5) and Tristan Vukcevic (-13.3) are looking at respectable, but modest jumps if they share minutes with a top vet. This all might sound obvious, but for the Wizards, only 31.8% of their veteran player-seasons have been with “good” veterans (vs. 49.4% league-wide). They’ve spent most of the rebuild era with negative net rating veteran rosters. Getting minutes with Trae Young and Anthony Davis will very much be new ground for this organization in a way that signing journeyman vets was well trod and predictable.

Many pixels have already been posted about the Wizards midseason moves. As weird as it is to see Corey Kispert’s perfect hair above an Atlanta Hawks jersey, this analysis and my own general feeling from what I’ve read suggests getting Trae Young will be good for everyone. The guy has been a fun cheerleader from the bench, seems genuinely excited to be part of something new, and has a lot of experience in big moments that few of the Wizards signings in the past could bring. Anthony Davis, well, I don’t know. So far, he has said all of the things you are supposed to say in the most generic, Melania-esque way, but I feel less convinced about his fit and desire to be part of the Dawkins-Winger vision even if the model suggests it will be good for the current young players.

The key point here is your coworkers matter. What you do, the day-to-day on the basketball court, or clocking in and out of a desk job, tends to matter less than the people you surround yourself with. In work, like family, we don’t have a choice who we’re around. The key takeaway here is that quality matters and matters in different ways. A strong locker room guy who maybe can’t play like he used to—say, Udonis Haslem a few years ago—might still be worth signing but not giving significant minutes to. For the Wizards, this focus on quality and minute-share will hopefully be more deliberate as the team moves out of its rebuild. Thinking through how these pieces fit together isn’t just a statistics problem.

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Last week’s news that the Washington Post was laying off 300 staffers and essentially shutting down its Metro, Sports, and international coverage has been eloquently covered and dissected. It’s bad for DC, bad for society, bad for democracy. These are all BIG reasons to mourn. There are also, for many of us, dozens of small reasons this closure marks the definitive end of one era. This, I suppose, implies the start of a new era, except that we’ve been living in that era for a while now. The whole idea of a newspaper—paper! just the word is kind of odd—feels quaint. For a bunch of reasons, including not-wanting-to-pay reasons, I haven’t read the Post in years. Still, it is, or was, part of the landscape in and around DC.

Growing up, I used to quickly shuffle through stories about the horrors of the Iraq war to page through the Sunday Best Buy ad-insert and look at stereos and video games. This is just to say that the Post doesn’t evoke warm nostalgia. Instead, it was kind of around, on the margins of my household memories. There are, though, a few Wizards stories from the era of the paper when I was young or slightly less young and living with my parents, that come to mind. I wanted to share a few of those because they are also a part of my Wizards fandom. Not the main thing, but like the paper, around the main thing, helping me understand this wacky team and the world as I was learning how to live in it. These aren’t ranked or anything, but instead just in the order that I thought about them.

Mike Lee on Gilbert Arenas’s Finger Guns

I used to always enjoy reading Mike Lee’s coverage of the Wizards. It often felt like Lee was mildly annoyed at the whole organization, which is a sign that he was paying attention. The Post should posthumously win a Pulitzer for its scandal-era Arenas coverage, which included a fair share of self-reflection.

A bit of context on this one for those who missed it: Gilbert Arenas brought guns to the locker room, claimed he was innocent after meeting with law enforcement, and then came out to a game against Philly and did a finger guns dance. Ok, here’s the end of Mike Lee’s write up of that game, which DC won:

“I’ll take all the hits right now. The truth is there; there is no point in getting angry and mad,” Arenas said. “At the end of the day, all that I want is a sorry. It can be small print. Maybe just one person do it, for slandering me. Because you guys have no idea.”

Arenas will celebrate his 28th birthday on Wednesday and will head into another difficult road environment in Cleveland. ‘They’re worse,” Arenas said of Cavaliers’ fans. “They hate us.”

[Nick] Young was asked after the game what he planned on giving Arenas for his birthday. “A muzzle,” he said.

Dan Steinberg’s DC Sports Bog

Today’s House of Highlights and various NBA influencers are, at least to some extent, the great-great-great grandchildren of the 2000s basketball blogs. Dan Steinberg’s DC Sports Bog was the Post’s entry into the blog space. While Steinberg’s voice was never as snarky or sarcastic or erudite as some of his Blogspot peers, it was still a fun read. If modern fandom is defined by the arrhythmia of ESPN push notifications, the regular pace of Bog updates in the 2010s on the Post’s website captured the culture of fandom as much as the play. Here’s Steinberg covering how fans reacted to an early season loss in 2016:

Anyhow, you don’t really need attendance numbers to sense that fans are asking deep questions.[…]Are we gearing up for another season-long quest to reach .500? Will the Wizards — who haven’t won 47 games since before the invention of the internet — win 47 games again before humanity goes extinct, which Stephen Hawking estimates could happen in just 1,000 more years? Could Verizon Center maybe create some safe spaces, free of scoreboards?[…]

Anyhow, this is all too overwrought. Sports aren’t that serious. If the Wizards win, fans will be fine. If they lose, well fans are used to that. And even the struggles contain little nuggets of happiness.

Candace Buckner on Brittney Griner

Candace Buckner put in time covering any number of woeful Wizards performances. I couldn’t find a few of the columns from her that I wanted to include, but her coverage of WNBA legend Brittney Griner’s imprisonment in Russia also stands out. Buckner covered the lack of movement from the State Department, the economics of women’s basketball that led to the W’s all time leading blocker playing abroad, fans’ own responsibility in and apathy toward Griner’s plight, as well as the contradictions of wanting more from a country that doesn’t always want people like Brittney Griner. In a piece on Griner’s tears during the 2024 Olympics, Buckner wrote,

Her country has never been perfect, and for years the playing of the national anthem has been used as a time for American to embrace their rights and express themselves. It’s not un-American to notice racial and social ills that plague the nation. It means you’re aware.

[..]Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, as the national anthem played before major sporting events, more athletes knelt. So did Griner. She was labeled unpatriotic— the angry Black lesbian who hates America. Not like us.

[…]The national anthem played, and the red, white, and blue flag was raised inside a foreign arena. And a proud American couldn’t stop her tears.

“I thought I would get a little red-eyed, but it hit me pretty hard.” Griner said. “My country fought for me to get back, and I was able to bring home the gold for my country. There’s no greater feeling.”

There are plenty of other writers, like Gene Wang and Ava Wallace and more recently Varun Shankar, who put in a lot of effort to report on what was likely a slog as far as story telling goes. And sure, there’s Wilbon and Kornheiser before they had completely fallen into schtick. This isn’t an obituary, it’s a tribute. Though it does have one thing in common with going to a service: I’m going to end with a call for donations, sort of. All I can say is that you should spend money on stuff you value. Especially if friends make it, especially if it builds community or supports something you believe in, but also if it’s something you want to see in the world. This isn’t a guarantee that it will last, but it at least increases the odds that it won’t wither away.

It is an awkward topic, admittedly, or at least can be. We’re talking about peoples’ bodies, bodies that are constantly being judged, and, more often than not, bodies in a country that has put a literal value on the worth of those bodies and then treated them as worth less. It should go without saying, but I will: every body is beautiful and deserving of love and also a kind of disgusting collection of bile and guts and farts and mysteries, so let’s celebrate and respect that.1 And yet, if you’ve watched the past two weeks of Wizards games, it is hard not to see.

AJ Johnson getting pushed around by Jaylen Clark, Kyshawn George struggling against Aaron Gordon in the paint, Sabonis needling Sarr further and further from the basket until Sarr attempts a questionable midrange shot. This isn’t a judgement on who the Wizards are, but given that this current team is essentially speculative, it does make one (I don’t know why I’m being precious here, it makes me) wonder if these are the guys as they will always be, or if, like 19 and 20 year olds everywhere, there’s still more growing in store. It is unlikely many of the players on the current roster will even be around in three years, but for the ones who are able to stick it out in DC, are they going to find ways to work in the bodies they have or will they become the guys bullying people in the paint?

Most people think about Giannis, or the handful of other young guys who enter as rookies in the mid-to-upper six foot range and by season three are closer to seven feet, but looking at data from the past 25 years shows that this is actually pretty rare. Weight, on the other hand, does change. This is partly because weight is correlated with muscle mass. It is tough to get taller—many of us know the genetic ceiling all too well—but getting stronger is, at least to some extent, within a player’s control.

As we can see in the figure, the overall change in average weight doesn’t move that much season-to-season. Yet, some players see huge increases and decreases. Our old pal Daniel Gafford got traded to the Dallas Mavericks and suddenly had shoulders you could see from the upper deck. Similarly, Deni Avidja went from being listed at 210 pounds in his last season in DC to 240 when he started the 2024-25 season in Portland (weirdly, Deni is one of the few players who lost height, losing an inch between 24/25 and 25/26).

Given how much variation there is in the data, simply looking at averages and assuming some sort of straight line in weight and seasons played might obscure how players actually grow. There is also the fact that weight might be misreported or simply measured with some error. Maybe the scale being used wasn’t quite calibrated the right way, maybe a guy had a big lunch. Whatever the case, it’s plausible that you could weigh yourself three times in a week and get three different measurements.

If you have ever had a small child, or known someone who has a small child, you have likely encountered a growth curve to understand whether or not a child is developing within some age appropriate range. Using the NBA’s weight data, I basically reconstructed this idea using each player’s first season weight and then tracking each subsequent season to understand the time it takes to get to 95 percent of their final or steady state weight, i.e., the point after which they kind of level off. Some players get there quickly (1-2 seasons), while others take longer (3-5 seasons).

Rather than just averaging across players, though, which would assume some sort of straight progression, we use a statistical model that borrows information across similar players so that guards inform our understanding of other guards, centers inform other centers. This is important in cases like Yaroslav Korolev where there isn’t a ton of data on an individual level and the changes are extreme.

The model assumes weight follows an identifiable curve: players start at their rookie weight and approach their mature weight over time (if we’re getting technical, this is called asymptotic growth). This allows us to get a sense of some actionable overall numbers, as well as individual estimates for where a player is in their growth journey.2

As shown below, the median time to hit steady state is around two seasons for guards, while forwards and centers hit their steady state weight about mid-way through their second season. This kind of tracks with the types of players who get drafted in these positions: a 19 year old guard tends to be a skinny kid who is quick on his feet, while big men on the team are often entering the NBA having played in the paint in college or abroad, having to tough it out under the basket, and need to continue building strength to get minutes.

If you just look at raw numbers and average across players, you get slightly higher results because there are a handful of guys, like Jamal Crawford, who play a ton of seasons and who have higher than average variation in their weight. For guards, their overall raw average is around three seasons, while centers and forwards level off at season 2.5. But again, the results above from the model help account for the fact that growth isn’t linear and hitting a steady state depends on where you start, when you play, and for how long.

These results—that guys are who they are by their third season and more often by their second—are both promising and a little terrifying. The Wizards are now solidly in year three of their rebuild, with a young core of second-year players. It has been so great to see Alex Sarr suddenly split defenders or pivot in the paint for a fadeaway. I have no doubt that rookie Tre Johnson’s heart and grit will take him far. It is also clear that from the most elite stars to the workaday players who stick around, building strength and gaining weight is critical. The eye test says the Wizards are getting stronger. It also says they have a ways to go.

I plugged the current roster into the model to project where the guys might go and see who is likely still growing. Based on the number of seasons to get to each player’s projected steady state weight, Tre Johnson, Jamir Watkins, Will Riley, Alex Sarr, and Bub Carrington are projected to continue gaining weight in a way that the model suggests is outside of season-to-season variance. This is not too surprising given how young those players are. The model suggests that Tre Johnson is 1.6 seasons away from hitting 95% of his steady state weight, while Will Riley and Bub will be there next season. Notably, the model doesn’t quite know how to handle Sarr. It suggests that he is likely only about halfway through his development process, but also that he likely won’t gain that much more weight. This is sort of contradictory to me and not super helpful. Still, if most guys are who they are by season three, Sarr is nearly there. he’s leading the league in blocks per game. He’s developing an inside game. I don’t feel too worried that this model is kind of all over the place with him.

Zion gains weight and loses it. Lebron loses weight and then gains it. Guys check into games looking like they got into an argument with their barber. The body is on full display in the NBA in a way that belies how vulnerable these 20-something players are when they step onto the court. The main benefit—maybe the only benefit—of watching a team like the Wizards is getting to observe players develop. You get to see the small steps and the big leaps. You watch Will Riley get rejected by the rim one game and then move through space for a dunk a few games later. But it’s impossible not to see how much room there is to grow. I come back to the Russ clip not only to see an innocent moment captured in time, but to see how much of the superstar was already there.

Bub doesn’t lead the team in turnovers or turnover percentage (i.e., % of possessions per 100 where the player loses the ball), but depending on how you slice it, he’s second or third. This is partly because of his role as point guard. He’s the guy directing traffic and trying to set up plays. In his second year of career surrounded with similarly young players, it is no surprise that the ball tends to end up in the other team’s hands or thrown at a ref or inexplicably in the front row seats. These things happen. This is exactly where the Wizards players are in their growth: trying new things and figuring out how to work together against opponents who can draw on the unspoken comfort of experience.

As the Athletic’s Josh Robbin’s has reported, Bub is actively trying to grow and taking as much time as he can with the team’s vets, CJ McCollum and Khris Middleton, to learn. He leads the team in loose balls recovered, he’s a hustle and grit player. At the same time, Carrington came into the league as a self-aware player and loyal teammate. This is what makes Bub a special case and an exemplar of the rebuild.

Over the first 30-ish games, he has slowly begun to focus on what he’s good at—shooting and making threes. Indeed, of all the players on the team, Bub’s three point progress is the most real and sustained evidence of growth both as a strategy and in the data. You can see Bub taking opportunities and being given chances to stretch his shooting in ways that are perhaps second only to rookie sharpshooter Tre Johnson.1 Bub is averaging 4.5 attempts from three, which is slightly up from this point last season when he was averaging 4.34 attempts per game. I want to resist the urge to rank and compare because on his own terms, Bub is having a great shooting season (ok, I did take a look, and he’s ranked 11th overall in three point %).

Simply comparing this season and last season isn’t quite right, though. I’m not the same fan or person I was last year. If anything, I am enjoying this season way more than last year’s Poole party. Bub has always had a confident charm, which has only grown stronger as he has moved into the second half of the 25-26 season. At the same time, the personnel around him, while mostly consistent, has shifted and the competition in the Eastern conference is more inconsistent than last season. It is also worth noting that Bub is shooting worse from the foul line, 61.8% compared to 81.5% at this point last season on 0.6 more attempts per game on average. This lumpy progress is also the path the team seems to be taking. Finding small improvements here, beating the Bucks there, and making changes that are nearly imperceptible if you glance away too quickly.

Yet, we can use all of this information to see how Bub and others are changing compared to last season. While I don’t think you need the numbers or a model to highlight Bub’s progress, it does help.

To get a bit technical for a moment, we estimate year-over-year changes in three point shooting ability using a hierarchical Bayesian state-space model fit to game-level shooting data.2 The model jointly estimates latent free throw and three-point shooting ability for each player in the past two seasons and allows improvement in three-point shooting to vary based on changes in free throws. This allows us to borrow strength across players, incorporate prior information, and account for large differences in shot volume across players. The nice thing about this approach is that we don’t have to say things like, “among players with at least 100 possessions” or “compared to this time last year” and instead ensures that players with many attempts contribute more information than players with few attempts.3 And because not everyone is a gunner from distance, we set up the model so that if a player shows strong free throw improvement but has limited three point attempts, the model uses free throw improvement as informative evidence that their true three point ability may have improved as well. Basically, the model ensures we don’t end up saying Anthony Gill is the best three point shooter on the team because he’s gone 50% on two attempts all season.

So after that throat clearing, what do we find? The model shows overwhelming evidence that Bub Carrington has improved as a three-point shooter, with his true ability up roughly six to seven points year over year.4 This is real improvement that accounts for streakiness and for variation in Bub’s other shooting. While I am a big fan of counting stats, season averages ignore uncertainty, are biased by low attempts, and overreact to game-level noise. Our game-level model produces data-informed estimates of true player improvement, weights players by shot volume, and borrows information from related skills, so we can get the probability of real change not just vibes or whatever has happened over the past seven games. And Bub is as real as it likely gets. What is also notable from these results is that nearly every player on the team is showing positive improvement from three albeit with a lot more uncertainty than Bub’s progress.

Some players, like Anthony Edwards, have a level of charisma that can make ordering a Shirley Temple while meeting Barack Obama seem like a “shaken not stirred” level of cool. But this isn’t quite how I see Bub. His tussle with Milwaukee’s Gary Trent Jr. shows why Bub is so endearing. The Bucks guard tries to go in for a steal and pushes Bub in a way that just wasn’t needed or necessary. Bub—maybe putting a little drama into the act, maybe not—tumbles down and then immediately gets in Trent’s face. Nothing bad happens, the two are immediately separated. This wasn’t a Bub-specific incident, though. The Wizards guard would do this for anyone on the team who he saw being wronged on a night when the team could barely get a whistle.

At a time when politicians who have no problem with at least 70,000 dead in Gaza (most of them women, children, and the elderly) claim to care about human rights and international law, when the NBA Commissioner Adam Silver says he wants to address gambling right after a quick break from the league’s casino sponsors, and when there are a million little “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this” moments, Bub’s consistency and clear sense of values, his support of his teammates above all else, is more endearing than any stat. This, plus the “don’t hurt ‘em!” daggers from three have made him the face of the current Wizards for me even if guys like Alex Sarr are getting more attention and putting up league leading stats. Will he regress a bit from distance? Probably. Will he be an All Star talent? Who knows. But Bub played 82 games last season, he is honing his craft, and he’s showing growth in ways that align with what the Wizards say they want.

Bub is rebuilding in real time and across games. When Bub completes his shooting journey and returns to roughly the same spot, less time has elapsed for him than for the defender. When he releases, the defender's clock shows they're late; Bub's clock shows he's right on time. Bub is taking us into the next stage of the rebuild if we’re willing to go there with him.

There was a moment a couple of weeks ago where the NBA’s collective neuroticism was on full display. The Knicks, playing on 1.5 speed, defeated the arguably most-hyped-in-the-league Spurs. The game arrived after a hard fought semi-finals round, where Victor Wembanyama understood the assignment and talked trash about Oklahoma City’s foul grifting and called New York unsophisticated. Both comments seem almost perfectly optimized to get under the skin of the targeted teams and their respective fans and helped set up some personal stakes for the players. Despite the fun, all anyone seemed to be able to talk about after the Cup finals game was whether or not the NBA mid-season tournament matters, if it should be moved, if players care, if banners should be hung, and on and on. It is amazing anyone was able to type with all the handwringing.

This insecurity is not new to the league, but it is notable that it managed to escape the confines of ‘back-in-my-day’ talking heads and land in some of the more thoughtful corners of the NBA commentariat. None of these questions about the in-season tournament (formally, the Emirates NBA Cup) are misguided. Traditions take time to develop. The issue, though, is that the framing of the Cup discourse compares it to the NBA finals, which are the ultimate payoff after a long season. In reality, it makes more sense to think about the Cup as comparable to the All-Star game: a chance to see match-ups and contests between players who wouldn’t normally face each other on such a large platform, the opportunity for up-and-comers to make a mark, and a competition with low enough actual stakes that pride is more at risk than actual team records. For all these reasons, the Wizards front office should make a deep NBA cup run one of its benchmarks for assessing the team’s ongoing rebuild.

How will we know when the rebuild is over? The Sixers Process has very much run its course and it almost seems like they are exciting despite their tank rather than because of it. People point to Oklahoma City’s two-ish years in the wilderness as a successful tank job, but this also doesn’t feel particularly instructive. Unlike the Wizards, their cap sheet and organization were already set up for success. Ownership had long been bought in to winning and developing in a way that favored long term thinking over adding a handful of wins with over-priced, injury prone contracts. If the Wizards are able to grow and develop through the draft, it could take years to get to the point where they are positioned for a deep playoff run. The NBA Cup, in contrast, is built into the season in a way that differs from the post-season gauntlet.

The past two NBA Cups have shown that the prior season’s league finals contenders are often dealing with injuries, which leaves an opening for the next tier of teams. The Knicks benefitted from the general lack of tendons and soft tissue in Boston and Indiana on this front. The Magic’s run is a good model for the Wizards. A young team that catches a few breaks, has a strong core, and defeats an awkward Heat team in the quarterfinals. It’s not exactly a Cinderella story, but it is a story and one that is specific to the Magic, which is more than the Wizards have at the moment. Or at least a better one than they have, which is to bottom out and draft high in tandem with all the other teams bottoming out and trying to draft high.

Monumental Basketball president Michael Winger, General Manager Will Dawkins, and Coach Brian Keefe can’t promise that there will be an All Star on the team in 2026. They can’t realistically promise a championship next year or the year after (or really, the year after that). Becoming an All Star requires a mix of celebrity, talent, and winning as a team while also putting up individual numbers that force national media to pay attention, plus a mix of luck across each of these categories. Plenty of great players never make it to an All Star game, plenty of injured stars still get voted in based on past success and name recognition. Guys like CJ McCollum have great careers without getting to hang out with the league elite for a weekend.

In one of his last poems, Raymond Chandler writes:
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

This is lovely as a poem. But terrible as a strategy for a basketball team. Yet, much of the talk about stacking days, improving defense, and trying to not be last or near last in most team stats reads more like that poem and less like a way to gauge progress. Have we gotten what we want from the rebuild? It’s too soon to say. But what do Keefe or Winger or Dawkins want? To get better, sure. But what specifically?

Setting the team’s sights on the NBA Cup will please everyone and no one. It’s perfect. If you think the Cup is a lame attempt to sell jerseys and drive early season hype, then setting a Cup goal should not distract from the main goal of, uh, whatever happens at the end of a rebuild. If you think the Cup is fun, it is a goal that will prepare the Wizards for post-season play down the line. If the Heat and Raptors can slip into the quarterfinals this season, the Wizards should be able to make it next season or the season after. I’m not looking for anyone to get fired—not in this economy!—but setting the Cup as a benchmark is at least a way to figure out if the plan, whatever it might be beyond “winning,” is working. Without this, injuries or statistical cherry picking or the promise of yet another young prospect worth tanking for will mean the current liminal state can continue apace.

Who knows what will happen with the in-season tournament? I would love to see the league truly treat it like the All Star game and experiment even more. Let G-League teams compete in it or foreign teams or college teams to get something closer to relegation and promotion. Even if NBA commissioner Adam Silver keeps the Cup as-is, the only way it will garner respect and become something that matters is if teams treat it as such. The Wizards have an opportunity to lead in how the Cup is viewed. To paraphrase Mario Cuomo’s line, team leadership has been planning in poetry, it’s time to move to prose.

The 2025-26 Washington Wizards can very easily seem like a basketball team. You’d be forgiven for noting that they play the game two-to-three times a week and conclude that this defines them as such. While watching Tre Johnson sprint down the court for a textbook-form catch-and-shoot three, it’s easy to forget that the Wizards are less a basketball team and more a way to transfer risk from today to tomorrow. A medium-term bond or collateralized debt obligation that averages around 18 turnovers a game. And if you’re reading this, I assume you know that this is all by design.

It is worth reiterating that they need to be a bottom four team this season in order to keep their first round pick in the 2026 draft or it will be sent to the New York Knicks. As The Athletic’s Josh Robbins diligently summarized before the season started: this pick conveyance was itself an insurance policy in 2020—a way to move risk between time periods—to fix earlier problems. I haven’t even mentioned the whole pick-swap scenario with Phoenix.

I want to spend as little time thinking about cap sheets as possible and more time saying “wowie” when Alex Sarr has a monster block or Kyshawn George hits a contested 16 footer or even when the aforementioned Alex Sarr tries to dribble the ball in one direction while all seven feet of his 20 year old body moves in an entirely different direction. That is what I’ve signed up for, not financial engineering.

The second half of games says a lot about how Coach Brian Keefe is managing this shambolic though ultimately-good-in-the-long-run situation. If the whole current squad travelled into some timeline where the NBA, driven by highlight culture and the whims of dystopian tech advancement, only played 12 minute games, the Wizards might actually be kind of good. But in our current timeline, games are 48 minutes. Where and how the team falls off in the third and fourth quarters is tough to pin down just by watching, though not that tough. Defense falls apart, opposing teams make very minor adjustments, guys forget to run, turnovers increase, and, in at least one case, everyone mentally checks out.

Looking at quarter-by-quarter data for the team’s starters and main second unit, you can see the wheels coming off. For example, only Marvin Bagley III and Justin Champagnie average more shot attempts in the second half of games than the first half among the 10 players getting regular court time.1 And yeah, Champagnie also averages more second half minutes (Bagley has been a much needed force in the first half even though he has been coming off of the bench), so it’s not totally surprising that he’s taking more shots later in games. But if we consider—for the sake of argument and also just as proxy for what we can glean from counting stats about on court player-coach choices—this isn’t really great to see. Ideally, we would see guys getting looks and taking shots throughout their time on the court.

The figure below shows the quarter-to-quarter attempts for each of the players that comprise a majority of line-ups so far this season. The blue line is their average, so lines sloping down from quarter three to quarter four show what fans have likely seen—a drop off in attempts from the guys who should be trying to hit shots if only to avoid getting completely blown out by opposing teams. The Wizards are 30 out of 30 teams right now in margin of victory at -16.17 per basketball-reference. If you want to try to adjust this margin by schedule, which, sure, something one can do, they’re ranked 29th in SRS. Either way, teams score a ton of points and the Wizards young core are slowing down in their attempt to even get points in the second half.

It is true that attempts aren’t everything. Kyshawn George, Khris Middleton, and Bub actually have seen their average field goal percentage (i.e., how many shots they make as a percentage of how many they take) increase in the second half of games so far, but that’s partly because they’re taking fewer shots. And yeah, there’s plenty of reason to be a little choosier with shot selection at times, but I would say the 1-11 Wizards are not in those times.

In theory, Coach Brian Keefe and his assistants take a look at what the opposing team is doing and respond accordingly. When that doesn’t it work, they (in theory) adjust. And they keep doing this until the young guys who they’re trying to develop—Alex Sarr, Kyshawn—get a look (again, in theory and assuming you want to give them minutes in the second half of games). But that’s not really what I’ve seen while watching and it’s not what the data show. As you can see in the figure below, the young core + unc cameo of Tre, Bub, Sarr, Kyshawn, and CJ have the top five total second half minutes, but these minutes are actually negatively correlated with shot attempts. Which takes us right into the dark statistical underbelly of the tank: missing 100 percent of the shots not taken.

It is a bummer that if Sarr or Kyshawn progress at a rate even faster than they have (this is unlikely, but bear with me), they will need to be taken out of games or simply further set up to fail. Under normal rebuilding circumstances, a team would start figuring out how to get better, to really start building around their promising talent. For the Wizards, if they start flying even slightly toward the sun, their wings will need to get clipped because the upside of the pick is too high. We are year two of the rebuild—a rebuild that was necessary and is proving painful, but at times it feels like the line between tanking and kayfabe gets a little blurry.

The challenge watching this year’s Wizards is that show flashes, but they truly can’t make a leap or even a small hop developmentally. This cognitive dissonance puts the whole season into a nihilistic tailspin. You don’t want to ask yourself what the point of this is—if any of this really matters—while watching basketball because on some level it doesn’t matter. The players and their amazing athletic feats bring meaning to it, we create meaning through the viewing experience and connection to those players. People buy gear because of a connection to the guys on the court. No one wants a City Edition jersey with the name “Below-Apron” on it.

But progress is for next year’s team. And sure, we were hoping for the first round last year, but next year, we’re due. It’s not that there is a point shaving conspiracy going on, the plan is out in the open and for all to see. Tre Johnson and Alex Sarr are worth watching. Kyshawn George’s growth seems real. Bilal Coulibaly still hasn’t had a full showing. These are all reasons to tune it. But the decision of where that growth leads was made for these guys, at least for this season, years ago.

I have way more ideas for this newsletter than I have free time to write it. Each of the items below are thoughts that I would love to turn into something longer, but won’t get to before the season starts. Enjoy!

The (second) biggest story of the summer. There were two big stories this offseason. The Kawhi scandal, which is still unfolding and is generating so many hours of podcasting and so many pixels across every platform that future generations will assume basketball fans were some sort of plutocratic caste excused from mundane tasks like work, sleep, and human interaction so they could focus on knowing ball. The other big item, which is admittedly more awkward and has generated far less coverage, was the demise of Streameast. If you don’t know what Streameast is, stop reading, you sweet angel. For the rest of us, you already know—Streameast was the largest and most accessible (and yeah, illegal) way to stream NBA games online, or so I’ve read.

At a time when it is stupidly expensive to be a sports fan, any respite that allows you to watch a game is welcome. This is especially true for the many blacked out, in-market or national games that aren’t carried on the NBA’s own streaming service. Sure, there are some ethical questions that come along with being able to enjoy a Streameast game. Yes, it is stealing. Stealing from who exactly? The league, I guess, and also Amazon, ESPN, TNT, NBC, or some other platform that needs live sports to stay afloat in the era of high interest rates and a glut of not-quite-marquee eight episode series. It’s worth noting, though, that often fans using Streameast are still paying for a streaming service, or three, and going to games and probably buying merch too, but the labyrinthine streaming agreements mean you still might not be able to tune in when you want. I’m not condoning Streameast, not exactly, but I do think that site and sites like it are an undeniable and inevitable part of the sports ecosystem. They give fans who might otherwise be unable to access full games the ability to tune in beyond “free highlights.” I don’t quite know what the right way to give people access is, but I do know that without Streameast it is going to be harder for a some portion of any given fanbase to watch their team.

Justin Champagnie, quiet hero. I fully expect to turn on a Wizards game at some point this season and not know a single name on the floor. This is not a team that is thinking about legacy. At times, though, it was nice last season to see Champagnie’s workmanlike approach to making the most of each possession. I have a bunch of cherry picked stats for him, but I’ll just share this one for now. In the 173 “high” and “very high” leverage situations (these are the few times when the Wizards went on a run and the win probability for the game started to—however briefly—tilt in their favor) the Wiz were 27.8 points better with Champagnie on the floor than when he was off per pbpstats and they were 7.7 points better in second chance points with him on the floor. There are players who are more fun, who are flashier, and a bit more athletic, but Justin Champagnie is the guy you want on the court for a handful of games to give yourself hope that maybe, just maybe the team could develop some talent and, who knows, win a game or two.

Cam Whitmore was one of my favorite League Pass players last season. Whitmore spent a good chunk of March last season collecting DNPs and got called out by Houston Coach Ime Udoka for his inconsistent play. And even though something about Ime Udoka makes me feel like he would be well cast in the sequel to American Psycho, he’s right on this one: Cam was inconsistent! His shot quality , however, was consistent. Indeed, it was one of his most consistent stats with a standard deviation of 0.05, meaning that quality ranged from 0.5 to 0.6 on average (Mitchel Robinson and Kai Jones tied for the highest shot quality at .66 last season). The figure below captures the potential and pitfalls of an athletic but somewhat unpolished player like Whitmore. He will likely to miss a lot of wide open threes, but he’s even more likely to make you say, “hell yeah!” on a slick pull up from mid-range or a monster dunk.

Congrats to Team USA’s new Coach, Kara Lawson. This coulda been us. I really hope the Wizards hire her after the rebuild.

I’m worried for DC. There have been ICE and DEA and anonymous military patrols in and around my neighborhood. My LinkedIn feed is a doom scroll of #OPENTOWORK after DOGE dismantled the agency where I worked and served for more than a decade. Old heads in my building and at my gym have passed this off as just another event in a long series that District residents have to deal with and too shall pass. This is both true and a not so convincing defense mechanism. DC feels like it is on the brink, or off the brink, or whatever comes after the brink. We know what happens when the largest employer in a town closes or stops hiring. What’s less clear is what happens when the largest employer is the government and also the city is under occupation by its own military.

It will likely take years to fully understand the effects of the past eight months. It also will not take any time at all. It’s around us now. Videos of delivery drivers getting assaulted and disappeared. People being harassed for relaxing on their front steps. But “the effects” of any big event are like this—many small moments, some terrifying, some mundane, some memorable, most forgettable—that accumulate until we say stuff like, “the impact of NAFTA” or “Jordan was the best” or “I think I might be lactose intolerant.”

We tend to remember the big moments in sports—the championships, the buzzer beaters, the heartbreakers—but the highlight reel is also just an accumulation of possessions, of seconds ticking down. To be a rookie in the NBA is to try to compile these many moments and show that you have an effect within a very specific timeline. It doesn't matter what is going on around you. In most cases, it won’t be great—if you’re a high first rounder, you are there because the team was (or more often is) in some sort of trouble.

Last post, we saw that the more rookies play, the worst their team win percentage tends to be and that where you’re drafted really does affect how much time you play as a rookie. This post, the question is how these minutes affect medium term outcomes. That is, does giving young guys on bad teams a ton of minutes—throwing them into the pool to help them learn to swim—actually train them to perform at a high level?

Getting in, Staying in

Since 2006, the probability of making it from season one to season four is 54%. But there’s a bit of nuance to this: for first round draft picks, this climbs to 87%, which is pretty good, but second round picks have less than a coin flip’s chance of making it to year four (45.1%) while undrafted players only have a 32% chance to make it to the point of being able to negotiate a second contract in the NBA.1 But these numbers aren’t adjusted for anything—not for where you’re drafted, the number of minutes you played, whether you get traded, etc.

To really understand how a player’s rookie season affects their trajectory, we need to account for any number of other factors. This is tough! Every fan probably has a rookie that they felt showed flashes of potential no one else saw. I’ve probably convinced myself—give or take a Johnny Davis—that every Wizards rookie could be an All-Star if things break right.

The last post noted that the Wizards have given their rookies above average minutes in most seasons over the past two decades. It also happens to be true that worse teams tend to give rookies more minutes. Before we turn this into some sort of ‘therefore the Wizards are a [redacted] team’ logic puzzle, let’s just look at how our guys have done between their first and fourth years to get a better understanding of whether or not all of this playing time has led to better performance.

The figure below might look like a bowl of spaghetti at first glance, but it helps show two things: 1. how few Wizards first rounders have made it past their rookie deal on the team that drafted them, and 2. how most rookies (both for the Wizards, but also across the NBA) are a net negative in their first season and the rest of their rookie deal is spent clawing their way out of that. Ok, there’s a third thing, too, which isn’t even on the graph because I had to remove it for aesthetic/scaling reasons: Anžejs Pasečņiks, who I’ve written about before, went from a net rating of 0.2 his rookie season with the Wizards, to an impressively rough -104 net rating in season two.

But past performance doesn’t guarantee future performance, for the Wizards (fingers crossed) or any other crop of rookies. Overall, the relationship between rookie net rating and season four net rating is weak. This is good! This is good for all of the guys about to hustle for 25-plus minutes in DC on a team designed to lose. In the figure below, it’s clear that net rating at the start of a player’s career, doesn’t say a lot about where they’ll be by the time their rookie deal is up, assuming it they make it that far.

Making it to season four is generally a mix of management decisions, performance, contract details, injury luck, and a grab bag of stuff I’ll just call “team dynamics,” the locker room stuff, the ability to be coached, and so on that occasionally leads to guys getting shipped out of town. If we really want to understand how rookie minutes affect year four player performance, we need to address the fact that even otherwise similar players might get very different playing time as rookies.

I dusted off the Wizards Points model machine to try to isolate the effect of rookie minutes on year four net rating, while taking into account factors like draft round, which tends to be highly predictive of future success (though not a guarantee), net rating in a player’s rookie year, and whether or not a player gets traded before their fourth season. The model also accounts for variation across teams, seasons, and positions so that we don’t need to say things like, ‘among centers who played more than 10 minutes.’ I also weight the data to put players on similar footing since some guys, like Damian Lillard and John Wall, played way more minutes than would be predicted.2

More rookie minutes, more net rating

To get right to it: every extra rookie minute per game is associated with a 0.09-point boost in a player’s year-four net rating, or, put in human terms, 10 more minutes per game on average as a rookie translates into nearly a full point higher impact by year four.3 This is pretty good when you consider net rating is the difference between offense (how many points you add + assists + rebounds per 100 possessions) and defense (how many points + stops + other stuff the other team gets per 100) and as we saw above, even some of the best Wizards players tend to hover around zero, if not dwell in the basement. And just to get right to it, most guys, rookies or not, tend to focus on offense, so any benefit in net rating is arguably some mix of getting better at getting buckets and improving/not declining at stopping buckets.

But this estimate is somewhat noisy and comes with plenty of caveats. There’s an 80% chance that each additional minute to a rookie’s average minute per game count adds 0.07 and 0.11 points to their year four net rating. There is also a lot that I haven’t accounted for, and despite trying to weight and control for the big stuff, there are so many factors that affect both the spread of estimates shown below and the estimates themselves.

One benefit of this approach is that it points to something that coaches and front offices have generally shown through their actions, while also accounting for the fact that bad teams play 19-to-22 year olds way more than teams that are trying to win. These aren’t such crazy effects that I worry the Wizards are onto some master plan or are squandering their young guys’ potential. While it has been clear the Wizards are giving rookies minutes to bet on the team’s future, this shows that there’s a good chance it will pay off for the players who make it to and past year four. At a time when DC—and the world—feels pretty bleak, these results give me a small amount of hope that we’ll see our rookies improve. I don’t like to put too much stock in any single model result or stat, but I feel a little more optimistic knowing the odds are in favor of Kyshawn George and Alex Sarr growing despite the team’s goal of tanking.

I have been thinking about a poster from the artist Divorce Culture that just says, “The city don’t love you.” It’s true. It doesn’t really matter if I’m worried about DC. Just because love is unrequited, doesn’t mean it’s not love. There’s no better example of this than the Wizards. Loving a team is a kind of self-care, though. It is a way to give yourself a little bit of hope and excitement and confined boredom and safe vulnerability. So it doesn’t really matter if the Wizards won’t love you back. It doesn’t matter if the city don’t love you. Rooting for or marching for or just complaining about/for something you support is a way to connect with others and yourself. The impact might not be obvious today, but that’s not really the right framing. By the time we see rookie minutes or a push against occupation pay off, we will all be different, better people in a changed city.

The saguaro is truly an incredible plant. Very few reach full maturity, but those that do can live to be 150 years old and over 30 feet tall. It is what ecologists call a keystone species: the entire ecosystem, including humans, live off of the saguaro cactus at various stages of its development and demise. Saguaro seedlings can only grow in the shade and shared resources of a nearby nurse plant, which helps protect the fragile cactus and will die well before the saguaro even develops its mighty arms. Most saguaro won’t make it given how much has to align, but those that do will thrive and help keep the desert alive.1

NBA rookies also need support early on—a Nick Nurse plant if you will. But does that support mean more playing time, getting thrown into “NBA situations” as much as possible, or does it mean gradually learning five-to-10 minutes per game, often at the end of the game, how to grow as a player?

It is no secret that the Wizards did not want to do much of anything in the 24-25 season. The value of a shot at a top draft pick was higher than any given win. And despite tanking as a strategy seeming less prudent when so many teams are doing it, we’re looking at another repeat of the same playbook next season. But what about the guys on the team? Even if none of them seem end up as All-Stars, will the excessive minutes early on in their careers payoff in the long run?

Anyone who has spent more than two minutes on the beltway knows that just because you do something a lot (like driving) doesn’t mean you get better at it. But NBA players are not sleepy commuters or mighty cacti. In many cases, they have been tended to from an early age to increase the odds of stardom. And in most cases, guys don’t pan out. A list of, say, the 50 best players sees a decent amount of churn season to season, particularly outside of the top 10. Is giving Bub Carrington the ball in high leverage situations next season going to help Bub, as a player, when he gets past his rookie deal?

Good teams play rookies less than bad teams. First round draft picks tend to get more minutes than second rounders. These are well known trends. In this post, I’m just going to focus on minutes to show what this has looked like overall and for the Wizards and then we’ll build up to understand the impact of these minutes in the next post. This isn’t about what is good for the long term position of the Wizards, but the long term outcomes of guys thrown in to help the team tank.

Minute by Minute

Over the past 20 seasons, NBA rookies averaged 13.4 minutes per game, with rookies on the Wizards averaging 13.7 minutes per game.2 Prior to the most recent season, Bradley Beal stands out. Beal was the only rookie on a pretty young team (Martell Webster was one of the lead vets that year) and got a ton of playing time (again, Martell Webster was one of the main vets3).

But you can’t just look at the averages and understand how much playing time rookies on the Wizards and other teams get. There’s a lot of variation even within the team from season-to-season. For example, the 2021-22 team, which in hindsight was truly an island of lost toys assortment of players, had six first-year players, with Corey Kispert cracking the top-10 in minutes per game as a rookie and the other rookies tapping in at the end of games before taking the bus back to the G-League.

Two things stand out to me from the figure above: the first is that in what I think about as the good years (2014-2016ish), that simpler time when John Wall was in his prime and podcasts were only 45 minutes long, Wizards rookies saw less playing time. This tracks with how most coaches think—if you have a talented, winning team, the job of a rookie is to watch and learn. The Dallas Mavericks saw the lowest average per game rookie playing time this past season and both of their rookies, who were on two-way contracts, were waived by the end of the season. Oh, and, in case you suppressed memories of June, Dallas also received the number one draft pick.

The second thing that is notable is the 24-25 season is new territory for the Wizards. Yes, Beal, as the lone rookie in 2012 saw a ton of playing time, but not a single rookie on the team this past season played anywhere close to the league average. Bub Carrington not only played all 82 games, but did so while averaging 30 minutes a game. Jaylen Martin, who played a total of five minutes for the Nets before joining the Wizards, somehow still racked up 234 minutes across the 13 games he played after joining the team from Brooklyn in February. And if you’re asking, “who the hell is Jaylen Martin?” that’s kind of the point. As much as people talk about the NBA being a copycat league, Coach Brian Keefe let the young guys run wild in way that stands out even as an unprecedented number of teams were trying to lose given the strong incoming draft class.

There is another, perhaps even more important, piece of seeing how the Wizards stack up in rookie minutes: draft round. Even ‘let-them-watch-and-learn’ coaches like Steve Kerr tend to give their first round rookies more playing time. Every rookie, like every new relationship, is a bet on the future. So it makes sense to nurture the players you think are more likely to help the team either because of their play or potential trade value.

Players drafted in the first round averaged 18.3 minutes per game over the past 20 seasons, with the Wizards first rounders averaging 20.7 minutes per game. Last season, players drafted in the first round averaged 7.5 minutes more per game than players drafted in the second round. By the end of the most recent season, a third of the Wizards active roster were first round rookies. Just based on general trends, you’d expect lots of minutes for this group, but the Wizards, especially since Rui Hachimura’s rookie season in 2019, have seen above average minutes for young guys.

A Peek at Performance

The best rookies tend to play tons of minutes on bad teams. The average Rookie of the Year winner over the past 20 years played 15 more minutes per game than other first rounders. But like life, there are ups and downs and these trends vary season to season.

As rookie minutes go up, team win percentage tends to go down as shown in the figure below. But in some years, like 2018-19 (-0.80 correlation) , this relationship is really strong, while in others, like 2008-09 (-0.43 correlation), the dots are just kind of all over the place, which suggests the relationship between rookie minutes and winning was weaker.

The real question, though, is how do these minutes contribute to a player’s ability to win down the line when their rookie deals are ending, or to even make it to the end of their rookie deals? We will explore this more in the next post. But for now, it looks like rain.

Each saguaro will produce millions of seeds over its lifetime. A growing seedling might only be a couple of inches tall after nearly a decade. So many things have to go right for it to prosper. The rains that a mature saguaro saves up in order to survive the heat, wash away its nascent offspring. You wander out of the desert. You flag down a Mini-Cooper driving by. The window rolls down. Is that incoming Wizards rookie Tre Johnson? Are you still hallucinating? The door opens, you get in. The desert blooms in the rearview mirror.

Children learn about certain kinds of jobs. You are told people grow up and become firefighters or bakers or doctors. In adulthood, especially if you’re lucky/aimless enough to go to graduate school and/or live in DC, you learn that most jobs are more like “Junior Sales Manager” and “Chief People Officer” and “Program Analyst II (Lead).” As readers likely know by now, Wes Unseld Jr. has gone from the world of recognizable job titles (coach) to the latter category (“front office advisory position” per the Wizards press release).

Being the leader of any organization or group is taxing. Everyone knows how they would do things if they were in charge, but they’re not in charge, you are and you have to convince them to do things your way. It almost goes without saying that organizations reflect their leaders. The Wizards have had coaches that were jerks and coaches that were non-entities; guys like Wes Unseld Jr., who players said was nice, and guys like Scott Brooks, who players cursed out. Neither type of coach has really brought success, at least not sustained success. Still, it’s worth looking back at WUJ’s tenure and seeing how he stacks up.

As a fan, every coach I’ve seen the front office hire seems like the worst coach to ever lead the Wizards at least until the next guy comes along. But being a coach involves a lot more than drawing up plays. It requires managing 15 egos, plus a whole staff, plus the sometimes contradictory incentives and mandates of ownership. I don’t know all of the ways WUJ compares to Flip Saunders or Eddie Jordan in the day-to-day stuff that makes some managers motivating to work for and some miserable. But in theory that stuff should add up to something approaching on court performance. So let’s take a look at where our recently promoted coach ranks and see if there is any thing to learn from the wild mild ride that was the WUJ experience.

Stacking Ls

As much as winning isn’t everything, especially for the current rebuilding team, it is a good starting point for seeing how WUJ stacks up compared to his Capital/Washington Bullets/Wizards peers. As shown below, Wes Jr. out performed his Hall of Fame dad. Still, Jr., ranks among the worst full-time, full-season coaches in the organization as far as win percentage is concerned.

This isn’t really a fair comparison, though, because some coaches, like Randy Wittman and Scott Brooks, had flawed but talented rosters, while others, like WUJ or Flip Saunders were given teams that had outlived their usefulness or were never really built for success. Other coaches, like Jim Brovelli, Darrell Walker, and Ed Tapscott, were interim coaches, who were basically there because someone has to coach, right?

Given that different teams have different expectations (i.e., we knew the Wizards would be bad this season, just not, uh, this bad in this way), it’s worth asking how a coach’s record stacks up against what it was expected to be. Luckily, Bill James, the baseball guru, has an expected win percentage formula that is finally coming into its own now that it is being used to better understand the WUJ era.1

As shown below, if we look at the John Wall-era and later coaches, statistical expectations have been low. There are certainly more advanced ways to figure out whether or not WUJ performed well given what he was given (e.g., adjusting for injuries), but I suspect other approaches that would take more time would also provide similar results. Wes Unseld Jr.’s winning percentage was not that far off from where he should have been. This might explain why he was given a new contract and why the front office jumped to defend him after the last two seasons ended poorly by standards such as “does the team win more than they lose” or “do I feel happier or sadder when I think about the Wizards.”

But maybe what matters is not whether or not you lose, but how. If we look at the above coaches and their point differential during their tenures, we can see that WUJ didn’t fare all that well either. None of the Wall-Beal-Kuz era coaches have had winning seasons or even outscored their opponents on average. Among this group, though, WUJ had the fewest 15 point losses. Scott Brooks’ teams got outscored by 15 or more points 59 times, Randy Wittman 52 times, Flip Saunders 43 times, and our dear Wes Jr. only lost by 15 or more points 40 times out of his total 207 games coached. Those 40 games account for 31% of the team’s losses under Unseld Jr.’s leadership. While Scott Brooks is the leader of losing by 15 or more points, including setting the record with a 47 point loss against Utah in 2017,2 he lost by 15 points or more in 28% of his total losses.

Perhaps more relevant to the goals of the team for this season (and arguably the latter part of last season), Wes lost by five points or less in 28 games over his three seasons as head coach. Flip Saunders, whose tenure was a high point of the “moral victory” Wizards is probably the closest comparison to WUJ in that he was let go in January 2012 after a rough start to his third coaching season. Saunders had 27 games that were lost by five points or less, while Brooks and Wittman had 55 and 57 victory-is-just-out-of-reach games, respectively.

Onward and upward

This is not a post to beat up on Wes Unseld Jr. There are coaches who are there to contain and harness the energy of their players and coaches who are simply there. WUJ seemed to be more of the latter. There are coaches who have a stubborn but justified philosophy, but WUJ was often just stubborn. The fact that in his first season players complained that his system and plays were too complex, but that WUJ didn’t adjust to guys not getting it. The fact that he seemed to decide that some players can only play in certain quarters. The fact that Jordan Poole, Shaqtin a Fool mainstay, ranks 157th overall in three point percentage and last in players who appear to know what defense is and has averaged 29.1 minutes per game. All of these facts suggest a slide from stubborn to delusional. It was never clear what WUJ wanted or what he was going for. At least not in the grand scheme of things. Analysts that focus on the set-up of plays, like the good folks at Swish Theory, praised Unseld Jr.’s creativity. But creativity without execution is simply a nice idea.

Coaching is a job we all recognize and only a handful of people actually know how to do. It isn’t actually a simple job. What you learn as an adult is that there aren’t any simple jobs. Former players, guys who have grown up with the game, and deep basketball minds have all come to DC only to be worn down by the slow grind of mediocrity and myopia. With WUJ’s promotion to the front office, the organization seems to be in the process of growing up. Maybe this is the first true turning point in the rebuild. Or perhaps we’ll all be saying, “well, Unseld Jr. wasn’t all that bad” in a season or two after we see what the next guy does.

“Some guys like small markets, some guys like big markets,” is how Adam Silver described team parity in the NBA to the Monumental Sports Entertainment broadcast team back in November. This ‘men are from Mars’-esque non-explanation set up the next line of questioning, oddly edited out of the linked YouTube clip, that the NBA is planning to expand in the coming years, including to Mexico City. This wasn’t exactly news. I like an early November Knicks-Wizards game as much as the next degenerate, but it’s not the place to make a big statement. With the finalization of the collective bargaining agreement in April, the NBA has been teasing expansion to new cities at a slow but steady clip. But what would expansion mean for DC?1

The Athletic’s Mike Vorkunov wrote a good piece this week about all of the money waiting to pounce once the NBA officially makes its push to expand. It is easy to forget, and generally not worth remembering, that the NBA is basically that scene in every mafia movie where all of the families gather around a big table to discuss how to avoid another mob war, only instead of “families” the league has “governors,” i.e., majority owners for each team. As Vorkunov notes,

“While expansion might be seen as a league issue, it is more acutely a personal issue for each owner. They would have to weigh several variables, not least of all their own financial interests. Wherever the next national media-rights deal lands, it, along with other league revenue streams, will be split in 30 directions. Would each owner be willing to see that annual cut diluted by two extra teams each year for the foreseeable future, while taking in their share of expansion fees? That choice might land in different places for different owners.”

We could wildly speculate about what expansion means for the Wizards, and I will do some of that because why not, but this is also not the first time a league has expanded. While the NBA hasn’t seen expansion since the 2002/2004 New Orleans Hornets/Charlotte Bobcats, other professional leagues have seen expansion and other nerds have asked, “what does this mean for MY favorite team?” I took advantage of the fact that I can still log-in to my old university’s library and checked out the academic literature on league expansion.

To understand what league expansion might mean for Wizards fans, it’s worth considering why the NBA wants to expand in the first place. While I can’t know what is in Adam Silver’s heart, I can read. And luckily, there has been a good amount of reporting and academic work on why leagues expand generally. In a paper analyzing the effects of Major League Soccer’s expansion, University of Delaware professor Tim DeSchriver and co-authors note that, “leagues generally expand to enter a new market, prevent competition from other potential professional leagues in the same sport, and increase overall media rights value.” Other papers generally agree with this summary as does reporting around the last NBA expansion. A 1988 Advertising Age article about the NBA’s expansion to Charlotte, Miami, and Orlando quotes a few late-80s NBA executives saying things about how the Southeast, aside from the Hawks, was largely untapped for the NBA. One NBA VP of marketing notes that the move into Florida and North Carolina, “will create different kinds of associations for us," she says. "We can go after an official sunglasses of the NBA, for example.”

With new markets comes a stronger bargaining stance when the league wants to negotiate broadcast rights. So, while Vorkunov is absolutely right that revenue sharing will require owners to split more of their pie under league expansion, what a lot of the economic literature on the topic notes is that if expansion allows them to negotiate even more money from TNT or ESPN or some streaming service, the pie might actually get bigger and so their cut could end up being larger under expansion.

Ok, so that’s context. I honestly don’t care that much about how NBA owners feel about this whole thing except to the extent it affects the on-court product and the general experience of being a fan. Much of the economic and legal literature focuses on the obvious antitrust angle since the league is monopolistic in a way that is somewhat unique.2 Owners clearly have an incentive to maintain as much of their monopoly on top-tier basketball as possible. Yet, a mix of evidence and theory suggests that fans also have something to gain both from expansion and from the existing monopoly status of the NBA being the center of the basketball multiverse.

There are two main, interrelated issues that come through in how academics have tackled the effects of expansion: attendance and competition. For cities that get a new team, the attendance effects are obvious. There was no NBA team to watch live, now there is an NBA team to watch live. The question is whether those fans would have gone to other cities or watched other sports pre-expansion. Both Major League Soccer and Major League Baseball offer some evidence around this, as does the NBA.

Looking at data from 1950 through 2004, economists Kevin Quin and Paul Bursik treat the arrival of a new team as a “shock” on par with an unexpected labor strike to estimate the effects of expansion. The authors report that, “League expansion was found to have no net effect on trends in average MLB home date attendance.” While I reviewed a lot of papers over the past few days, I liked this one because they did a ton of work putting together their data and the analysis is pretty robust, but they also find that results are lumpy. So, while there was no average effect on attendance, they also note that, “expansion was found to depress growth in home date attendance for incumbent (i.e., non- expansion) teams” at least in the initial season of expansion. A similar finding comes from an analysis of MLS team expansion. Penn State economist Jadrian Wooten found that introducing a new stadium had a statistically significant effect on attendance BUT this finding doesn’t hold for East Coast teams, which tend to be physically closer together and have “traditionally strong regional ties.” Other work on MLS expansion finds that the average increase in attendance tends to level off by year three.

For the Wizards, and NBA generally, expansion might more or less have a similarly negligible effect, at least relative to other drivers of attendance. As work from Jerry Hausman and Greg Leonard shows, as well as from your very own Wizards Points, star power largely drives NBA attendance. Hausman and Leonard note that in 1992 alone, Michael Jordan generated 53 million dollars for opposing teams.3 Expansion would reduce the number of high profile star visits to any given city as teams would likely have fewer match-ups. Even in research on MLS expansion that finds expansion improved average attendance, the star effect (in this case from David Beckham) is larger in magnitude than the effect of a new stadium (roughly 7 to 8k fans from expansion compared to 11k from Beckham alone).

Overall, expansion creates new fans, but reduces the opportunities to see your favorite player on another team. Generational stars will always be a draw. The question then is whether expansion affects the quality of the games. For the Wizards, where quality (or at least winning) is less of an issue at the moment, this is still an important question to address.

Lawrence Kahn says it pretty bluntly in my favorite theory-based paper on this subject: “As a sports league expands, the average quality of playing talent on the court or in the field falls.” This is because, assuming a limited basketball talent pool, there is essentially less concentration of skill. In addition, evidence both from my own eyes and academic research shows that new teams, which often lack the institutional support, culture, and cash of incumbents, are not good. As Kahn notes in his paper, bad on-court product is not fun (or in econ-speak, “not welfare enhancing”), especially when the monopolistic status quo means more opportunities to see a star. The Quinn and Bursik paper I mentioned earlier finds that for the MLB, “a 10% league expansion would be associated with an initial decrease of about 18% in competitive balance.”4

There is one caveat to all of this—the theoretical work and the analysis—and that’s immigration. All of these papers assume a fixed pool of talent or a similar trend, generally based on pre-2010 data. As Kahn notes in his paper, talent levels can become “more elastic” (i.e., less fixed or limited) if the NBA recruits more international players. In his model, this moves the optimal league size closer to what you might see if the NBA were less of a cartel and more of an open market. I would expand this to growth from G-League players, too. Although there are few players who can come into the league at 19 years old from the G-League Ignite or abroad (Bilal Coulibaly’s precocious first-quarter of a season notwithstanding) and take over a game, there are definitely guys like Eugene Omoruyi who have been relegated to the GoGo, but could have more consistent NBA-level opportunities and truly grow into their skills on the Burlington Coat Factories or whatever expansion team comes along.

Wait. So is expansion good?

Just to recap:

• Expansion probably means slightly more money for Ted Leonsis and Monumental Sports Entertainment if it can be used as a way to negotiate a bigger and better television/media deal even if revenue has to be shared with more owners.

• Expansion is probably negligible or slightly positive overall for attendance (largely driven by more people going to games in new cities), but still not as strong as having a star from the opposing team visit. Sorry, Wizards fans, we’ll have to listen to all of those jerks from Montana cheer in Capital One Arena for their beloved Helena Natural Gasers or whatever expansion team happens to land a star.

• Expansion will, all else equal, dilute the level of talent…except all else is not equal! We don’t need to hold players constant in our model because we don’t live in a model, we live in the real world, where we can go to France and Turkey and Nigeria and all of the G-League cities to find promising talent. While the league’s approach in recent years has been to find rookies from abroad, under expansion, it could make sense to look deeper into FIBA and elsewhere for the best and brightest not just the youngest international players.

For the Wizards, I see all of these points as potential positives. Maybe not right now when the team is not trying to win, but in the near future. A future that I hope will bring a need to get reps in winning games with a young core. In theory, this will be easier if there is a tier of expansion teams below the lower tier of San Antonio, DC, and Detroit. But less theoretically, a larger set of teams means a larger pool of professional talent both on and off the court.

Working in a large organization, whether it is an NBA team, a school, or a corporation, requires a level of savvy, patience, and tolerance for a certain kind of bullshit. I think there is more than enough talent to go around and create expansion teams in Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook, not to mention Las Vegas and Mexico City, too. For the Wizards, this means more potential trade partners, more places to find experienced executive team and coaching staff, and more places for guys who might otherwise get lost in the G-League shuffle5 to develop their game and eventually come to DC to flourish.

Ted Leonsis and Adam Silver aren’t worried about competition within the NBA. They are worried about competition from other sports leagues and also every other form of entertainment that might take peoples’ dollars and eyeballs away en masse. League expansion is a hedge against distraction from the basketball court. Despite this fact, there is the possibility, however remote, that this new NBA competition will help light a fire under Wizards President Michale Winger, General Manager Will Dawkins, and, of course, owner Ted Leonsis. If the Bangor Lumberjacks, or whomever, end up with a better record than the Wizards, it will hopefully force some tough questions. For Wizards fans, this is not so much a “some guys like small markets, some guys like big markets” situation, as another opportunity to for the team to improve through trades, recruitment, and stealing some wins against new, inexperienced teams. At a minimum, it means more people get a chance to play NBA basketball and fans get a wider array of talent in DC. That is something worth expanding.

In this rebuilding season, in any season really, the point is to see some progress. Incremental progress is fine. But progress. We’re already seeing some shifts 19 games into the season. Three years ago after a January loss, Bradley Beal said the Wizards, “couldn’t guard a parked car.” Last week, Kyle Kuzma said the Wizards “couldn’t guard a stop sign.” This isn’t exactly the move away from the Beal era fans were looking for. Though if Deni Avidja explains that the team can’t guard a locked bicycle during training camp next year it might be time to call it quits on this whole Wizards thing. Even if progress is the goal, it’s tough to know what success looks like when you’re staring at a 3 and 16 record. Would it be better if we had the same record, but the youngest players were getting increasingly more minutes? Maybe! Is the team learning and adjusting nearly 20 games in? Some nights it looks like it, other nights are a toss up.

This is not the season to lean on box score stats. The in-season tournament and new rules about rest have changed, at least marginally, how opposing stars have played against the Wizards. And, just to get this out of the way now, this is not a team built to win. At this point last season, coach Wes Unseld Jr. had put out 250 different line-up combinations, while this season he has fielded 210 different line-ups, which speaks to the lack of, uh, legitimate options. Still, as a data guy, I do think the numbers can point to which guys are adjusting. Do we see game-to-game changes? Is WUJ actually playing people more or less from game to game? None of this is predictive of how things will go for the remaining three quarters of the season, but it’s worth checking in on the rebuild with the info we have so far.

The main way I have been thinking about this is in game-to-game changes across key metrics. To start, let’s look at minutes. This is really a way to assess the extent to which Coach Wes Unseld Jr. is adjusting based on how guys are playing and also how guys are holding up. The figure below shows the percentage change game to game.1 For example, in the November 10th game against Charlotte, Bilal Coulibaly played 19.6 minutes; in the next game against Brooklyn he played 33.9 minutes. This is a 73% increase in minutes from one game to the next, which is a big jump!

A big percentage change in the number of minutes played is not necessarily a good or bad thing. A jump from 10 minutes to 15 minutes (i.e., a 50% increase) back down to 10 might just be a function of who the match-ups were, how guys were feeling, and so on. But what stands out is who is seeing huge swings in their court time. For example, Landry Shamet, who has been one of the better two-way players so far this season, has seen his minutes bounce around pretty dramatically from nearly 21 minutes to 6 minutes to 14.5 all in the course of three games. Again, this isn’t inherently bad. Every season takes a while to find an equilibrium. But it does highlight some of WUJ’s decision making around who is on the court and for how long, about who is getting pulled or not after a bad game or bad quarter.

If I have one complaint about the season so far, it’s that I would like to see the younger guys, like Bilal, Corey Kispert, and, even though he’s had usage around 25% for some games, Deni Avdija, get more touches. Unfortunately, I have many complaints, but this is one that tends to resurface each time Jordan Poole misses another contested 30 footer with 18 seconds on the clock.

Taking the same logic as the prior graph but with field goal attempts, we can see that Bilal Coulibaly has been pretty consistent in his attempts. This is a problem. I’d like to see Bilal be given the ball and freedom to just let it rip, even if it means taking a game of contested 30 footers with 18 seconds on the clock. He is the future of the team more than anyone else. Right now, he’s averaging six field goal attempts per game. It would be great to see that gradually increase over the next 20 games.

Deni Avdija is averaging 9.2 attempts per game, but with a lot of up and down. Deni overall is having his best season and looks a lot more focused on the court. Setting aside a brutal showing against Milwaukee, where he only went for five attempts, Deni seems to be making the most of his minutes, with a 61.5% effective field goal percentage in games with 24 minutes or more (league average is 54% per basketball-reference.com) .

And while I don’t want to get too hung up on whether or not guys are hitting their shots (the key thing for developing young talent is just getting reps in), let’s look at actual effective field goal percentage (i.e., number of shots made vs. those attempts, taking into account that threes count for more points).

This one is kind of confusing because it’s the percentage change of a percentage. For players like Corey Kispert, with a career 59.8% effective field goal percentage, i.e., someone who reliably tends to hit more than half of their shots, any of the lines going up is really really good, but also kind of tough, while any lines that drop below zero are not necessarily a sign that things have fallen off the rails. There’s just a natural amount of variation in the percentage of shots players hit. That said, I see figures like Bilal’s and Daniel Gafford’s below as pretty good. After each downturn, they seem to have bounce back games. Gafford had an effective field goal percentage of 77.8 in the November 22nd game against the Hornets, dropped down to 50% against the Bucks, but was back up to 75% the next game against the Hawks a day later. This is both reflective of how tough the Bucks are and how bad Charlotte is, but the Hawks are a physical team and Gafford was able to fight through Clint Capela and Onyeka Okongwu to get buckets.

It is too early to say anything about the rebuild. The main value of tuning in to each game these days is to see how guys adjust game to game. It’s weird to say, but my interest is less in any single game than in stretches of games that might present different tests for specific players. It has been great to see guys like Deni and Bilal miss assignments or make bad turnovers one game and seemingly make a point to avoid doing the same thing the next game. It’s a small thing, but it is progress. To quote James Baldwin wildly out of context, “if people did learn from history, history would be very different.” We don’t know whether or not the Wizards are truly learning here, and the data only tell some of the story, but we can already see how game to game shifts are taking place, who is bouncing back from tough match-ups, who is going above their average play, and whose game is still getting worked out.

The Weird Doublespeak of Monumental Sports

Here’s an excerpt from the start an email that Monumental Sports Entertainment sent out after the season opener:

It’s clear the offense and the Washington Wizards’ point production is not going to be an issue this season. Right out of the gates, a team that had 11 newcomers, two joining the starting lineup, dropped 39 points in the first quarter of the season.

Although the Wizards ultimately didn’t get the win in the season opener Wednesday at Indiana, that type of burst and offensive explosiveness is what this version of the team will have in 2023-24.

Reading this, you’d never know the team lost that game by 23 and only had one player with more than five minutes on the court who had a positive +/- (Gallo is back!). There are going to be a lot of downs and a few ups this season. Ted Leonsis and his Monumental Sports Entertainment empire will need to reckon with this sooner rather than later in the content they produce if they want to build any kind of trust with fans. This is particularly true of the long suffering among us who have sat through years of being told there’s a plan, a middle build strategy, or some approach that belies what is actually happening on the court.

The in-season tournament

Is it good? Is it bad? Does it matter? I don’t know! One thing that is clear: the less it is explained the better. Hearing Chris Miller or any other on-air personality read a summary of the set-up and team groupings is like listening to a friend explain the rules to a complicated German board game. Just assume I stopped paying attention 10 seconds in, let’s get to playing and I’ll pick it up as we go.

Only kind of related, but my fringe idea is that there should be a tournament that feeds into the All-Star game. Maybe this could be rolled into the new in-season tournament. Tying the in-season tournament to the All-Star game would raise the stakes for the elite group of players for whom the $500,000 bonus isn’t enough to get them to care, but being an All-Star does matter. Most (/all?) of the league’s top-tier talent have contract clauses that pay out more money if they make it to the All-Star game. Sure, “for the love of the game” and all that, but money talks and for the perennial All-Stars, 500k is a whisper.

Deni’s paint shooting

In last night’s win over Memphis (wooooooo!), Deni Avdija had a moment that I hope we see more of: reading the defense, moving to the low post, and getting a basket in the paint. In his first two seasons under former coach Scott “White Claw” Brooks, Deni was typically stuck on the three-point line, where he looked like a guy waiting for a bus that was never going to arrive. At 6’9 (and maybe with a bit more muscle this season), Deni should be using his size to get under the basket. Yes, he has had a career of embarrassing missed lay-ups, but that is a fixable problem. And I think we’re starting to see progress. Over the past three seasons, Deni has gradually increased the percentage of shots he takes in the paint1:

• 2020-21: 39%

• 2021-22: 45%

• 2022-23: 50%

Indeed, if we look at Deni’s paint shots last season, he tended to have a higher percentage of his shots come in the paint in games the Wizards won. While it’s hard to make a lot of this in a vacuum, I think it points to Coach Wes Unseld Jr. realizing how to better use Deni’s skills and size, as well as Deni building up his game. Sure, some of the increase last season came when there was no longer any hope of a play-in run, but there were still two solid months of basketball where Deni put in good paint work. This is something to watch as WUJ experiments with line-ups and point guard Tyus Jones tries to find the best shot.

Who watches sports?

People don’t need to watch basketball. And even if they watch basketball, they don’t need to watch the Wizards. Still, sports (and in the case of this newsletter, basketball) are, I believe, a net positive for society. Yes, there’s a lot of gross stuff about the NBA [cough, “Visit the FTX lounge at Capital One Arena,” cough], but there is also a lot of good that comes from having a benign place to irrationally pick a side and stick to it through thick and thin and thinner.

Pew Research recently published some results from their American Trends panel survey about the state of sports fandom. Pew reports that most people don’t follow any sport closely, but the striking, though unsurprising, finding to me was that this includes 70 percent of lower income respondents out of their sample of nearly 12,000.

Yes, this makes sense for all of the obvious reasons. Following a sport costs time and money, which are in short supply. I want to dig into this a bit more at some point, but for the Wizards, I would hope that the rebuilding season is exactly the right opportunity to diversify the fan base. I don’t know what this would look like exactly—and the team already does a good job of giving tickets to DCPS and other local institutions and orgs—but now is the time to get people in while the stakes are low. It’s easy to get super depressed about inequality in the United States. And of all the priorities, making Wizards games a cross-class rainbow coalition of G-Wiz stans is probably among the lower ones. As the NBA continues to position itself as a value-driven league, it’s good to know who is and is not part of the conversation.

Wizards City Edition

The Wizards new city edition supposedly leaked. While these uniforms are clearly a way to keep sales going across the NBA even in down years, they provide one important service: a break from the monotony of the Wizards Captain America aesthetic. I get it: we’re the nation’s capital. America. Red, white, and blue. But the choices in using that aesthetic have been so unimaginative. Philly has basically the same colors and somehow has us beat when it comes to uniforms over the years (and also, in actual games). Whether this ends up being our city edition or the team returns to the cherry blossom jerseys from last season, I welcome the break from boilerplate Stars and Stripes.

As the rebuilding season kicks off, my mind turns to migration. To transition. Not necessarily on the court—though that too—but in general. As the poet Gloria Gervitz writes, “we’re always migrating within ourselves.” In her most famous, and only, work Gervitz explores all the ways we’re constantly moving—through memory, personal growth, across space—not just forward but also back.

All of this came to me during a very distracted and distressing weekend. I woke up to push notifications and texts about the attacks in Israel. This is not going to be a post about what is happening or the tragedy that has taken place, is unfolding, and is likely to come. What struck me amid a weekend of constantly refreshing feeds and intense texts was Wizards forward Deni Avdija’s post on Instagram (I’ve pasted it as a photo because I couldn’t figure out how to embed his English translation of the original Hebrew):

There has been a lot made of the growth of international players in the NBA. Despite the photos of Nikola Jokic riding horses in the off season, there’s very little acknowledgment of what and who is left behind. This makes sense on some level; guys are coming here to play basketball and live a dream. In a cut-throat league, any sign of perceived weakness will almost undoubtedly get exploited on the court or online. But this is exactly what made Deni’s post stand out to me.

The NBA, and corporate America generally, have increasingly talked about “talking about” mental health. Everyone wants you to be aware of mental health awareness. We’re told we should make sure we talk to someone. What has happened less often is someone showing vulnerability in real time and saying that their mind is not on the game. Yes, guys cite personal reasons or take time off or will note that they are going through something. But Deni’s post specifically notes that his thoughts are pulled back home. Understandably so.

Migration is a state of flux. In announcing that he’ll be playing for Team USA, Joel Embiid made it clear that you can feel at home in many places and in many ways. In his post, Deni, the NBA’s only Israeli player, showed why there is more to the simple observation that “international players are taking over the league.” Deni didn’t play in the Wizards first pre-season game, a blow-out against overseas visitors, the Cairn Taipans. And who can blame him? Maybe his back really is sore. Maybe he just wasn’t feeling it.

It is easy to miss the humanity of players once they take to the court. What glimpses we do get tend to be guarded, for good reason no doubt. The combination of seeing the same faces a few times a week, social media, articles, and team-approved interviews can provide some guise of understanding who these people are. But we can’t really know. At least not in any real way. That’s not to say that personalities don’t come through, both on and off the court.

This isn’t a post about Israel and Palestine. There’s plenty of that to go around. It’s about recognizing that we should remember each player is a person and each person is work in progress. I mentioned that Gloria Gervitz only published one poem, Migrations, during her life. She worked on that same poem over the course of 44 years and seven different published editions. The work was never really finished. Even when we think we’re done and we’ve let people in, there is always more to say.

Fall has arrived. Depending on where you’re reading this, the weather is either unseasonably warm or disturbingly cold, it’s probably flooding or you’re in a drought, and there’s a good chance some area nearby or down/up wind is on fire. The husk of a functional government we have barely avoided a shutdown. The global mosquito population is growing. Not to get too dramatic, but it’s looking rough out there. Don’t fret. NBA basketball is almost here!

Every year,1 Wizards Points puts together a gentle introduction to the Wizards. Last year’s overview started with the very basics—how many players there are on a typical team, what the roles are—so if you are sharing this with a friend coming in completely cold, that piece is worth a read first. But, if you have a general sense of what the NBA is, the fact that you’re not supposed to kick the basketball, and that the Wizards haven’t been good for the past few years, this is a post to get caught up and hyped for the 2023-24 season.

The two big things you need to know

The key story of this upcoming season is the change in leadership of both the Wizards management and overall basketball operations for Monumental Sports and Entertainment, the team’s ownership group. For the past 20 years, the Wizards general manager—i.e., the person making key staffing decisions, overseeing contracts, basically taking care of the business side of the business—rested in the hands of Ernie Grunfeld (from 2003 through 2019) and then Grunfeld’s #2, Tommy Sheppard. The 2022-23 season ended poorly, Sheppard gave an interview followed by a press conference that can only be described as child-standing-next-to-broken-vase-holding-a-ball saying, “I have no idea what happened to the vase.” More specifically, he graded the Wizards 12th place conference finish as an “incomplete,” telling the Monumental Sports Network (née NBC Sports Washington), “I don’t think it’s a talent equation. I think we need to continue to do better to maximize what we do have and add some strategic pieces.” It is rare that a single moment leads to someone’s downfall, but this was close because it was so objectively out of step with how fans and even some players felt after yet another losing season in DC. Sheppard was let go 10 days after the interview.2

In Sheppard’s place, owner Ted Leonsis brought in Michael Winger as “Monumental Basketball president.” Winger then hired Will Dawkins as general manager of the Wizards. There has been a lot written about both of these guys,3 but the thing to know is that they both come from organizations (the Thunder for both, the Clippers and Cavs for Winger) that have had success building strong organizations and winning.

This is the first key thing to know: the people hiring and firing have changed. They have made it clear that the Wizards are rebuilding and that rebuilding is going to be “a heavy lift,” that it’s going to take time. The second key thing to know is this all a way of saying the Wizards are going to be bad. And being bad is the point for a bunch of reasons, but basically it gives the team the freedom to develop talent and improve its chances of getting better in the future.

Wait, the team is saying they are going to be bad. On purpose. And I should still watch?

Yes! Because the team will be focusing on development and has brought in several new players (more on this below) who will be fun to watch, this will probably be one of the most creative, weird, and, well, memorable seasons in DC that we’ve seen in a while. Depending on your personality, there is also some cachet is getting in on the ground floor of a new team, of being there back when. The secret handshake of many NBA fans is their deep-cut favorite player. Being able to say you really enjoyed Eugene Omoruyi coming off the bench will say more than having to explain you read a random Substack post a friend forwarded, watched a few games, and, “yeah, I guess I kind of like the Wizards now.”

The other reason to watch beyond this broad meta-narrative sketched above that involves team management and the potential (though very real) idea of growth, is the players. This squad is odd. At a time when NBA teams are more talented than at any point in the league’s history, when many people get paid a lot of money to eke out marginal advantages through roster construction, this upcoming Wizards team is poised to be as graceful as a sixth grade growth spurt. The beauty of a rebuild is that everyone has an incentive to push themselves. If things go well—and this is where the coach will be important—it will mean pushing individual skills to advance team cohesion. At worst, we’ll get some highlights interspersed with a lot of broken plays, guys gesturing wildly, and quick cuts back to the announcers’ booth. But in the end, guys are either playing to get traded to a non-rebuilding team, to stay in the league, or get a contract. This is always true, but rarely has leadership made it clear they will be patient with players figuring out their game in real time. This is the “there are no stupid questions” moment for the Wizards. Of course, there will be stupid questions, or moments, which will also be fun to watch. So, yes, you should tune in if only to see a fairly unique organizational and sporting moment in history—a time when it’s ok to learn and fail.

How about the players?

Each NBA team can have 15 players. The Wizards have guaranteed contracts for 17 players. According to our models, 17 is more than 15, so two players will need to be cut before the home opener at the end of October. Here is at least one thing to know about each player currently on contract for the team.

The Bigs

• Taj Gibson: at 38 years old, Taj returns to the Wizards team to make sure their games don’t completely descend into the Puppy Bowl. Something to watch: what line-ups is he in? Last season, the most efficient three-point shooting (75%) and some of the best defense per 100 possessions were on the few Gibson-Avdija-Kispert-Morris (not on the team any more)-Beal (also gone) line-ups. But really, Gibson is on the team to make it ok to go to bed early.

• Mike Muscala: brought over from Boston as part of a three-team trade, Muscala replaces Kristaps Porziņģis as a big man who can shoot and also brings a veteran presence to the team. Seventy percent of his attempts last season were from three, so he will give the Wizards some spacing. Muscala joined Boston last year from Oklahoma City, another team in the midst of a rebuild, so he understands the “very heavy lift.” One thing to watch: whether coach Wes Unseld Jr. will pair Muscala and returning Center-Forward Daniel Gafford as a new version of his at least somewhat effective “twin towers” line-up from last year. Speaking of…

• Daniel Gafford: I like Gaff. He gave us one of the best dunks in all of basketball last year, but he also just seems like a friendly dude who wants to play some ball, go home, and eat Pop-Tarts while watching cartoons and playing video games like any other reasonable person.

  The thing that Gaff started doing a bit more last season was diversifying his game beyond dunks. In the 2022-23 season, one in five of his shot attempts were five feet or farther away from the basket. This is up from about 1 in 10 the season before. I personally would like to see Gaff’s shooting game evolve, but it’s also something to watch now that there is a little more freedom to grow.

Forwards—Other Tall Guys

I’m going to have to really scale down the content of each of these bullets if I want to cover each player. At least one of these players (not Kuzma) will likely be gone by the time the season starts, so don’t get too emotionally attached based on the next few bullets.

• Kyle Kuzma: after signing a multi-year deal over the summer with the Wizards, this will be a season for Kuz to round out his game. He set a personal record last season for lost ball turnovers (52, per basketball-reference.com). This reflects increasing usage, but he’ll likely have even more of the offense on his back this season, so it will be worth seeing if he can help keep the ball in DC’s hands.

• Danilo Gallinari: normally after a trade when the Wizards post on social media, “Welcome [player name]” they use some action shot of the player in uniform. It conveys a sense of, ‘this guy knows how to play basketball!” For Gallinari, the team’s post was him walking to a game in a sport coat, which conveys, “we just traded for someone injured!” One thing to note: he has said he looks forward to getting revenge on Boston. I hope management keeps him on the team for at least long enough to make his revenge dreams come true.

• Xavier Cooks: Cooks looked very jet lagged in the few games he played after coming to the US from Down Under at the end of last season. If he manages to stick around this season the big question will be if he can translate his game to the NBA.

• Anthony Gill: Another veteran presence.4 At this point, the Wizards need some young guys to make trouble just to give Gill something to do.

• Patrick Baldwin Jr.: Second year player coming over from the Warriors. Last year, at age 20, he tried a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for the first time. My main take away is that Patrick Baldwin Jr. was an incredibly stubborn child, teen, and 19-year old given the fact that Big PB&J dominates nearly every rec center, cafeteria, and tired parent’s shopping list. Respect.

• Corey Kispert: I think of him as a shooting guard, NBA.com (where I’m pulling all of these stats unless otherwise noted) says he’s a forward. It doesn’t matter. The key thing to watch is whether his defense can improve—opposing teams had an effective field goal percentage about 1.4% better when Kispert was on the court.

• Deni Avdija: Last season was kind of a mixed bag for Deni, but this is the season he really needs to step up and decide: am I going to compete with Kyle Kuzma’s high-fashion sense or not. Also, if he can work on his shot and movement in transition that would be good, too.

Guards—the fast, passing-shooting guys

• Bilal Coulibaly: the first-round pick from France. The main thing to watch with Coulibaly is literally anything he does since he is a bit of an unknown. The other thing to watch is the inevitable “Bilal visits the monuments for the first time” and “we made Bilal eat McDonalds” team content.

• Johnny Davis: last season’s first round-pick had a few highlights at the end of the season when it was clear the Wizards were no longer trying to win. But you know what? The Wizards are not trying to win (or rather they’re working on “development”), so this might be Davis’s time to prove the haters wrong.5 Watch for whether his defense—he held opponents to 24.5 percent from three—can continue to evolve and if he can get in the paint against starters.

• Landry Shamet: in my previous post I made a Landry Shamet joke expecting that he would be traded shortly after I hit send. Update: he has not been traded. Watch for whether or not he gets traded or if I have to do a follow-up, deep dive post into his game.

• Jordan Poole: DC needs Poole to make games fun with his high velocity play and above average shooting. Poole needs DC to reset his career after a very awkward season with Golden State. This has the makings of either a dramatic 30 for 30 or a heart warming 30 for 30. Watch for whether he can work on becoming more consistent, or if he decides this is just a season to get his shooting stats up en route to a city with taller buildings and/or a beach.

• Delon Wright: last year Delon Wright was the one of the few reliable defenders. So much so that his absence due to injury was seen as a borderline existential risk rather than simply a back-up guard going out. Weirdly, there has been very little published about him this off-season. Wright has the second best three-point percentage (34.5%) of players still on the roster after last season and it was actually a bit of a down year for him. Watch to see if he helps improve the Wizards dismal perimeter shooting.

• Tyus Jones: There is always a question about whether or not “they can really play” when guys come to the Wizards from teams with major stars. Jones joins DC from Memphis, but has a strong track record there and from Minnesota of keeping turnovers low and assists high. Watch to see if Jones can keep those numbers up and have the team experiment with different roles and line-ups.

• Ryan Rollins: Another pick-up from Golden State who spent most of last year, his first in the league, injured. If he sticks around, things can only go up.

So those are the 2023-2024 Wizards. This is less like the Dream Team and more like a reality show, where it’s not clear if Jordan Poole will be the “I’m not here to make friends” contestant or a peacemaker. The other point, which is a bit more abstract is that in rebuilding and giving their players the freedom to learn, the Wizards are letting other teams do the same. Watching the Wizards this year is a chance to also see the future of the league. End of bench second-year players and rookies might get more time against this version of the Wiz kids. More experienced players who have been working on their three might give it a try in DC.

This all feels like…a lot

This is a new direction. The randomness and uncertainty will bring suspense on a team and player level. But suspense makes for great entertainment and occasionally good basketball. At a minimum, any given Wizards game you watch will feature some player stretching their skills and a David-vs-Goliath arc, where Goliath wins 70 percent of the time.

Whether you’re a new fan or a grizzled lifer, this will be a season to pace yourself. There is going to be a ton of inconsistency this season. Some of it will mean performing way above average, some way below the expected average for the team. Let yourself get caught up in the hype, but don’t believe the the hype. Team leadership is building the foundation for a future team and future success that few (and to be real, none) of the players listed above will get to see. All of the text above gets a lot simpler once the teams take to the court. There’s only one thing to do: play.

It was a career night for Hezonja. SB Nation’s Knicks blog, Roasting and Toasting said the game was, “a wonderful example of just what it means to cheer for the orange and blue,” the New York Post called Hezonja a hero, and Bullets Forever described the game as a the Wizards “improving their lottery odds.” A career average 6.9 point scorer, Mario dropped 30 on DC. He ended the night by hitting a corner three with 44 seconds on the clock after the Wizards managed to catch up thanks to a feisty Jeff Green. In the final seconds, after hitting what would be his game turning shot, Hezonja pointed at Green while the fans of this very bad Knicks squad went wild.

Every team has their Mario Hezonja. A guy who shows up and drops 30 on the Wizards for a game that fans will talk about throughout the off-season. It’s the kind of game that can make you reassess a player, to come up with phrases like “Hezsanity,” and believe that, hey, maybe we’re turning things around. As a Wizards fan, these are the games that can make you rethink the whole team.1 These games feel burned into my mind. It’s not just the random Croatians, but stars, too, that seem to suddenly decide they need to pad out their stats a bit when they face the Wiz kids.

It feels like these games happen all the time—some guy you’ve never heard of, who even fans of the guy’s team only kind of know—comes out and has a career night. Thanks to a suggestion from Reddit user z3mcs, I decided to look into how many players have actually scored 30 or more points against the Wizards. The 30-point threshold is kind of arbitrary. You could look at players with career nights against DC or players who passed their career average by double digits or any number of other ways to point out that sometimes (ok, many times) the Wizards really slip on defense. But 30 points is a lot. It’s impressive, but not, like, mind blowing. Elite players do it enough that it’s not something that might lead a story. And yeah, less-than-elite players do it, too. But it’s still more than double the per game league average.2 And it’s a nice way to separate the remarkable games from the 14 point career high, which might be impressive, but isn’t going make reporters and bloggers get emotional.

The 30+ Club

To understand how often guys are making memories against DC, I pulled data from every regular season and playoff game during the Scott Brooks and Wes Unseld Jr. coaching eras.3 While what happened when Randy Whittman or Flip Saunders were coaching has almost certainly shaped my fandom (and probably in some messed up way, my whole world view), it feels less relevant to understanding where the team is today and who is scoring 30 or more points against them.

There are 99 players who have scored 30 or more points 249 times against the Wizards since the 2015-16 season. A lot of guys show up more than once. The top five in the 30+ club is basically an All-NBA squad of the past eight years. DeMar DeRozan has scored 30+ against the Wizards 12 times, LeBron James nine times, and Damian Lillard, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Joel Embiid have each done it eight times. On the other end of the list, there are a lot of recognizable names and a few names that might make you kind of squint and look out to the distance when you see them, trying to dust off some memory of an NCAA tournament from the mid-2010s or a random Wiz game from the pandemic season. Elfrid Payton, Alec Burks, DeMarcus Cousins, Josh Jackson, and Wesley Matthews all dropped 30 on DC once.

Ninety-nine players is a lot. And many of the names that pop-up aren’t surprising. James Harden scoring 35 in a season that he averaged 36 per game is neat, but really just prime-Harden clocking in for the day. The more interesting question is not who has scored a lot of points against the Wizards, but who went above and beyond expectations and scored a lot of points against the Wizards.

To filter out the good Harden games from the, [Googles Landry Shamet] games, I looked at the difference between the 30+ point games and two standard deviations of that player’s point-per-game average for the period under review. From there, I filtered out players where that difference between 2 s.d. and their 30+ point game was less than 15 points. This is basically just a way of asking not only how far from a given player’s average was their 30-point game, but how far from 95 percent of all of their games were they when they shot the lights out against the Wizards?4 You can see Lebron shows up twice: in the 2017-18 season and in the 2021-22 season. Other “top 75” guys like Steph Curry and Anthony Davis also show up, but this really highlights the mid-tier, everyday hero type of players that breakout against DC.

This might all sound bad, but there were 723 players who faced up against the Wizards over the past eight years and didn’t score a single point. Also, while 99 players dropped 30 or more points over that time, nearly 6,000 scored less, with an overall average of 10.6 points per game.5 On the opposite end of the court, the Wizards have had 232 games where a player scored 30 or more points, with 15 different players claiming this completely arbitrary and incredibly difficult achievement. Bradley Beal alone dropped 30 or more points 147 times. John Wall did it 29 times. And the people’s hero, Ish Smith, did it once against Denver, go figure.

Scoring When It Counts?

The beauty of the NBA is that any given game can be a true battle, a night of incredible athletic feats, and a reminder of why we watch. The reality of the NBA is that not every game is equal across an 82-game schedule. There is definitely an analytical way to assess game value, but I just decided to take a look at where in the season games fell when players hit 30+ points to see if there was any pattern.

As shown in the figure below, we see a general peak at game 33, which, aside from the schedule-skewed 2020-21 season, has fallen between December 23rd and January 6th,6 or what I call, “the battling time.” This period includes the build-up to the Christmas Day game, typically the day that garners the highest ratings pre-Playoffs, and continues up through the All-Star break in mid-February. The ten players who all went off on game 33 are a who’s who of scoring lots of points—LeBron, DeMar DeRozan, Kyrie Irving, Paul George (twice), Joel Embiid (twice), Devin Booker, and Julius Randle, and Kawhi Leonard.

The game where a player scored the most points against the Wizards relative to their season average took place right in the lead up to the All-Star break: the Nets Cam Thomas, who averaged 10.6 points per game last season, scored 44 points in 29 minutes in a February 4th game.7 The second most points relative to a season average came from Kemba Walker in game 32 on December 23, 2021. This was a season where Kemba averaged 11.6 points per game, but also scored 44 points against the Wizards. Finally, we have James Harden and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. It’s easy to forget how good prime Harden was, but both him and SGA have had seasons where their 30 point showing against the Wizards was actually below their season average. When we look at an individual player-level, there is less of a clear arc to the season—guys are dropping 30+ points no matter the time of year.

It’s a Team Sport

One of the narratives of the 2022-23 season was the fact that scoring seemed to have increased. There was some pearl clutching commentary about this being a sign of defense no longer mattering, but mostly analysts seemed genuinely intrigued and perplexed, like meteorologists tracking snow in April. If there’s anything to take away from looking at massive scoring against the Wizards it’s that high points per game are a general feature of the modern game.8 Maybe they happened more frequently last season, but they’ve been happening and they will happen again this season. Defense hasn’t been a skill that has really defined the past eight years of Wizards basketball; the team has never ranked above 15th in defensive rating during this time. If there’s a simple takeaway for the upcoming season, it’s that it’s never too late to focus on stopping the other team from scoring.

The more important point here, though, is that guys like Embiid are going to get their numbers in any given game. But the risk is less in elite scorers being elite than in Cam Thomas looking like an elite scorer. Players who average 15 points or less a game are good, solid NBA players, but they ideally shouldn’t swing games dramatically. The Wizards have only won 38 percent of the games where these players, guys like Coby White and CJ Miles, score 30 or more points. A good way to look at the next phase of the Wes Unseld Jr. Wizards is whether or not they can shift that percentage.

Mario Hezonja doesn’t play for the Knicks any more. After his season ending high point against the Wizards, he signed as a free agent to Portland and then, a year after that, was out of the league. In reading through old off-season write-ups of his career, the phrase used most frequently to describe his Knicks tenure is “inconsistent.” There are players who have made long careers out of reliably averaging 10 points a game. Those are not players I’d consider inconsistent. Inconsistent is averaging 10 points by dropping 30 and then going scoreless for the next two games. Sure, sometimes inconsistent means going above and beyond your average. We all have days where everything’s coming up for us, but most of the time—aside from the truly exceptional among us—we’re all just doing our best, which is, honestly, just kind of okay. And that’s okay! For the Wizards, the goal is to keep the 10-point players at 10-points. We’re in a golden age of scoring, but DC doesn’t need to usher in the next “Hezsanity.”