A guide to the Washington Wizards
Wiz 101 for new and returning fans
Every four years the World Cup happens and every four years I have to Google, “how do you play soccer?” The thing is, much of the excitement around team sports is in the narrative of each game and the conflict that narrative creates. Just knowing what fouls are or how points are scored gives you enough to know what’s going on in your local pickup game, but isn’t necessarily going to make following a team or even a single game that interesting. This is especially true if that team is the Wizards and no single game on its own is high stakes.
This post is not for people who already know about the Wizards. Instead, this is a post existing fans (i.e., you, Wizards Points subscriber) can share with their grandmother, boyfriend, neighbor, whomever to get them to watch basketball with you. I’m going to try to keep this as straight forward as possible and without getting bogged down in the long, frustrating history of the Wizards. The goal here is to save your friend/family/enemy half an hour looking through random articles and YouTube videos. So, welcome, new Wizards viewer! This pamphlet from the Simpsons could lead any intro to everyone’s favorite DC-based NBA team. Just kidding! Being a Wizards fan will be an experience unlike any other.
This post is going to gloss over a lot of detail and nuance. I’m sure most fans will take issue with this or that description, but I’ve tried to make this as general as possible with the goal of getting someone interested in the Wizards. Let’s move to the explainer!
A Gentle Introduction to the Wizards
What are the Washington Wizards? Why…Wizards?
The Washington Wizards are an NBA basketball team that plays at Capital One Arena in Washington D.C. Fans “voted”1 on the name after the former owner decided it was time to move on from the “Washington Bullets,” which is what the team was called from 1974 to 1997. The other options were Dragons, Express, Stallions, or Sea Dogs. I was a kid at the time, but apparently DC was a much more fantastical place in the 90s.
Basketball?
Ok, right, where to start? Each of the 30 NBA teams has five players on the court at a time and 15 players on their team roster. The goal is to put a ball into a hoop 10 feet off the ground. Teams get two points each time they do this. If someone breaks a rule, it’s called a foul,2 and depending on how that rule breaking happens, the opposing team gets foul shots, which are worth one point each. The Wizards averaged 108.6 points per game last season per basketball-reference.com.
108 points! That sounds like a lot.
The league average last season was 110.6 points per game, which is probably more or less what you can expect this year, too. So, the Wizards were in the lower tier as far as points scoring. But that was last season. New season, new team, new average. Also, scoring points isn’t the only thing that matters. The Golden State Warriors averaged 111 points per game, which puts them right in the middle of the league, and they won the championship.
Ok, so the five players, what do I need to know about them?
The tallest guy on the team usually plays the center position, which means he stands near the basket and tries to keep opponents from getting close to it for an easy shot. Kristaps Porziņģis and Daniel Gafford play center for the Wizards. Other players like Vernon Carey Jr. and Taj Gibson are also likely to show up in that spot. Gafford and Porziņģis represent the two main styles of play to watch for. Without going down memory lane, centers used mostly be tall guys who couldn’t shoot the ball. At some point, coaches realized it might be good if maybe they could shoot. Porziņģis is the quintessential new style center. He has a deceptively good shot and can move with the ball really well for someone who is 7-3. Gafford, on the other hand, is not great at shooting, but he is great at jumping, a good skill for the sport generally and especially good if you want to block opponents’ shots or catch the ball from your teammates and drop it in the basket. One thing to watch this season is how the Wizards balance these two talented centers in different situations. Come for the dunks, stay for the continual amazement about how tall these guys are.
There’s another set of positions that are called guards. These tend to be on the opposite end of the skills-size spectrum as centers in that they are traditionally smaller and faster, and also decent at shooting. The point guard position typically helps run the offense—setting up plays, passing the ball—while the shooting guard is focused on scoring. Key players to watch are Bradley Beal, who just signed a five-year 251 million dollar contract, Monte Morris, who joins the Wizards from Denver, and Johnny Davis, their first-round draft pick. Morris is known for his defense, which is something the Wizards have struggled with over the past few years. Davis is the rookie, so he’d always need to prove himself, but early struggles over the summer and in pre-season games have made fans feel stressed for him and themselves and the team (so much stress) about whether or not he’ll ever amount to anything in this life. It seems a little too soon to make any conclusions about Davis because, to state the obvious, the season hasn’t started, but his development will be an ongoing topic of debate. Come for the fast plays and fancy dribbling, stay for the fast plays and fancy dribbling.
Everyone else on the team plays the forward position, which kind of does everything. Even some of the guys I already mentioned, like the two centers, are also considered forwards. It’s confusing and there has been a lot of discussion about whether we even really have positions in the NBA anymore. Traditional forwards on the team, like Rui Hachimura, Kyle Kuzma, and Deni Avdija, tend to be tall, but not as tall as the centers, good at shooting, and good at defense. Lebron James generally plays forward, you may know him as the actor from Space Jam 2, but he’s also an NBA player. Come for the last minute shots that win the game, stay for the steals, blocks, and all around amazing athleticism.
That was a lot. What else should I know?
Let’s take a break and look at Daniel Gafford pretending to play guitar, a thing he does a lot.
I’ve heard the Wizards are bad. Why should I watch?
It’s tough to respond to this without getting philosophical. The Wizards are a perpetual underdog. They are often their own worst enemies. They can defy the rules of physics and sports in both the best ways and worst ways. If you like the scrappy upstarts, rejects, and n’er do wells of the world, this is the team for you. Society pays a lot of lip serve to the straight-A students, the exceptional role models. But what about the C students? We’re in awe of Harvard acceptances, but rarely recognize the kid who barely makes into the local college and then ends up doing kind of ok there. If you just want to watch a team win over and over, the Wizards are not your team. The secret to teams like the Wizards is that when expectations are low, when everyone—fickle fans, the media, other teams—have written you off, there’s no where to go but up. It also means any game can be a night to make a statement, to garner attention, to get some respect.
Right. So what else?
I’ll close with some advice. The Washington Wizards are kind of like the tv show someone tells you to check out, but then quickly adds that things don’t really pick up until episode eight. This isn’t to say that any one game is going to be boring, but the fun of watching a team like the Wizards is in getting to see them evolve. Here are a few key narratives to watch this season:
How will Deni Avdija and Rui Hachimura do? Rui and Deni have had flashes of great play over their first few seasons in the NBA. The general take on Rui is that he’s good on offense, bad at defense, while it’s the opposite for Deni (good at defense, bad at offense). This will be Rui’s fourth season and Deni’s third. They have both missed significant chunks of their time in the NBA due to injury, but there’s a general sense that if these ugly ducklings are going to turn into swans, it should happen in the next season or so. The thing is, even ugly ducklings grow up to be regular looking ducks and that might be good enough to push the Wizards into competitive territory.
Is Coach Wes Unseld Jr. the right man for the job? Last season was Coach Wes Unseld Jr.’s first season as a head coach. There are any number of reasons he had limited success—Covid, players not liking each other, a supposedly confusing approach to defense—but with one full season on the books, it’s time to see if WUJ (as he’s known among fans) can coach around and through these challenges. As former Wizards beat writer Fred Katz has noted many times, the main job of a head coach is to manage people, not just to draw up plays (though WUJ and a legion of assistants also do that).
Bradley Beal is rich(er). Beal signed a huge, controversial contract after leaving last season early to have wrist surgery. I don’t think anyone who isn’t already a household name (and Beal is not) could live up to the expectations that come with a quarter of a billion dollars. Beal needs to show fans and the team that it was worth mortgaging the future to make him happy. What “worth mortgaging the future” means is up for debate, but at a minimum it involves scoring a lot of points or winning a lot of games or, ideally, both of those things.
What will Kuzma wear? Last season forward Kyle Kuzma took the world by storm with an extra long sleeved sweater. What we he do this season? Extra long pants? An extra short sleeved sweater? Whatever it is, he’ll look good and all of us still wearing regular sleeved sweaters can enjoy the ride.
Those some of the more Wizards-specific points to watch. It will be fun to see how the new guys on the team fit in with more established players, to watch if the team makes any mid-season trades, whether or not the mascot G-Wiz comes up with new antics, and how the team will deal with injuries, which are already piling up. The first game of the regular season is on Wednesday, October 19th against the not so great Indiana Pacers. When no single game has high stakes, they all kind of matter because each game is a chance to push against the subtle grind of low expectations. And of course, if this post didn’t convince you, we’ll always have this:
The final results of this vote were never released as far as I know. There’s some version of the multiverse where people are reading Stallions Points or complaining about another mediocre Express season.
It’s a bit more complicated than this, but if you really want to get into the weeds, check out the official rules.