If the Wizards are the ones working so hard, why am I so tired?
Some brief thoughts on coaching and lineups
You’re on a rock moving through space at 67,000 miles per hour. The rock itself is in a system of other rocks moving within a huge collection of dust, gas, many other rocks, and many, many other systems spinning around at 220 kilometers per second. At some point, amidst all this movement, some people realized they could move electrical currents through tiny filaments, which led to moving electrical currents through even smaller circuits, which led to people realizing they could move information through these same circuits. This changed the way people lived, worked, loved, died. Cities changed. Societies changed. Temperatures are now rising to new highs and extreme lows. Fear, greed, shame, hate take on new, yet familiar forms. The rock keeps moving through space. And amidst this constant whir, the never ending gyre, there’s one question that rings out through all of the circuits and bits and space dust into the ever expanding void: what is going on with Wes Unseld Jr.?
The Wizards coach was largely given a free pass on judgement last season. It was his first time in a head coach role. The massive trade that sent Russell Westbrook to the Lakers brought in a new set of players and personalities who also had to adjust to life in DC. And the usual challenges of NBA basketball in 2022—Covid-19, injuries, and the need to take a break—meant who counted as “the team” varied from week-to-week. So, he had a tough time and it showed on the court.
The grace and generosity extended at the end of last season seems to have run out if you have been on Wizards Twitter over the past two days. I wouldn’t recommend diving into NBA Twitter (it’s pretty bleak), but vocal fans are quickly souring on WUJ. It has only been 10 games, but this season feels more like a continuation of last year’s losing record than a fresh start. The only game that has felt like a sure win was the season opener. The other three wins seemed like they could have slipped away at any moment.
When a player misses an uncontested layup or dunk, which Wizards players do with a weird frequency, I put that on the player. I don’t even know what a coach would do in that situation. Recommend the player pass up the opportunity for easy points to go for a tougher shot? When opposing teams are scoring 116 points per 100 possession, which puts the Wizards at 26th place in points per 100 possessions nine games into the season, per Cleaning the Glass, there’s something beyond the players going on.1
A coach can do any number of things to lead a team to victory. There will always be otherworldly talents, guys like Kevin Durant or Michael Jordan, that less talented players have to defend. But this is exactly where coaching comes in. What are the pieces that you can assemble to exploit the weaknesses of great players and level the playing field? A good coach can set up the court so that players can make the best choices under the constraints they face from the other team.
The most obvious in-game version of this is playing time. I compiled play-by-play data for the first nine games to see who was on the court when to get a sense of how WUJ’s choices have evolved over the first month of play.2 The figure below shows all of the games combined with players ordered by their overall total minutes so far this season.
Like a lot of stats, this more or less shows what fans already know. Beal is at the top, which is not surprising as the franchise player (or “franchise player” if you’re feeling kinda salty about his contract3). You can also see where players on the second unit do or don’t overlap with starters.4
The original starting unit of Monte Morris, Beal, Deni Avdija, Kyle Kuzma, and Kristaps Porziņģis remains the strongest line-up and most frequently used. This group started the first six games, with a record of 3-3, and scored 128.1 points per 100 possession while holding opponents to 106.9 points per 100. And then things changed.
Game 7 started with Deni on the bench and Anthony Gill in the starting line-up. This, on its own is not a bad thing. At 6’8, Gill provides size similar to Avdija’s 6’9 height, with a better career effective field goal percentage (60.4% to Deni’s 50.1%), but Deni’s defense is overall considered better both statistically and by the eye test.5 Opposing teams tended to shoot worse last season when Deni was on the court (.527 eFG%) compared to when he was off (.531 eFG%). With Gill, it was the opposite: other teams shot better while Gill was on the court (.520 while Gill was off to .530 while on). I’ve written before about how Gill has been tough to assess because his role has largely been as an end of bench, end of game player.
There were various reasons given for starting Gill. WUJ told The Junkies he “wanted to try something different,” while in a post-game interview after a loss to the Celtics he said Deni didn’t “play the way we wanted him to.” "Wanting to try something different” is what you say when you hear from HR when they don’t hire you because they decided to hire the VP’s cousin. It’s a curious rationale given that WUJ has not defined his limited tenure in DC through innovation and experimentation. If anything it has been the opposite. Players complained early on last season that his various playbook schemes were too complicated and that he wasn’t adapting to help them along. Bradley Beal is very good at scoring points but his decision making and even his ability to score points are so limited at times that it seems like it would be worth trying out different ways of using his skills. There are young players, like Jordan Goodwin, who have shown flashes of strong defense and competent passing and who might throw off opposing defenses if given more minutes. There are any number of try somethings different that WUJ could go with on this team. The figure above shows pretty consistent use of the same set of players game-to-game.
Still, the Gill starting line-up is the best line-up on a point-per-possession basis after accounting for minutes played per Cleaning the Glass, with 131.6 points per 100 possessions. At times, though, the Gill lineup has made opposing teams look like five Steph Currys going up against five people killing time at the gym while their kids take swim lessons. Opposing teams shot 40% from the three with the original starters and 44.7% against the Gill line-up. Notably, though, the newer Gill line-up has had opponents shooting 45.5% on corner threes compared to only 14.3% against the original, Deni-included line-up based on data I sourced from Cleaning the Glass.
The issues with WUJ are bigger than Deni or Gill. I don’t actually think it’s productive to get into a ‘this player or that player starting’ debate because ideally it should depend on the opponent match-up when you have set of players whose skills are so imbalanced. And I know I just dropped several stats filled paragraphs comparing Deni and Gill and then said we shouldn’t compare them. This is simply an example of making changes that don’t seem to change much on the court. Coach Unseld Jr.’s main tendency seems to be to revert to certain players and plays regardless of what is happening. You can also see this clearly in Rui Hachimura’s minutes, which are starting to take on a pretty clear pattern in the data. My main point after looking at these line-ups is that I wish WUJ would read the room a bit better. Move guys off the court when they’re cold and mix things up a bit more.
Watching WUJ coach this year, I don’t feel like the challenges come down to this player vs. that player. Instead, the issue is theory vs. reality. In theory, throwing double teams at Kevin Durant will force him to give up the ball to a less skilled teammate. In reality, Durant got 11 assists and made Yuta Watanabe and Royce O’Neale look like stars. And if you don’t know who either of those players are, that’s fine and also kind of the point. In theory, if you have a strong game plan, you can bring it to your players and they’ll implement it and you’ll win games. In practice, if they say it’s confusing and don’t seem to be able to guard shots from the three point line or in the paint or between the three point line and the paint, which is to say, on the basketball court, then the strong game plan is beside the point, it’s not for this team.
There are any number of ways to coach a basketball team. Any number of questions fans can ask. The biggest issues—why a given player comes in or out during a game even if it doesn’t seem warranted—are usually the most obvious. Fans don’t always have full information on what goes into a given decision. Not every choice should be or can be data driven. But there is one thing we all have access to, game in and game out, one data point every team lives with that should inform WUJ’s choices and how he adapts (if he adapts at all): the scoreboard.
I wrote this before Sunday night’s game, but the loss against Memphis most likely didn’t push stats like this in a better direction.
All stats are from basketball-reference.com unless otherwise noted.
For the record, I am feeling kinda of salty about his contract right now. But it was a long time coming so I resigned myself to it like a year ago.
According to 538’s RAPTOR metric, Deni is a +1.7, meaning he improves the teams defense by about 1.7 points per 100 possessions, while Gill is a -2.3.