Kristaps Porziņģis is making the Wizards fun
The Unicorn really does do it all
If you had the misfortune opportunity to travel over the past few months, you may have encountered ads for visiting DC. It’s always kind of weird to run into these for a place you know. It’s probably just the camera work, but it sort of feels like everyone is either dancing or about to dance or just about to fall over from too much dancing-like energy. This message—visit “DC not Washington”—is undercut by the Washington.org url at the end, but the the intent is clear: DC is FUN!
The thing is, there is a difference between FUN and fun. The people in the tourism ad are all having FUN no matter where they are. On the other hand, if you actually go to the National Gallery of Art on a weekday, you’ll probably have fun, but I’m not sure it will be FUN. Avatar 2 is FUN, Avatar: the Last Airbender is fun. Going out with friends in Gallery Place is FUN, going out to the galleries there is fun. Steph Curry is FUN, Kawhi Leonard is fun. Los Angeles is FUN, with apologies to the propagandists who put together that slick video, DC is fun. FUN is the stuff of teen movies, fun is the stuff of actually being a teen. One isn’t better than the other and they aren’t mutually exclusive, but FUN and fun are two different things.
Kristaps Porziņģis, as the lone unicorn on the Wizards, is both FUN and fun. But there is one part of his game, of the whole game of basketball in the NBA, that he excels at, which is not fun or FUN: drawing fouls. This is an area that is key to any team’s success and is probably the least entertaining part of the sport. So let’s dig in!
The Art and Science of Fouling
Drawing fouls is not as simple as just flopping to get refs to notice you. Bradley Beal has historically been kind of bad at getting to the foul line despite a tendency to argue with the refs after every lay-up.1 Fouls are subjective, yes. But they also show that a player is aware of his body and how to use it, that a player understands the game and the weaknesses of a defender. And for defenders, fouls show how well they know their personnel. This is the reason Daniel Gafford has the highest shooting foul rate on the team, i.e. fouls made as a percentage of all shots made, at 22.8% but one of the worst free throw percentage rates on the team, i.e., how many of his foul shots he actually hits, at 60.8%. This is the rationale behind “Hack-a-Shaq”: just foul the guy who can’t make it from the charity stripe because you might block the shot he’s going for, end up not giving up points (if the players misses), and get the possession of the ball.
Among starting bigs, only Denver’s Nikola Jokic and the 76ers Joel Embiid are better at drawing fouls on the floor than KP.2 The fouls most people notice, though, are shooting fouls, where The Unicorn ranks ninth overall on the season among bigs who have played at least 500 minutes with a shooting foul percentage of 15.8%. Giannis Antetokounmpo leads among bigs in this group (at least 500 min.) with fouls drawn on 26.3% of his shots through December 31st. Notably, only 25.3% of KP’s fouls drawn are on And-1s, which is low for both the team and his position.3 So what does this stats dump mean?
Kristaps Porziņģis is elite among starting bigs when it comes to working defenses to his advantage. Fouls are frustrating for opposing players. Porziņģis knows how to draw fouls in-game and, to a lesser extent, while shooting. With an average free throw percentage of around 80 percent he is also making good on these opportunities at a respectable-but-still-with-room-to-grow rate. While his pick-and-pop game tends to be more eye catching, drawing fouls is an important part of his success in wearing down defenses. The figure below shows just how much of the work KP is doing on this front. Porziņģis accounts for 44.4% of all fouls drawn on average per game among the starters. If we expand this out to see how KP compares to the team overall, he still draws 32% of all fouls on average so far this season.
I sourced the data from this post via the NBA API4 and according to that, Porziņģis has drawn 123 more fouls than the next highest guy on the team, Kyle Kuzma (211 to 88). This is so high that I had to double check it. There are any number of reasons for this. Porziņģis has the highest usage rate on the team (i.e., how many of the team’s plays a player used while he was on the floor) at 27.2, but Beal comes in at a close second with a usage rate of 27% and Kuzma is ranked third right now in usage rate with 26.5%. As noted earlier, Beal has gotten better at drawing shooting fouls, but injuries and illness make his progress difficult to assess.
Porziņģis’s role as a big on the team and his somewhat unique style of play is important here. His battles in the paint and his tendency to shoot from mid-range where 44% of his shots have been taken so far this season mean he is setting himself up to draw fouls.
The Wizards are no strangers to tall Latvians and Latvians who can sometimes hit shots, but KP is both and so much more. His foul drawing (like in this play against Milwaukee last night, which resulted in Serge Ibaka getting pulled) shows he knows the game, understands the weaknesses of the guy guarding him, and can exploit his size in a way that goes beyond just being 7’3.
The Wizards are 🎉
The thing that the DC video gets wrong is that good times don’t all look the same. Trying to make everything look FUN ends up being kind of unconvincing because everyone is having a very generic enjoyable moment. Memorable moments are memorable because they aren’t generic. The fact that you might go to the National Gallery of Art on Wild Tourist Club Night™ or go and just look at some art you’ve never seen is what makes it a place worth visiting. This is how fouls are. Fouls are one of the most subjective parts of basketball. As annoying as it can be to watch Deni or Gafford or, yes, KP get called on some ya-gotta-be-kidding-me foul, it introduces randomness into the game (it’s also pretty great to see an AND-1 call).
Is drawing fouls fun? No. Is it FUN? Not at all. But the Wizards need all of the tools available to get under the skin of opponents. Would actual defense—shot blocking, closing out—help? Sure. Drawing fouls is not a strong suit of the team: they’re ranked 26th on a per game basis and 20th for total fouls drawn per nba.com. This is an area where they can improve. Having Kristaps Porziņģis on the team has made pretty much every game worth watching because of his ability to shift the momentum on offense and keep things active on defense.5 The pairing of KP with Gafford to start is also a way for the Wizards and Coach Wes Unseld Jr. to continue bugging opponents while controlling the pace of game a bit.
The caricature of the modern NBA is that it’s all threes and dunks. Anyone who actually watches the league, but especially Wizards fans, know this is far from the truth and ignores what makes the games more than just a live action version of NBA 2K. Any given Wizards game can go from meh to fun to FUN and back in a single possession. It’s what makes the team frustrating and fascinating.
People at parties or at my office (sometimes called “friends” and “coworkers”) occasionally say things like, “DC is boring” or “how can you watch the Wizards?” I don’t think they realize that in my mind these two things are connected and also show they don’t get it. Is DC FUN? It can be! Are the Wizards a bad basketball team? Probably! But the old person in me really believes you make your own fun. Maybe if the team won more I wouldn’t be as interested in where players like Porziņģis are putting their elbows. There’s a strong case that KP should be an All-Star this year. He’s top 20 in blocks, points, rebounds, and a bunch of other fun categories. But the whole point of diving into the not fun part of the game is to make it clear that this is also makes the game fun. You wouldn’t have DC without Washington. You don’t get KP the All-Star without KP the guy drawing fouls, forcing time outs, and making coaches change their line-ups. This isn’t the stuff of hype montages, but it can mean the difference between just another winter night in the District of Columbia and something to remember.
Notably, Beal has been getting to the line more this season with a 12% shooting foul rate and a 1.8% floor fouled percentage, which are 87th and 90th percentile respectively for guards per Cleaning the Glass.
Nikola Jokic and Joel Embiid each have a fouls floor percentage of 2.6%, Sengun is tied with Porzingis at 2.3% per Cleaning the Glass.
Taking this further, KP actually ranks 6th overall across all positions for total personal fouls drawn per nba.com.
There are a bunch of other players that also make this season really fun—Goodwin, Wright, Kuzma are a few of my current favorites.