Despite it all, Wizards basketball is back! The first two games of the season have been a nice summary of what we can probably expect over the coming months: a defenseless blowout and a wonderful display of what teamwork looks like, respectively. This is not a newsletter dedicated to recaps and reactions. Right now, my reactions are mostly, a mix of cringe face and “wooooo!” BUT, here at Wizards Points, we have a running list of potential newsletter ideas, very few of which ever make it to print due to not writing down the list and wanting to maintain interpersonal relationships. So, this post is just a few of those half-baked ideas. Some of them could turn into longer pieces at some point in the future, but mostly these are things I’ve thought about more than once and felt like sharing. Enjoy!
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.
Nice article, I loved the stats and graphs, it really sent it home.
Now that the official photos are out, I’m warming up to this City Edition jersey, but I’m yet to see it worn by the Wizards whenever their qualifying home game is...