Oh shoot. Taking a look at the Wizards shot data
I am always a little skeptical of adults who have heroes. It is great to find someone inspiring or have a mentor or want to follow an example. But people are complicated and full of contradictions. If Gandhi were around today, I’m sure there would be times, after a long day of peacemaking, where he’d come back to his apartment and hit the “close door” button in the elevator as an old lady with a walker and four grocery bags approached. No one is perfect. So, here we are with the Wizards. They are still doing well in the rankings, but reality has set in. This doesn’t mean the team is any less inspiring. I still feel fired up about the season and we’re approaching December. December! It’s hard to feel fired up about anything when the sun sets at 4:55PM. Some of the Wizards issues that were easy to look past early on are on full display. Notably, their shooting.
You have probably seen the stats. The Wizards are ranked 25th in three-point percentage, with a success rate beyond the arc of about 33%. Bradley Beal hasn’t really shot well from distance at all, though I think it’s worth giving him a bit of grace given his recent family loss.1 Bertans has been injured (and I’m not holding out hope for him improving that much over last season). Kuzma, KCP, and Spencer Dinwiddie have all had moments where they have landed a shot from 24 feet back, which turned things around or energized the offense. It’s easy to overweight these moments relative to the many, many missed shots.
Following the example of the great Owen Phillips, I decided to take a look at the Wizards shooting. I used code Owen posted on his (sadly) now defunct F5 Substack to see where the Wizards and their opponents have shot from over the first 15 games. Owen’s code looks at how teams compare to the league average (and you can create a similar graph on the NBA stats page, too). The Wizards are actually shooting about three percent above the current league average in the paint. Montrezl Harrell is leading the league in offensive rating, so that’s going to show up somewhere. But the team is at or well below league average pretty much everywhere else. It seems too early to really think about league averages, though, so I decided to check out shots by game.
Wizards shot placement
As you can see in the figure, the Wizards are doing a sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe not so good job spacing the floor and avoiding the supposedly dreaded mid-range jumper.
A few games stand out to me. For one, the loss against the Hawks during the Wizards second match-up. There were very few shots from the left side of the court and not much from midrange. The wins against the Pacers and Celtics included a lot of mid-range shooting too. I don’t see this as a bad thing on its own. Overall, the data align more or less with what I feel like I have seen so far this season. Occasionally good ball movement along the perimeter, with a ton of action in the paint.
Other teams’ shooting
The beauty having this data is we can also see where opponents shot the ball. I created the same figure above, but only plotted opponents’ shots. One thing that stands out (and also aligns with my general sense of Wes Unseld Jr.’s defense) is that teams are getting pushed to mid-range in some of the most memorable wins. The second game against the Celtics stands out. You can also see that the games against the Grizzlies and Bucks featured pretty strong defense from the three point line, with shots getting taken, but neither team hitting them. Memphis threw up 31 shots from three, but only hit six of them and had an effective field goal rating of .385. While the Bucks were held to .447 effective field goal rating. The recent game against Miami was not a fun loss, but notably the Wizards shot 49% to Miami’s 50% from the field and actually had a better three-point percentage (41.7% to 38.5%). The placement of shots for Miami also looks similar to the Wizards shown above, though Miami took more shots from mid-range.
While this post is about the Wizards shooting, I think maybe it’s actually about the Wizards defense and ball movement. Even in games where opponents were limited in their shooting, the Wizards have seen double digit turnovers. For a hobbled Milwaukee, that might be ok when you’re hitting 41 percent of your threes. Clearly, for a team like Miami, the Wizards can’t afford to lose the ball, even if both teams are shooting at similar rates.2
The Wizards will work through their shooting woes from three. It’s easy to focus on the near-term highs and lows. Looking at the data, the Wizards shooting for the games they have lost is not dramatically different from the games they won. The team will continue to have inspiring moments and heroic victories. The loses, though, help point out that everyone, and every team, has their off moments.
One thing fans really don’t appreciate is how quickly players come back after major life changes. Yeah, these guys are getting paid tons of money, but they are still people. I find it tough to focus at work when stuff way more trivial than the loss of a loved one happens, but we expect players to come back or even play through these events.
This is very much a point based on stats. From the eye test, though, I didn’t feel like that Miami game was ever really close after the first half.