The Wizards are a very reliable basketball team
And that's part of the problem
There is a specter haunting the Washington Wizards. It’s not some advanced stat or contract issue or organizational challenge. It is consistently there. If you have had the privilege of watching more than two quarters of Wizards basketball, you have seen it. There are any number of ways to describe it, but let’s just call it like it is: inconsistency.
The team starts off hitting big shots, making the right moves. And then. And then something happens. Like a one-hit wonder who just can’t seem to find the right chords that put them on the charts last summer, the Wizards seem to be fumbling once they get 13 minutes into any given game. Or at least that’s how it seems. In this post, I wanted to take a look at the Wizards quarter-by-quarter numbers and reflect on what it means for the team fighting for the tenth-seed.
Kristaps Porziņģis stands out
If the Wizards consistency issues had a mascot it would be a 7’3 Latvian unicorn. Kristaps Porziņģis stands out because he will score 18 points in the first quarter and finish the game with 24 points. You can see what this looks like in the figure below. I pulled true shooting percentage, which is basically how many shots a player made given the number of shots they took, but accounts for free throws and the fact that three pointers count for more than two pointers. I’m not really interested in debating advanced stats vs. box score stats, but the trend is the same if you look at simple field goal percentage. I think this is a good way to look at average quarter-to-quarter performance for someone like KP because even when he isn’t hitting shots or getting big minutes, he tends to get to the foul line a lot.
You can see that this looks like Charlie Brown’s shirt, when we probably want shooting that looks more like his mouth (e.g., : \ ). It is also clear that KP’s ups and downs have been a season long issue. Some of this is on Coach Wes Unseld Jr., who tends to sit Porziņģis in the second and fourth quarters.
But it’s easy to pick on Porziņģis. For one, he is very tall. Just from a “human watching a game” perspective, it’s much more obvious when the seven footer who tends to get a lot of touches isn’t hitting his shots.1 There is also a question of how much consistency to expect from any player, especially one having as good a season as Kristaps. As NBC Sports’s Chase Hughes has noted, “Expecting Porzingis to maintain the same production from the first quarter on might be a bit unfair when you extrapolate the numbers. If he averaged 8.1 points in every quarter, that would break out to 32.4 points per game on the season.”
If this were just one player, the team’s inconsistency would be easy to coach around. The team’s net rating (i.e., how good offense is to how good their defense is) follows a similar trend. This isn’t just a Porziņģis issue. So who else is having second quarter struggles?
Up and Down, Down and Up
Working a full day isn’t easy. I was just congratulating myself on Friday for not having an afternoon coffee because it can feel like a struggle to get through eight hours looking at a computer. Running up and down a basketball court, often after a long flight and a night of sleep in a bed that isn’t yours requires a level of focus and wherewithal that few of us will ever be able to muster. This is why most teams (but not all, and often not the Wizards) are built to distribute play time. Ideally, you want your bench to pick up where your starters left off. That’s what the Wizards do right? Right?
A few things stand out to me:
Beal’s quarter to quarter variation is pretty low.2 He's less in Charlie Brown shirt territory and more in cartoon character hairline territory, this is good.
Corey Kispert is a better second and fourth quarter shooter. I did a little work to look into this and his percentages, even after accounting for minutes, are better, on average, before the half and at the end of games. This is exactly what you want out of a player like Kispert coming off the bench. Delon Wright is also coming to save the day, it seems.
Delon Wright and Deni Avdija were making some cool sweaters back in October and December.
Kyle Kuzma and Kristaps Porziņģis have pretty similar trends. Both have had months where they did better in the second quarter (December for Porziņģis, February for Kuzma), but KP’s lows are much higher than Kyle Kuzma’s. I realize this comes with all of the usual caveats when comparing players who serve different roles, have different styles of play, and get buckets in a slightly different fashion. Still, from the standpoint of “what the hell is going on in the second quarter of Wizards games?” this is a relevant comparison.
What to make of all this
I’ve written in other posts that the value of using stats is sometimes just to go deeper into something your eyes already know well (and your heart bears with each game). Seeing that Porziņģis doesn’t hit shots in the second quarter the way he does in the first is not news. What I hope this post highlights, though, is that this is not a Kristaps Porziņģis problem alone.
Wizards Points has highlighted some of the issues with WUJ’s line-ups in the past. Guys not hitting shots is not really a coaching issue, at least not solely. But where we see everyone except Delon Wright and Corey Kispert more or less dropping off in even numbered quarters, that’s a problem that goes beyond simply getting good looks and moving the ball.
There’s a trope among casual and non-fan NBA observers that only the last two minutes of a game matters. Wizards fans know that no lead is safe, no pre-buzzer shot too far fetched to make the whole game a roller coaster. The consistent inconsistency has made the team extremely frustrating to watch. My takeaway from looking at these figures, though, is that the mascot for dropping leads or disappearing, Porziņģis, is not alone. Fans know this—and have known it for years—but as we near the end of the season, hopefully the front office is taking notice, too.3
Also worth noting that KP has a very high usage rate, so he does get a lot of touches.
For the nerds out there, the standard deviation of his true shooting percentage is only 0.0754 on average TS% of 0.592, which is really good!
I have no illusions that they are, but one can hope.