Hi! Remember this newsletter? Wizards Points started during a confluence of being really bored at work and the Wizards having the best start to a season in recent memory. I figured I could rant into the nothingness of Twitter OR rant into the nothingness of Substack. Since last November, I’ve started a new job and been swept up in a bunch of other projects, but I really appreciate everyone who read. We got around 500 views for some posts, which is pretty amazing. I also received some DMs telling me how wrong I was about this or that thing, which is also amazing.
Going forward, I’d like to publish at least one post a month. BUT I also want to invite you or others from the Wizards/DC/basketball community to post. If you have an idea, or even just something that just seems like it deserves more space than a Twitter thread, please reach out.
This post is going to just be a bit of a quick hit on a few things that have come up over the past few months. Thanks for reading.
The Beal Deal
What else can even be said at this point? One of the first posts mentioned that I thought the whole narrative around Beal’s contract was kind of uninteresting. From what I’ve seen, the takes on Bradley Beal signing for a quarter of a billion dollars range from, “you can’t blame him, but it was a bad move by the franchise” to “you can’t blame him, and also what planet does Ted Leonsis live on?” As someone who has to muster all my will power to avoid taking a free sample that I know I won’t enjoy, I think it’s amazing how Beal and his management have played this. Not to be too fatalistic about the whole thing, but the narrative around Beal seems to exist in some world where there were viable alternatives1, Beal is a different person and player, and the NBA is a different type of league. If the Wizards were in a better position with respect to the Beal deal, they would be a very different team with a very different history. It’s not clear what alternatives were seriously on the table with respect to the current deal (rather than what could have been a few seasons ago). As the Athletic’s John Hollinger recently wrote, negotiations are about leverage, and the results of this deal suggest the Wizards didn’t have any. I’m not sure fans would be happier if the team had let Beal go. There is also a lot to look forward to knowing Beal is around. We have a reliable scorer in Brad. DC has a promising charming young(ish) core. Kyle Kuzma is still around. I feel hopeful in the short term and less hopeful over the long run with this deal, which is very Grunfeldian and familiar.
District of Flavortown
I don’t really have strong opinions about Guy Fieri. He inspired New York Times food critic Pete Wells to write one of the best pieces of journalism food-related or otherwise, so I guess that makes me a fan. What I do care about are opportunities for G-Wiz to play pranks in the guise of corporate promos. My favorite example of this is the beloved mascot’s Chipotle hijinks at the expense of Andre Blatche. In hindsight, this seems like a fitting indictment of Blatche’s less-than-stellar workout routine and also not the most wild thing to go down around the Gallery Place Chipotle (RIP). The upcoming season may not be great, but hopefully it will at least be a little weird. Throwing some of Fieri’s Donkey Sauce in the mix should help on that front.
Mid-range March
Every season brings a series of postmortems. The Wizards won 35 games, with the one of the worst defenses in the NBA (25th out 30 in defensive rating), and were last in the league for 3 pointers made (though only ranked 26th in overall 3 point% per basketball-reference.com). This is not news to anyone who managed to make it through the season as a fan. What I was curious about is whether, given their well known, uh, deficiencies, their shot selection changed over the season. Knowing they weren’t hitting from beyond the arc, did coach Wes Unseld Jr. push things closer to the basket? Did mid-season trades shift where shots were taken?
You can see a bit of a variation in attempts above the break, but midrange attempts really shot up in March. This was, of course, after the trade deadline in mid-February.
The figure below helps tell this story.
Getting Porzingis added some immediate shooting to the Wizards. Rui Hachimura’s mid-range game has always been strong, but you can really see that he was starting to come into his own after a shaky entrance to a delayed season. Notably, only Rui and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope improved in their mid-range field goal percentage (i.e., how many of those shots went in compared to how many missed), with Rui hitting 25% of his middy shots in February to 40% in March and KCP going from 32% to 49%. Everyone else shot worse over that period, even if attempts went up. There are any number of reasons shots increased from mid-range. Considering that both Porzingis and Hachimura shot well (Rui finished the season with a career high 58% true shooting percentage) in their limited playing time, this might be a sliver of hope for the start of the new season.
Quick Hits
Anthony Gill (a Wizards Points fav) continues to be one of the best values on the team. Gill pretty much finished above his career averages in every category and his on-off numbers are exactly what you hope for from an end of the bench player.
Shoutout to Otto Porter and Gary Payton II. They join the growing ranks of Wizards players who have gone on to win rings after leaving DC.
As a fan generating Wizards content, I’m all for fans generating content. There’s a new fan-produced podcast, The Casuals, on Spotify. Give it some love.
Sure, there was reporting Beal was talking to other teams, but I think some of that was probably just normal NBA management due diligence (if you’re doing your job, I think you have to talk to any one who will pick up the phone) and some of it was overblown, ‘sources say’, need to get clicks reporting.