What's the deal with players scoring so many points against the Wizards?
Mario Hezonja had a rough start to 2019. As January moved to February, the former youth star from Croatia and fifth overall pick in the 2015 draft was struggling with back and leg issues. After moving to New York from Orlando, “Super Mario” couldn’t seem to find a place in the worst-in-the-East Knicks line-up. Despite being a player full of potential, the “Did Not Play” stat lines were starting to add up. Hezonja only saw the court in six of the Knick’s 14 games in March. April didn’t start off much better: another DNP to start the month, a strong showing in a 14 point loss against Orlando, an “emergency start” at point guard in a 24 point humiliation against the James Harden-Chris Paul Rockets, and then a long trip back to Madison Square Garden to face a Wizards team that Mario shot 0 for 5 against in January. While the Knicks were bad, the Wizards were coming off a 2 and 10 skid on what would end up being a 32-win season. This is April basketball before the play-in. If ever there were a game that didn’t matter, this home game against DC was it. Only the most loyal and depraved among us were tuning in. Though no one seemed to have told Mario that.
It was a career night for Hezonja. SB Nation’s Knicks blog, Roasting and Toasting said the game was, “a wonderful example of just what it means to cheer for the orange and blue,” the New York Post called Hezonja a hero, and Bullets Forever described the game as a the Wizards “improving their lottery odds.” A career average 6.9 point scorer, Mario dropped 30 on DC. He ended the night by hitting a corner three with 44 seconds on the clock after the Wizards managed to catch up thanks to a feisty Jeff Green. In the final seconds, after hitting what would be his game turning shot, Hezonja pointed at Green while the fans of this very bad Knicks squad went wild.
Every team has their Mario Hezonja. A guy who shows up and drops 30 on the Wizards for a game that fans will talk about throughout the off-season. It’s the kind of game that can make you reassess a player, to come up with phrases like “Hezsanity,” and believe that, hey, maybe we’re turning things around. As a Wizards fan, these are the games that can make you rethink the whole team.1 These games feel burned into my mind. It’s not just the random Croatians, but stars, too, that seem to suddenly decide they need to pad out their stats a bit when they face the Wiz kids.
It feels like these games happen all the time—some guy you’ve never heard of, who even fans of the guy’s team only kind of know—comes out and has a career night. Thanks to a suggestion from Reddit user z3mcs, I decided to look into how many players have actually scored 30 or more points against the Wizards. The 30-point threshold is kind of arbitrary. You could look at players with career nights against DC or players who passed their career average by double digits or any number of other ways to point out that sometimes (ok, many times) the Wizards really slip on defense. But 30 points is a lot. It’s impressive, but not, like, mind blowing. Elite players do it enough that it’s not something that might lead a story. And yeah, less-than-elite players do it, too. But it’s still more than double the per game league average.2 And it’s a nice way to separate the remarkable games from the 14 point career high, which might be impressive, but isn’t going make reporters and bloggers get emotional.
The 30+ Club
To understand how often guys are making memories against DC, I pulled data from every regular season and playoff game during the Scott Brooks and Wes Unseld Jr. coaching eras.3 While what happened when Randy Whittman or Flip Saunders were coaching has almost certainly shaped my fandom (and probably in some messed up way, my whole world view), it feels less relevant to understanding where the team is today and who is scoring 30 or more points against them.
There are 99 players who have scored 30 or more points 249 times against the Wizards since the 2015-16 season. A lot of guys show up more than once. The top five in the 30+ club is basically an All-NBA squad of the past eight years. DeMar DeRozan has scored 30+ against the Wizards 12 times, LeBron James nine times, and Damian Lillard, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Joel Embiid have each done it eight times. On the other end of the list, there are a lot of recognizable names and a few names that might make you kind of squint and look out to the distance when you see them, trying to dust off some memory of an NCAA tournament from the mid-2010s or a random Wiz game from the pandemic season. Elfrid Payton, Alec Burks, DeMarcus Cousins, Josh Jackson, and Wesley Matthews all dropped 30 on DC once.
Ninety-nine players is a lot. And many of the names that pop-up aren’t surprising. James Harden scoring 35 in a season that he averaged 36 per game is neat, but really just prime-Harden clocking in for the day. The more interesting question is not who has scored a lot of points against the Wizards, but who went above and beyond expectations and scored a lot of points against the Wizards.
To filter out the good Harden games from the, [Googles Landry Shamet] games, I looked at the difference between the 30+ point games and two standard deviations of that player’s point-per-game average for the period under review. From there, I filtered out players where that difference between 2 s.d. and their 30+ point game was less than 15 points. This is basically just a way of asking not only how far from a given player’s average was their 30-point game, but how far from 95 percent of all of their games were they when they shot the lights out against the Wizards?4 You can see Lebron shows up twice: in the 2017-18 season and in the 2021-22 season. Other “top 75” guys like Steph Curry and Anthony Davis also show up, but this really highlights the mid-tier, everyday hero type of players that breakout against DC.
This might all sound bad, but there were 723 players who faced up against the Wizards over the past eight years and didn’t score a single point. Also, while 99 players dropped 30 or more points over that time, nearly 6,000 scored less, with an overall average of 10.6 points per game.5 On the opposite end of the court, the Wizards have had 232 games where a player scored 30 or more points, with 15 different players claiming this completely arbitrary and incredibly difficult achievement. Bradley Beal alone dropped 30 or more points 147 times. John Wall did it 29 times. And the people’s hero, Ish Smith, did it once against Denver, go figure.
Scoring When It Counts?
The beauty of the NBA is that any given game can be a true battle, a night of incredible athletic feats, and a reminder of why we watch. The reality of the NBA is that not every game is equal across an 82-game schedule. There is definitely an analytical way to assess game value, but I just decided to take a look at where in the season games fell when players hit 30+ points to see if there was any pattern.
As shown in the figure below, we see a general peak at game 33, which, aside from the schedule-skewed 2020-21 season, has fallen between December 23rd and January 6th,6 or what I call, “the battling time.” This period includes the build-up to the Christmas Day game, typically the day that garners the highest ratings pre-Playoffs, and continues up through the All-Star break in mid-February. The ten players who all went off on game 33 are a who’s who of scoring lots of points—LeBron, DeMar DeRozan, Kyrie Irving, Paul George (twice), Joel Embiid (twice), Devin Booker, and Julius Randle, and Kawhi Leonard.
The game where a player scored the most points against the Wizards relative to their season average took place right in the lead up to the All-Star break: the Nets Cam Thomas, who averaged 10.6 points per game last season, scored 44 points in 29 minutes in a February 4th game.7 The second most points relative to a season average came from Kemba Walker in game 32 on December 23, 2021. This was a season where Kemba averaged 11.6 points per game, but also scored 44 points against the Wizards. Finally, we have James Harden and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander. It’s easy to forget how good prime Harden was, but both him and SGA have had seasons where their 30 point showing against the Wizards was actually below their season average. When we look at an individual player-level, there is less of a clear arc to the season—guys are dropping 30+ points no matter the time of year.
It’s a Team Sport
One of the narratives of the 2022-23 season was the fact that scoring seemed to have increased. There was some pearl clutching commentary about this being a sign of defense no longer mattering, but mostly analysts seemed genuinely intrigued and perplexed, like meteorologists tracking snow in April. If there’s anything to take away from looking at massive scoring against the Wizards it’s that high points per game are a general feature of the modern game.8 Maybe they happened more frequently last season, but they’ve been happening and they will happen again this season. Defense hasn’t been a skill that has really defined the past eight years of Wizards basketball; the team has never ranked above 15th in defensive rating during this time. If there’s a simple takeaway for the upcoming season, it’s that it’s never too late to focus on stopping the other team from scoring.
The more important point here, though, is that guys like Embiid are going to get their numbers in any given game. But the risk is less in elite scorers being elite than in Cam Thomas looking like an elite scorer. Players who average 15 points or less a game are good, solid NBA players, but they ideally shouldn’t swing games dramatically. The Wizards have only won 38 percent of the games where these players, guys like Coby White and CJ Miles, score 30 or more points. A good way to look at the next phase of the Wes Unseld Jr. Wizards is whether or not they can shift that percentage.
Mario Hezonja doesn’t play for the Knicks any more. After his season ending high point against the Wizards, he signed as a free agent to Portland and then, a year after that, was out of the league. In reading through old off-season write-ups of his career, the phrase used most frequently to describe his Knicks tenure is “inconsistent.” There are players who have made long careers out of reliably averaging 10 points a game. Those are not players I’d consider inconsistent. Inconsistent is averaging 10 points by dropping 30 and then going scoreless for the next two games. Sure, sometimes inconsistent means going above and beyond your average. We all have days where everything’s coming up for us, but most of the time—aside from the truly exceptional among us—we’re all just doing our best, which is, honestly, just kind of okay. And that’s okay! For the Wizards, the goal is to keep the 10-point players at 10-points. We’re in a golden age of scoring, but DC doesn’t need to usher in the next “Hezsanity.”
These are the kind of games that make you think Davis Bertans might be deserving of 80 million dollars.
This was 12.6 points per game according to basketball-reference.com
This is a riff on the empirical rule. But also, I just needed a way to pare down the list of 99 to highlight 30+ games that seem notable.
Wizards players averaged 10.4 points per game over the same period, which tracks with their overall record.
Oy, you really can’t type that date anymore without cringing.
Kyle Kuzma went 0 for 7 from the field in this game. Not really relevant, but yikes.
For the seasons under review here are the number of times players score 30+ points:
Season 30+ player games
2015-16 17
2016-17 30
2017-18 23
2018-19 25
2019-20 31
2020-21 46
2021-22 38
2022-23 39