Randy Wittman and the Washington Wizards seem to be sick of one another
Over a four-day stretch that began last Friday, the Washington Wizards lost road games to the Los Angeles Clippers, the Sacramento Kings, and the Golden State Warriors by a combined 68 points, and the NBA barely blinked. The team’s coaching staff and players may have gone sullen, and the team’s fan base may have lost its collective mind, but the league as a whole chalked it up to just another case of Wizards going Wizard.
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Wednesday was supposed to change that. A seemingly alert and angry Wizards team lined up against the only other Eastern Conference playoff contender struggling just as much as the Wizards were (and, spoiler alert, are) – an Indiana team that had lost six straight games. The Pacers then proceeded slap the Pacers around in their own building for three quarters before John Wall’s 24-point second half dragged an unwilling Washington squad back into a time game during the final stages.
With under ten seconds left, as he’s done for most of the season, George Hill went to work:
As the Wizards fandom quickly noticed, this particular play reminds quite a bit of a game-loser earlier in the year from Oklahoma City’s Russell Westbrook:
Hill and Westbrook have acted as their franchise saviors all season, and the Wizards are a decidedly mediocre team this year. There shouldn’t be too much shame in either of those two guards beating you at the last second, should there?
Well, Bullets Forever’s Jake Whitacre beat me to the spot in pointing out that not only was 7-footer Marcin Gortat on the bench for the final seconds, leaving Nene to both attempt to trap an early screen and roll and dash back to guard the rim, but stellar defensive guard John Wall was kept off the ball for some odd reason.
In both situations, Wall was playing with five fouls, so you have to assume Wittman moved him off the ball to keep him from fouling out. But there’s some really messed up logic in that decision. For starters, referees almost always swallow their whistles in late game situations, so the risk of Wall fouling out is extremely low. Secondly, even if Wall does foul out, his absence doesn’t hurt the team nearly as much as the two free throws he just gave the other team to seal the game. Leaving Wall to cover a standstill shooter in the closing seconds is a self-defeating strategy.
For the second time this season, we’ve seen Randy Wittman make the classic mistake of overcoaching in the final seconds. Rather than let his best defender try to extend the game by forcing a stop, he left him in the corner on a lesser player to save him for an extra period that’s never going to come.
Randy Wittman, to his credit, also decided to stick with his timeout-less team until the very end ha-ha just kidding he turned his back started walking to the locker room directly after Hill’s layup went in even though there were a few seconds left watch:
Wittman’s continued insistence on removing himself from the sinking situation was noticed by Wizards fans even before Wednesday night’s embarrassment. From Chris Thompson’s fantastic pregame column on the Wizards/Pacers clash at TruthAboutIt.Net:
Not surprisingly, nothing he said even nodded in the vague direction of the fundamental and fatal weakness in Washington’s whole basketball system, brutally and embarrassingly exposed by Speights’ comments. In talking about his job, in acknowledging his responsibility to put his team in position to win basketball games, he took a swipe at the effort and professionalism of his players. The team is incapable of playing 48 minutes of solid two-way basketball—on that we can all agree—and the extent of the coach’s responsibility is to exclude those players who can be blamed for this phenomenon. Nevermind that Wittman has had more than 70 games to find out which of his players are willing to grant him this nebulous effort-based boon.
Preaching accountability while being totally unwilling to accept any meaningful accountability for your own actions undermines credibility, like, a lot. If it seems like the Wizards are losing their edge, their confidence, their faith in one another, their common purpose; if it’s true that they’re bitching in timeouts and in the locker room about offensive touches; if their commitment is truly out of whack, maybe it’s time to consider whether these new dynamics flow from the experience of following a head coach who implicitly and constitutionally dismisses accountability. If players look to Wittman for direction, and all they see is a finger pointed back at them bereft of real solutions, there’s nowhere left to go but the wrong way.
The lack of accountability and infighting even made it all the way out to the Left Coast well before the most recent Wizards meltdown. Witness Warriors forward Marreese Speights following Monday evening’s crushing Golden State win:
“We just turned up a little,” reserve center Marreese Speights said of Golden State’s defense to reporters following the win. “We knew if we hit them, if we got a couple stops they would start arguing with each other and quit. We went out there with a good mindset in the second half and we did it.”
Now that the locals have noticed, and now that the Marreese’s have noticed, perhaps it’s time for us to notice.
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The Washington Wizards owner, Ted Leonsis, embraced mediocrity when he decided that Ernie Grunfeld deserved a third chance to work his way out of the holes he’d created. Grunfeld himself embraced mediocrity when he tossed major contracts at an injured Gilbert Arenas and an aging Antawn Jamison in 2009, and he embraced sub-mediocrity by blowing a few draft picks. Both men embraced mediocrity when they stuck with Randy Wittman past Wittman’s execution of what he was brought in to do – establish professionalism at the cost of any attempts to catch up to a league that has left Washington’s offensive and sometimes defensive ideals behind.
We mention defense in full deference to Wittman’s role in creating what was an eighth-ranked defense last season and a tenth-ranked defense this year. As Bullets Forever noted, Wittman’s insistence on getting far too cute on offense often bleeds over to the defensive end, like when he sat Gortat on Wednesday night as Indiana went small in favor of Otto Porter for the final defensive possession.
Porter isn’t a bad defender at times, all memes aside, but the idea that a man WHO HADN’T PLAYED A SINGLE SECOND ALL NIGHT should be trusted to spring from the bench and shake off the rust in the game’s final possession is absolutely hysterical. Unless you’re a Wizards fan, of course.
Once again, Randy Wittman took what the other team gave his Wizards, a theme that has been running roughshod all over Washington’s season.
Golden State trounced Washington by 31 points on Monday not just because they own the NBA’s best defense and, ipso facto life is a video game and things are played on paper and the Wizards should only score 76 points. Nah, Golden State beat Washington by 31 points because things aren’t played on paper, fully executing possession by possession and forcing the Wizards into the shots that Golden State wanted Washington to take – namely, those long two-pointers that don’t send Washington to the line, and don’t go in that often.
The problem here is that Wittman and the Wizards love those shots. Partially because they’re fun to take (Beal especially loves that pull-up, picturing themselves as MJ or Kobe until the ball clangs off the rim), but mostly because Wittman encourages Washington to let the opponent dictate the terms of engagement.
This is nothing new for Randy Wittman-led teams. We’d watch his early-century Cleveland Cavaliers players – fraught with solid enough names like Jim Jackson, Lamond Murray, Chris Gatling, Andre Miller and Zydrunas Ilgauskas – a fall well short of expectation. That’s not a championship lineup, to be sure, but that collection would seem to be quite capable of making a dent in the similarly-crummy 2001 East, nearing .500 at least.
Instead, the team wins 30 games, piling up the 18-footers. And this is where the Washington Wizards are, working at 75 percent of where they should be, watching as an Atlanta Hawk team that was deemed to be just as mediocre rushes right past them in the Eastern standings. All while Washington wastes another year, prior to Ernie Grnfeld convincing his bosses of at least one more chance on the promise of another coach after Wittman, and the potential for Kevin Durant to sign as a free agent with Washington in 2016.
Good luck with that, Wizards fans. We’ll try to use our internet more often next time to better understand why you keep muttering rude words.
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Kelly Dwyer is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops
