Bradley Beal spares no feelings in summing up the frustrating Wiz
Coming off a second straight trip to the second round of the playoffs scuttled largely due to a significant mid-postseason injury to their best player, the Washington Wizards entered the 2015-16 season expecting to give the Cleveland Cavaliers a run for their money in the race for the Eastern Conference’s top spot. Things, um, haven’t quite worked out that way.
The Wizards entered Wednesday evening 36-38, three games behind the Indiana Pacers (who hold the head-to-head tiebreaker over Washington) for the eighth and final playoff spot in the East, after a season chock full of false starts, injuries, mediocre defensive play and an inability to recreate the offensive success they found during last postseason’s shift to a four-out style featuring a floor-spacing power forward. Even so, despite losing three of four, they had a chance to get back on the good foot with a win over a Sacramento Kings team seemingly in open revolt … and they couldn’t pull it off.
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Behind a monster game from DeMarcus Cousins, a double-double from Rajon Rondo and big outings off the bench by Darren Collison and Omri Casspi, the Kings smoked the Wiz, 120-111. Sacramento reached 30 wins for the first season since 2008, while Washington fell 3 1/2 games back of the No. 8 spot with just seven games remaining. With their postseason lives to fight for and in desperate need of a win to hang with the Pacers, Detroit Pistons and Chicago Bulls, the Wizards committed 20 turnovers while allowing the Kings to shoot 56 percent from the floor and score 58 points in the paint.
It was an unimpressive performance at the worst possible time for one, and it probably doomed the Wizards’ chances of making a third straight trip to the postseason. Basketball-Reference.com gives the Wiz a 2.2 percent shot of cracking the top eight, and while FiveThirtyEight’s a bit more optimistic, its projections only have Washington making the playoffs in 7 percent of simulations.
You could chalk the lackadaisical outing to Washington being on the second half of a road back-to-back after falling to the defending champion Golden State Warriors on Tuesday night. But that’s not how Bradley Beal saw it, and the shooting guard said so in no uncertain terms after Wednesday’s defeat, according to Jorge Castillo of The Washington Post:
“To me, it felt like we gave up,” a frustrated Wizards guard Bradley Beal said. […]
“I guess we kind of figured we’re already in the playoffs some reason,” said Beal, who led the Wizards with 24 points on 10-of-21 shooting. “It’s either that or we want to get to the offseason. But as far as why, I have no idea. If guys don’t want to play, they need to sit down.” […]
“We bark too much,” Beal said. “We say what we need to do. We scream at one another. We can even try to blame [coach Randy Wittman] if we want to, but at the end of the day we’re still the ones playing and we still beat ourselves. We do dumb stuff on the floor. Just not having a man in transition or not knowing where a guy is in half court or not knowing personnel. We just do dumb mental lapses that just messes up your game and ends up hurting us in the long run.”
Beal later added: “I guess [it’s] mentality. Everybody’s a grown-a** man. Either you want to play or you don’t. It’s plain and simple. Either you want to win or you don’t. If you don’t want to win then you need to sit down.”
Beal didn’t walk reporters through a film session, but if he had, he might have pointed to blown defensive plays like these:
In case you’re wondering, here’s one example of the “dumb stuff” Bradley Beal was referring to in his comments. pic.twitter.com/MnxCTGXTrn
— Mike Prada (@MikePradaSBN) March 31, 2016
There’s something to be said for a player publicly calling for increased accountability as a team watches its season slip away, but that doesn’t necessarily mean everybody in the locker room’s going to enjoy hearing that talk:
That tweet by Wizards center Marcin Gortat — no stranger to calling Washington’s 2015-16 season overly negative and “not even fun” — was later deleted. Natch.
At this point, though, the damage is done. Whether due to failings in roster construction by general manager Ernie Grunfeld, tactical deployment by Wittman, simple underperformance by a roster full of players from whom many of us expected more, or a combination of all of the above, the Wizards now find themselves staring down the barrel of what might be a much-needed offseason shakeup. From Kyle Weidie of the stalwart Wiz blog Truth About It:
Randy Wittman spoke of a lack of discipline—his keyword of the night—after the game via CSN’s postgame show. Plugging that keyword in the translator: his players just didn’t care. He could see it, they could see it, I could see it from the other side of the country. And the culmination of season-long events continues to indicate that the head coach simply can’t get his players to care consistently enough. The substitute teacher has been good, but the classroom is way overdue for some true leadership. Because the end results are inarguable. The Wizards are underachievers. […]
No, we’re just going to slowly back away from this post, this ‘Key Legislature,’ just like the Wizards have slowly backed away from their season with players who no longer care, a coach no longer capable, a front office that’s sewn seeds of losing for too long and only ever wanted to win just enough, and an owner who is blinded a flux in selfies, his hockey team, and the misconception of injuries to his 15-man basketball roster.
That owner, Ted Leonsis, will have to take a long hard look at what comes next for the Wizards this summer — at whether Wittman’s the right man for this job; at whether Grunfeld (one of the longest-lived personnel chiefs in the league despite a record that can charitably be described as very spotty) deserves yet another chance to reboot the roster; at whether the oft-injured Beal is worth the maximum-salaried long-term contract he’s likely to command in restricted free agency; at whether a core of Wall, Beal, Gortat, Otto Porter and Markieff Morris is getting you anywhere near contention in 2016; etc. These are tough questions, and finding answers doesn’t figure to be easy. Whether Beal’s decision to rip off the Band-Aid and air out the Wizards’ on-court grievances helps guide that search ought to be one of the more interesting subplots of the summer ahead.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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