Aldridge: Wizards aren't in 76ers' class, so does running it back next season make sense?
By
David Aldridge
May 27, 2021
The season has a few days left, maybe a week, and then the Washington Wizards are going to have to make some decisions.
Game 2 of their NBA playoff series with Philadelphia only confirmed what was obvious before the series started: Philly’s significantly better than Washington, and it’s the worst possible matchup the Wizards could have gotten in the first round.
It starts with
Joel Embiid and
Ben Simmons, but it doesn’t stop there. The 76ers are superior across the board. Maybe not 25 points better, the final wreckage in the Wizards’ Game 2 120-95 loss. But they’re better, and it’s not close.
Reducing that gap will be the job of the team’s general manager. Right now, that’s Tommy Sheppard. Of course, it’s Ted Leonsis’ call. There are capable executives he could bring in. But I think Leonsis knows that since Sheppard got the job almost two years ago, he’s done a very good job adding meaningful talent to the roster without hamstringing the budget or going into the luxury tax. The details of Sheppard’s contract since his 2019 promotion have always been opaque, but whether his deal is up at season’s end or there are club options, Leonsis needs to give Sheppard some certainty with a new deal and let him go to work.
The Wizards could have blown things up two years ago — even after last season — and started a long-term, down-to-the-studs rebuild with young players and a young, defense-minded coach. And, with some luck, you could have built a team like Atlanta or Memphis, which are both loaded with emerging talent.
But the Wizards made their choice. They’re going to roll with their star backcourt of
Russell Westbrook and
Bradley Beal for the next two years. Leonsis has made it clear he wants to make the playoffs as often as possible and has no interest in restarting the clock. It’s his team, and if that’s his gauge for success, I’d disagree — after 40 years in the hoop wilderness, the goals should be a little loftier. You can be patient when you have a generational, historical talent like Alex Ovechkin on your team; his greatness will give you a chance, year after year, to win it all. The Wizards don’t have that player on their roster.
But there’s no point in continually relitigating it. And that means running it back with Sheppard and Scott Brooks, which makes the most sense from a continuity standpoint.
A new GM, in all likelihood, is going to recommend the very thing Leonsis doesn’t seem to want to do: start over, and try to get that Ovechkin-level player in the draft. At any rate, whoever is running the show has to immediately improve the talent around the two guards.
(Let me just say this right here: I worked in Philly for four years. I love the fans there. The vast majority are passionate, smart and show up for everything. But they have some a-holes there, too. And the jerk who
threw popcorn on Westbrook as he left the floor in the second half after turning his ankle needs to be banned from NBA arenas for life. He’s a coward on top of being a putz.)
The Wizards desperately need a 3-and-D wing — someone who is enough of a perimeter threat to space the floor credibly and create driving lanes for Westbrook and Beal, yet who also has the size and length to guard the likes of Philly’s Ben Simmons. The 76ers are completely indifferent to Raul Neto when he’s on the floor; they don’t care what he does when he’s out there. As it was, he didn’t score until four minutes were gone in the third quarter Wednesday. Simmons walked Westbrook under the basket to start the game and lorded it over the Wizards on the offensive glass all night. (My buddy Paul Evans, the longtime statistician, hit me with this tidbit: Simmons was 11-of-15 from the floor in Game 2. His average shot length was 3.1 feet.)
The three-guard rotation Brooks has started the last few weeks works against bad teams, but not in the playoffs, when you play teams like Philly, Brooklyn and Milwaukee, which have multiple 3-point threats
and switchable wing defenders.
“Everything’s up for grabs right now,” Brooks said after Wednesday’s loss. “They did what they did. Now it’s our turn to do what we need to do. … Everything’s definitely going to be looked at. We have to find a better group at both ends of the floor.”
Washington doesn’t have
any true and consistent 3-point threats on the current roster. It’s hard to think otherwise after the Wizards have gone 10-of-42 from 3 in the first two games against Philly, including 2-of-22 Wednesday. That just doesn’t seem possible in 2021.
Dāvis Bertāns has been a rumor so far this series, fouling out early in the fourth Wednesday without scoring a point. He has no Plan B for teams that can get into him and take away the open, regular-season 3s he made at a high clip. He has no in-between game and no post-up game, just 3s. Which would be OK if he shot a whole bunch of them every game, but he doesn’t — partly because
the Wizards don’t screen well enough to get him open looks against good defenses, anyway.
Beal is a wondrous scorer. He grinded his way to 33 points in Game 2 with his full arsenal on display. But, he’s fallen off significantly behind the arc this season; he shot 35 percent on 3s this season after shooting 39 percent or better in each of his first five. He was just 1-of-6 from deep Wednesday. That’s not a criticism; it’s what the numbers say. Rui Hachimura regularly turns down corner 3s, the staple of modern NBA offenses, time and again for midrange shots. Again, that doesn’t make him a bad player, but when you don’t make opposing defenses stretch, it makes it so hard for Westbrook and Beal to score easily. They have to expend so much energy hacking through defenses that load the paint with bodies.
Maybe Deni Avdija is that player. But it’s still unclear that you’re going to get the most out of the 2020 first-rounder playing big minutes together with Westbrook. Avdija is not a catch-and-shoot player; he’s at his best with the ball in his hands — and the ball is almost always in Westbrook’s or Beal’s hands. We’ll see if there’s a future mesh there. In the interim, the midlevel exception or Washington’s first-rounder should be put to good use on a three this summer. (If you’re asking me, I’d be looking at the Pacers’ Doug McDermott or the Knicks’ Reggie Bullock in free agency. An Otto Porter reunion wouldn’t be out of the question for me, either.)
There were no expectations playing the top-seeded 76ers. But Game 2 exposed all of the Wizards’ bad traits — poor defense rotations, bad free-throw shooting, going 2-for-1 at the end of every quarter and somehow not getting a high-percentage shot on either possession. The Sixers are good, but you can’t help them by making just 19 of 30 from the free-throw line.
“They’re pretty athletic,” Beal said. “They use their size to their advantage. They want to try and punish teams in the paint. That’s where a lot of their offense is generated. They’re able to get two feet in the paint, and once they do that, we’re helping a lot.”
As far as Brooks, I’m not crazy about his rotations. I never understood what he did with Troy Brown Jr., and the same can be said with Garrison Mathews this season. And if we see another second of Westbrook-Beal-Neto in this series … geesh. But when times were toughest this season, when the team was ravaged by COVID-19 in January, he kept his group together. They won big games on the road down the stretch and played excellent defense. And Westbrook played at an All-NBA level for a month as he conquered
Oscar Robertson’s career triple-double record. Brooks is a stan of Westbrook; Westbrook puts up monster numbers for Brooks. It makes little sense, now, to have one without the other. Who would you bring in that could get more out of Westbrook, and who’d have his respect?
By the way, Westbrook has been throttled by the Sixers in two games. The ankle injury he suffered late in Game 2 ended his night, but it wasn’t a good one before he got hurt, either. He said last week that when he was in Oklahoma City, the venerated assistant coach and Hall of Famer Maurice Cheeks told him great players don’t have two consecutive bad games.
That means Westbrook is due to perform magnificently Saturday in front of about 10,000 fans at Capital One Arena for Game 3. Teams play better at home and you’d expect the Wizards to do the same. It will be their last chance to make this series more than a glorified scrimmage for Philly, and they may be playing for more than pride.
