Nobody Beats the Wiz – Nobody!

At the risk of boring our audience, I’m going to do a quick synopsis of the Washington Wizards basketball team. My sense is that if you’re a fan of the NBA, it’s hard not to like the Wizards. And even if you don’t like basketball, but maybe you like professional sports, I still feel as though you can respect the Wiz and their story.

(I’ll go ahead and assume that most of our readers haven’t been following the Wiz this year. If you have been following them, I apologize for being repetitive, especially if you read the Washington Post. And If you don't like the Wizards or don't give a you know what, please just skip the post. I promise this will be the last post on DC sports for awhile)

The Team

In a nutshell, the Washington Wizards play unselfish, team basketball. They run a quasi-Princeton offense, score fast break points, rely on outside shooters, and generally don’t play post-centered basketball. While relying on outside shooters inevitably leads to off-nights, the Wizards are now playing much better defense than last year. Caron, Daniels, and Gilbert average around two steals per game, while Brendan Haywood anchors the paint with shot-blocking and attitude. As TMac pointed out the other night, a team can't always control the accuracy of their shooting, but they can control their defense. Improved defense by the Wizards therefore hedges them against nights when their shooting (their offense) is terrible.

The Wizards are always fun to watch, although some of the shots they take are sometimes foolish or unnecessary. Kobe pointed this out last year when he played the Wizards - he said something to the effect of, "the Wizards take about 2000 shots per game and most of them are goofy..." But three pointers are fun to watch and I won't complain if they continue to good.

Gilbert, when he’s healthy, runs the offense and he generally takes the majority of shots. One of the best things about Gilbert is that he has a flair for the dramatic, hitting at least three buzzer beaters from downtown in the past few seasons. When he’s playing well, teams are forced to double cover him, leaving Caron or Antawn open for points.

Caron and Antawn are prototype guard / forwards who can play a decent post game when they have mismatches. Caron’s three pointer is vastly improved this year, and Antawn has morphed into Dennis Rodman on the boards (he’s averaging over 10 boards this year). These guys are known as the Big Three in the league.

Generally speaking, I like to think of the Wizards as a team made up of three types of players – young guns, seasoned veterans, and role-players. What makes these sub sets interesting, however, is that over the past few years, each of these subsets have gotten dramatically better than the year before. And since they’ve been playing so well, this wholesale improvement has allowed the Wizards to develop young talent, maintain cap room, stay in the playoff hunt, and withstand injuries; very cool.

The Wizards have developed one of the best stable’s of young talent in the league. The Young Guns consist of rookies Nick Young, Dominic McGuire, Oleksiy Pecherov, and third year player Andray Blatche; all of them are badasses. When Gilbert had his second knee surgery at the start of the season, the team suddenly had a void in both leadership and scoring. Remarkably the young guns filled that void with victories when the team needed it most. For example, the Wizards started their season losing five games in a row. Then, out of nowhere, Nick Young (a rookie) dropped 18 points on Portland, most of them in the fourth quarter, which lead to a Wizards’ victory. He then scored 11, 5 and then 18 points as the Wizards won three straight and snapped their losing streak. I could give you more examples (Blatche taking his game to new heights, McGuire becoming a rebounding machine, or Pecherov hitting key three pointers), but I will leave it with Nick Young and his amazing play off the bench thus far.

Aside from their young guns, the Wizards have a bunch of role players who turned into major contributors this year. The Role Players consist of Roger Mason Jr., Brendan Haywood, DeShawn Stevenson, Darius Songaila, Etan Thomas, and Antonio Daniels (AD!). This group of players, in addition to the young guns, kept the Wizards afloat while they lost Arenas for the season, Butler for most of the season, and Jamison over key stretches of games. For those of you who didn’t read the paragraph above, these are by far the Wizards’ best players. This would be akin to the Celtics losing Garnett AND Allen for most of their season. No fun.

Thus far, the 2007 season highlights how the role players have moved into the team’s leadership sub-set. On any given night, one of the role players steps up and has a good game, which almost always keeps the Wizards competitive in close games. Take the entire group of role players and compare their stats from last year. Per game, almost every statistic is up – scoring, rebounding, steals, assists, blocks – you name it. (I may be wrong, but usually the NBA does not see a large group of players increase their stats across the board like this.)

This widespread improvement comes at a crucial time – despite injuries to their top players, the Wizards still have playoff hopes and may get the sixth seed which pitts them against the Magic and not Lebron at the 7th seed. This positioning is thanks to the role players and their improved play throughout the season.

Consider Brendan Haywood who used to really piss me off because he and Etan Thomas always fought. Brendan now gets serious PT thanks to an unfortunate heart problem with Etan. How has he responded to increased minutes? He’s averaging almost a double double, has close to 100 blocks, and provides fire and leadership under the glass; in other words, 100 times better than last year when he sulked on the bench. With Etan and Thomas sharing minutes last year, the Wizards never really had a presence in the paint. Now they do with Haywood since he blocks so many damn shots and talks trash. I love it.

The Seasoned Vets round out the Wizards, and they consist of the "Big Three" – Caron, Jamison, and Arenas. Antawn Jamison is a true leader who inspires his teammates and plays through injuries; he's been this way since college. Antawn, voted to his second All Star appearance this year, has been the heart and sole of this franchise while Gilbert has been getting all the press and adulation. Night after night Antawn plays hard and refuses to complain when the team is down on their luck. To date, I have not heard Antawn complain about the injuries to their team, nor have I ever seen him take a game off. Simply put, Antawn is a classy, professional guy who plays hard every single night. I also saw him driving around DC in a Rolls-Royce Phantom, blasting Master P, which was awesome.

Caron Butler is a huge badass, plain and simple. I mean, look at the tattoo of the grim reaper on his arm – who does that? For all you UConn fans out there, you know what I mean about Caron…this guy is a gamer and he always plays for keeps. The NBA recognized Caron with a second All Star appearance this year. A big part of his All Star vote was due to his improved three pointer. Caron improved his three through relentless off-season work with a shooting coach. (Incidentally, this shooting coach worked with the entire Wizards team and brough up the team's three throw percentage to top-five in the league.) The amazing part about Caron and the Wizards is that we got him for Kwame Brown, who went to the Lakers. This has to be one of the worst trades ever made, and I can promise you that the Lakers still regret this move.

Concluding Thoughts

If you had one word to describe the 2007 Wizards it would be “persistence.” Despite their bad luck, the Wiz simply refuse to give up and call it quits. Of course people will say, “every team goes through injuries.” But how many teams have their top three players injured two years in a row, yet still make the playoffs?

Some call it the Curse of Len Bias (a topic for another rainy day), but others call it the injury bug. Jamison, Caron, Arenas, Daniels, Haywood, Thomas, and Songaila have all suffered through injuries this year. Despite injury after injury, I still haven’t heard them complain or “mail in” games. Instead they continue to play hard every night and refuse to give up. If Kobe didn’t have Gasol, I promise you he would be whining about Bynum and crying himself to sleep every night.

Despite their injuries, the Wizards are good at beating Western Conference teams. They've beaten the Hornets twice, the Suns, the Clippers, the Mavs, and the Sonics. They've also beaten Boston twice, which no other team in the East has done so far (maybe in the entire NBA...stat please?).

Look for the Wizards to continue their heroic performance in the next 6 weeks. If we can continue playing .500 basketball, get Caron and Gilbert back in the lineup, and Philly starts to falter, the Wiz can lock up the 6th playoff position for an Orlando match-up.