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Washington Wizards: Small Ball Not The End Of The Answer

By Josh Wilson

May 13, 2015; Atlanta, GA, USA; Washington Wizards head coach Randy Wittman reacts to the action against the Atlanta Hawks during the first half in game five of the second round of the NBA Playoffs at Philips Arena. The Hawks defeated the Wizards 82-81. Mandatory Credit: Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports
May 13, 2015; Atlanta, GA, USA; Washington Wizards head coach Randy Wittman reacts to the action against the Atlanta Hawks during the first half in game five of the second round of the NBA Playoffs at Philips Arena. The Hawks defeated the Wizards 82-81. Mandatory Credit: Dale Zanine-USA TODAY Sports /
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The Washington Wizards are making changes next year. Really, they have to, if they want to be more successful than the last few years. Two years in a row now, they’ve fallen a few games short of being in the Eastern Conference Finals, and saying that that isn’t a goal would almost certainly be a lie.

Questions around whether or not the team will re-sign Randy Wittman certainly circle around the idea of him leading the Wizards that far in the playoffs.

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Wittman is obviously aware of this, and has said — probably regretfully — that he knows mid-range jumpers are not the way to go, and that moving along with the times, and embracing “small ball,” is the way to succeed.

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While I too was reluctant to see the upside to this new offensive scheme teams are embracing (I love two classic big men running power forward/center), it definitely is the way to go for Washington, and the playoffs this year proved that.

This makes sense, especially in the terms of the Wizards. Sure, this likely means Nene will not get as much playing time, and may struggle to find as many opportunities to score, but with the way the league is going, a stretch 4 and just one “big man” instead of two works wonders.

It proved as much in the playoffs this year for the Wizards, our first glance at the “new” team that Wittman was finally allowing to happen. The Wizards were taking more longer shots, and it was working, allowing the Toronto Raptors poor defense in round one to stretch out, giving the talented backcourt of John Wall and Bradley Beal room to work.

After attempting just 16.8 three pointers per game during the regular season, they improved in the playoffs averaging  23.3 three pointers shot per game. An even more eye-opening statistic is the amount of players taking more three pointers. Throughout the regular season, only four players averaged more than two three-pointers attempted per game (26.7 percent of the active roster).

In the playoffs, six players were in this category, which was 42.9 percent of the active roster, an increase of 16.2 percent.

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    • There seems to be a sense of expectancy among fans that the Wizards will look completely different compared to last year. They will, if you’re talking about the regular season Wizards. The regular season Wizards were a team that was led neglecting to embrace a smaller type of lineup, but that not how the playoffs went, as addressed above.

    If you think that a smaller lineup would have pushed the playoffs another round for the Wizards, I would argue that this is obviously incorrect, since they did use a smaller lineup in the playoffs. Sure, embracing a smaller lineup throughout the year could have set them up better as far as seeding, but it likely wouldn’t have mattered.

    In almost any other seed number, it would have helped significantly, but even with small ball, I don’t see the Wizards hypothetically bumping up more than one seeding in the playoffs. This would have put them at the fourth seed, and the Raptors in the fifth, thus simply swapping their seedings and giving Washington the home court advantage instead of Toronto.

    In other words, who would this have had the Wizards playing in the first round? Go figure, still the Raptors. If everything else around the Eastern Conference stayed the same, they would have ended up playing the Atlanta Hawks again, with the same outcome, not moving on.

    My point is that small ball is not the entirety of the answer to advancing further in the playoffs. It’s going to take more than that simple change of heart on Wittman’s part. It’s going to take a year of players being healthy, and playing great basketball. It’s not just a simple game plan change, it’s making that change into something of quality.

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