Washington Wizards: How much should Kelly Oubre Jr. shoot?
Kelly Oubre Jr. has had a bit of an up and down season for the Washington Wizards. One of the reasons for this might be that sometimes he might take too many shots for his own good.
The start to the 2017-18 NBA season has been one with many questions. Are the Detroit Pistons and Orlando Magic good? Can Aaron Gordon shoot 3 pointers now? Are the Cleveland Cavaliers worse than last year? Do the Boston Celtics have a chance without Hayward?
These are all questions that take some intense analysis to develop answers to, but the general consensus is that the league has a hefty amount of parity this year. One of the most up and down teams this year is the Washington Wizards.
They’ve played spectacularly against top level teams and they’ve lost to some of the worst. It’s pretty hard to actually pinpoint what their problem is, despite an inherent lack of roster depth that’s plagued their team for years.
But lack of roster depth has never equated to such an up-and-down season like this. Usually the Wizards can win games just from having a great starting five. Through 12 games, the Washington Wizards have won seven, giving them a .583 win percentage. Over the course of an 82-game regular season, that would place them at just under 48 wins, which is a little worse than last year.
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While a few less wins isn’t a dramatic difference, it certainly isn’t a step in the right direction, and in a year where the Celtics are missing one of their stars and the Cavaliers are losing a good amount of games, this could be a huge missed opportunity for the Wizards to get a top seed in the playoffs, something that might be crucial considering how well they play with home-court advantage.
So what is it that’s causing the Wizards to lose, and more importantly, what causes them to win? One of the big changes that happened in the Wizards’ rotation is that Markieff Morris has moved back into a starting spot over the young Kelly Oubre Jr.
While Oubre had some strong games as a starter, he was heavily inconsistent. Some games he would have one of the best plus/minus ratings in the game, and others, he would shoot under 30 percent from the field. Diving deeper into the stats, one of the single most dividing factors in determining if the Wizards won or lost a game is how many shots Kelly Oubre Jr. took.
In games in which Kelly Oubre Jr. took 10 shots or less, the Washington Wizards went 7-2. In games in which Oubre took more than 10 shots, they were 0-3. What we can derive from this is that the Wizards are better off when Oubre Jr. isn’t taking as many shots in the offense.
For a long time now, the Wizards have known what their offense is. John Wall runs the show, Bradley Beal gets buckets in any way necessary, Marcin Gortat sets picks to get things moving and Otto Porter Jr. shoots lights out when open. Anything that strays from that core is outside what the Wizards are at their best.
Kelly Oubre Jr. taking a large amount of shots per game is NOT featured in that core. What’s fascinating is, these numbers don’t translate when talking about minutes per game or usage rate. Both statistics for Oubre don’t really correlate into wins or losses for the Wizards.
There are two possible explanations for this. The first is he doesn’t need a lot of minutes to chuck up shots, and he doesn’t take long to do so when he has the ball. This pushes towards a narrative of one-dimensionality from Oubre, who has never really been one to get assists, averaging 0.2, 0.6 and 0.6 per game in his first three seasons.
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The other explanation is that we are still working with too small of a sample size to notice Kelly Oubre Jr.’s negative effects from taking too many shots. Through the season, look to see if Oubre’s usage rate and minutes per game numbers start to affect when the Wizards win and lose games, and look for the Wizards to get Markieff Morris more involved throughout the season.