WASHINGTON — The new-look Washington Wizards know what they must accomplish in the season ahead. Players, the head coach and team executives these days often talk about “building habits,” about “development,” about “growth.”
These are in part buzzwords designed to shift the focus away from the many defeats that are likely to follow, but they also are legitimate aspirational goals for a rebuilding franchise. If youngsters such as 19-year-old Bilal Coulibaly, 22-year-old Deni Avdija and even 24-year-old Jordan Poole don’t make individual strides — and, crucially, don’t make those improvements within a team concept — then 2023-24 will have been a wasted season in Washington.
Advertisement
Problem is, making steady progress during a rebuild is difficult work, especially if defeats pile up at a dizzying rate. Stalled rebuilds litter recent NBA history. It took the Sacramento Kings more than a decade to transition from their Chris Webber, Peja Stojaković and Vlade Divac heyday to the Western Conference contender they are now. The Orlando Magic sputtered for years after Dwight Howard’s exit. Last season’s Houston Rockets, despite their recent early lottery picks, also serve as a cautionary tale.
For the Wizards’ rebuild to gain traction this season, the organization needs to solve a problem that plagued it last year, something that Tommy Sheppard identified publicly during the final days of his tenure as team president and general manager: not enough accountability.
Sheppard had watched the roster he assembled falter en route to finishing 21st in defensive rating and 28th in one measure of transition defense. More galling, still, was how players and coach Wes Unseld Jr. would say after many dismal losses how the team didn’t play with enough attention to detail defensively and didn’t communicate well enough. Those are correctable errors of effort.
GO DEEPER
Making Wizards an NBA destination will begin with painful — but needed — first steps
On April 7, with his team 34-46, in a moment of candor, Sheppard said: “You get to the end of the season, and if there’s still questions (about how to play defense), if there’s still confusion or anything, then maybe sometimes you either have to simplify or really go back and say, ‘How much accountability (was there) throughout the year to get us to this point? Are we still doing some of the same things?’
“That’s a question for everybody. We all have to dig in and say, ‘What can we do better?’ One of the easiest things is to say, ‘Well, we told them and they’re not listening.’ Well, that’s not the way it works in the NBA. They have to be able to take whatever our scheme is going to be and take it to the court, and then there has to be that carry through.”
Advertisement
The implication in Sheppard’s comment was that no one — not the players, not the coaches, not Sheppard himself — did enough to make sure players were performing how they were supposed to perform on the court. It’s OK to make mistakes, but it’s not OK to continue to make repeated mistakes that stem from a lack of effort, discipline or focus.
To carry that argument to its unstated, but implicit, conclusion: One of the ways Unseld could have coaxed improvement out of his team would have been to reduce the playing time of chronic underachievers. In addition, the team’s best players — Bradley Beal, Kristaps Porziņģis and Kyle Kuzma — did not hold themselves to a high-enough standard on defense and, as a result, could not effectively police their own locker room and demand more from their teammates. And Sheppard himself did not do enough as the team’s key decision-maker to populate the roster with enough tough-minded players.
If you think Sheppard said what he said to deflect blame and save his own job, that would be a reasonable conclusion — that is, if others didn’t corroborate his assessment, both publicly and privately.
After the final day of the season, second-year swingman Corey Kispert made a telling comment of his own. Asked to explain why Washington finished with the league’s seventh-worst record, Kispert answered, “It’s hard to change these things sometimes, and I think it’s a mix of accountability from player to player, from coach to player, from player to coach. Within our organization I think that needs to be addressed and fixed.”
The Wizards did indeed endure a significant number of injuries, as Kispert acknowledged, but he also noted that other teams with similar injury issues managed to maintain their identities and adhere to high standards in ways the Wizards did not. The Miami Heat, who are renowned for their “culture,” are one of those teams.
Advertisement
“It’s hard to do the right thing all the time,” Kispert added in April. “Tough conversations and accountability and being uncomfortable in conversations, it’s a hard thing to do over and over and over again, you know? It’s a much easier thing to just kind of let things slide.
“And when you get a team full of guys who don’t really care about their feelings getting hurt and just want to win, that’s when you can unlock something really, really special. That’s something that’s not unique to our team. There are teams across the entire league that struggle with that, too, and I think it’s a majority. There’s a minority of teams that are OK with accountability.”
Now, after Ted Leonsis fired Sheppard in mid-April, after the hirings of Michael Winger as Monumental Basketball president and Will Dawkins as the Wizards’ general manager, the Wizards must work toward becoming one of those high-accountability teams, even if the 2023-24 season, as even Winger and Dawkins have acknowledged, likely will be one in which the Wizards will be underdogs the vast majority of the time. A playoff appearance is not the expectation. Long-term growth is the expectation.
As Kispert said this week, “If you want to build a successful organization over a long period of time, like we’re trying to do, you need to have accountability, not only between players but between players and coaches and then between coaches and players as well, like both ways. There’s no possible way you can put together a winning culture without that.”
GO DEEPER
‘This is what I’ve been working for’: Tyus Jones relishes his opportunity in Washington
With Beal and Porziņģis traded away, the primary responsibility for player-to-player accountability and player-to-coach accountability must fall on the players whose prior teams contended for championships and are approaching their primes: Kuzma, Poole and point guard Tyus Jones. As highly respected as 38-year-old center Taj Gibson is within the Wizards’ locker room, as well liked as 30-year-old big man Anthony Gill is, it’s the players who play and produce the most who can have the loudest voices — if they walk the walk.
Kuzma and Poole are expected to lead Washington in shot attempts this season, which is understandable given their track records as scorers and the NBA titles on their résumés. At the same time, though, Kuzma and Poole have to keep their bad shots to a relative minimum. If they hold themselves accountable for playing unselfishly, for passing up average shots for themselves to create good or great shots for teammates, then the Wizards have a chance to play with accountability on offense.
“It comes from the players,” Kuzma said, “and everybody here is really high character and cares about their craft. … It’s always about policing yourself first, because if you don’t police yourself, then it’s not really going to be a team.”
Advertisement
Defense is a larger area of concern, a riddle the defensive-minded Unseld did not solve during his two prior years as Washington’s head coach. While having positional size, quickness and athleticism are critically important qualities that the Wizards haven’t had enough of in recent years, defense also is about effort and concentration. In the NBA, defense is the end of the floor where accountability is most lacking, but the Wizards have been habitual underachievers for years now.
Winger and Dawkins will use the 2023-24 season as an evaluation period, not just for the players they inherited or brought aboard in recent transactions but also for Unseld.
Although the front office exercised its 2024-25 team option on Unseld, as The Washington Post reported, that decision was not an endorsement of Unseld’s long-term future with the franchise. Instead, it was a move made in line within commonly accepted industry standards. Few teams would want to go into a season with a head coach who could be viewed by players as a contractual lame duck. Exercising Unseld’s fourth-year option, which occurred at least two months ago, is merely a guarantee that Unseld will be paid by the Wizards for the 2024-25 season; it is not a guarantee the Wizards will continue to employ him at the outset of the 2024-25 season.
The best way Unseld can help his chances will be to help his young players improve, not just their individual skills or their individual stats but also within the areas of the game that coaches label “winning plays” — contributions such as setting effective screens for teammates, playing hard on defense and following defensive assignments.
To help his players make progress, Unseld will have to hold everyone accountable. Doing that involves more than merely pointing out individual mistakes during team film-review sessions. Holding everyone accountable means cutting individuals’ playing time if those individuals continue to make the same mistakes of effort.
Sheppard is gone. But he was right about this. If the Wizards do not correct the organization-wide problem he identified, the first season of their rebuild will not be as productive as it ought to be.
(Top photo of Sashi Brown, Tommy Sheppard and Ted Leonsis: Ned Dishman / NBAE via Getty Images)
