The Wizards Have Turned a Corner, But Are They Facing a Wall?

Who are the "real" Washington Wizards?

Are they the 2014-15 squad that won 46 games and came within a John Wall injury of going to the Eastern Conference Finals? Or are they the 2015-16 team that slumped to 41-41, missed the playoffs entirely, and fired their coach? Is Washington the team that started this season 2-8 and was five games under .500 as recently as the middle of December? Or is it the team that has ripped off a 14-5 stretch with the sixth-best pace-adjusted scoring differential in the league since that point?

Outwardly, the Wizards are confident that their recent hot streak is more representative of the team's true quality than the early-season stretch where they ranked in the bottom half of the league in both offensive and defensive efficiency.

"Coach challenged everybody," says John Wall, noting that Scott Brooks took the team to task over its rough start and sparked a turnaround. "Everybody looked in the mirror and started to do they job a lot better."

"We're playing better," Brooks says. "Offensively, we're playing with a good flow. We're sharing the basketball. We're making shots. Guys are playing well within their role. Like every team, there'll be some off nights that you have to somehow manage to put yourself in a position to win."

To their credit, the Wizards have indeed found ways to win every kind of game over these last few weeks. During the recent run of improved play, 14 of Washington's 19 games have entered clutch time, which NBA.com defines as a game that was within five points at any time during the final five minutes of regulation or overtime. The Wiz have won ten of those 14 games while outscoring their opponents by 23.5 points per 100 possessions during clutch minutes. That's a major improvement over their 7-9 record in clutch games during their 9-14 start to the year.

Marcin Gortat says the Wizards simply "got tired of losing" and have locked in with better concentration on defense at the end of close games. A better explanation is simple randomness. A team's record in close games tends to regress toward .500 over time, and a somewhat extreme version of that is what has happened to Washington so far this season.

Win or lose, maybe it's not such a good sign that the Wizards keep getting themselves into games that come down to the final few minutes. A surer indicator that they've really turned a corner would have been blowing teams out over the last few weeks. They're on pace to play 59 clutch time games by the end of the season, more than any team has played in any season in the last 20 years. If they win around half of those, the Wizards will have to go something like 13-10 or 14-9 in non-clutch situations to get to the 44 wins it took to snag the East's No. 8 seed last season. They're 6-6 in those kinds of games to this point—not quite good enough.

Brooks, though, seems happy with the direction of the team right now, and the Wizards are confident that they'll be able to put games away with better play earlier on. They cite clearer delineation of roles, improved defense (they ranked 22nd in defensive efficiency through 23 games, and 13th in the 19 games since), and scorching play from John Wall, Bradley Beal, and Otto Porter in particular as reasons for optimism.

"Otto is playing out of his mind right now," Gortat says. "He's making shot after shot after shot. John is aggressive. Brad is obviously being Brad. So, we've got a lot of good stuff going on right now."

In the aforementioned 19-game stretch, Wall is averaging 22.2 points and 11.1 assists per game while shooting 48 percent from the field. Beal is at 21.8 points per game with 46-38-83 shooting splits and a spike to nearly five free-throws a night. Porter has chipped in with 15.5 points, 5.4 rebounds, and 1.7 assists while shooting 55 percent from the field and 50 percent from three (in other words, as Wall says, Porter is "shooting the piss out of the ball"), all while swinging between three positions on defense. That's the foundational trio the Wizards want to build their team around, and it's hard not to draw a straight line from that level of performance to the 14-5 record since mid-December.

The Wizards have been good with their perimeter triad on the floor all year, but they've taken it to another level during this run. Maybe just as important, though, has been the big leap in performance level when the trio is split up.

The Wizards' bench was a disaster at the start of the season. Gortat described it as "one of the worst benches in the league" in mid-November—and he was right. It didn't improve much over the next month or so. Since that point, though, Washington's subs have begun to approach respectability. Wall has noticed the improvement. "I think everybody's understanding their role," he says. "Those guys are sharing the ball a lot more in the second unit, moving the ball side to side. Guys are making shots. Guys are putting in the work to knock down shots."

Brooks is still searching for a consistent group that he goes to night after night, but he's comfortable cycling through so long as he continues to get better results than he did early on.

"I think it's important that they all understand that they just have to be ready," Brooks says of his reserves. "I've been in that position as a player. You want an opportunity and you have to be ready to perform when you do get that chance. And I think our guys have done a good job of when they haven't played, when I do throw them in there and give them some minutes, they've played well."

You can survive while getting outscored by only 1.5 points per 100 possessions in the minutes where your big three is either split up or on the bench. You can't say the same about getting blasted by nearly ten points per 100. That's like being a full point worse than the Nets for nearly half your minutes, which is simply untenable for a team with designs on a playoff berth.

And make no mistake, that's still the goal here. You don't build a team with a $104 million payroll (top ten in the league) to miss the playoffs or go home in the first round. Whether Washington can actually get in the dance and advance is still an open question. If the Wizards are that team from early in year, they'll be watching the postseason at home. If they're the team from the last month or so, they'll get in—and then battle for the right to lose to Cleveland in the second round. That doesn't seem like a whole lot of bang for your buck. Randy Wittman was fired as head coach after last season; another meh campaign followed by a quick postseason ouster might finally be enough to cost GM Ernie Grunfeld his job.

The Wizards, at least right now, are in limbo. They're surely not tanking, or even in that stage where they'd be OK not making the playoffs. The roster's too expensive for that. John Wall's too good for that. But they're also not contenders. Not even close. They don't have the two-way strength, or enough good players. Even during their recent run, they're not quite in the top ten on both sides of the ball, which is generally a prerequisite for true contention in the NBA.

Wall's a true star, probably a top-15 player in the league. Beal is a worthy sidekick. Porter has emerged as a righteous third banana. Gortat is an above-average starter. There's just not really much beyond that.

Markieff Morris hasn't given them enough, consistently enough, to justify the lottery pick price they paid for him in a trade with Phoenix last season. Morris has occasional spurts where he looks like the player they envisioned stretching the floor at power forward, hammering mismatches in the post and switching pick-and-rolls, but those stretches simply don't come often enough. He has made only 32 percent of his threes in Washington—down slightly from 32.4 percent in Phoenix, and that's with Wall setting him up with better-quality looks than he had before. He has not really developed as a playmaker. He's not a great rebounder. His defensive versatility has not been quite as useful as hoped.

The bench may be better than it was at the start of the year, but it's still pretty bad, and it's not likely to be saved by the return of injured big-money summer acquisition Ian Mahinmi. Even during this run, the Wizards have been outscored by 2.2 points per 100 possessions when one or more of their starters has been out of the game, and they've basically collapsed into dust with Wall off the floor (-9.9 per 100) because there's nobody else who can consistently make plays for others off the bounce. Trey Burke is not scaring anyone when he puts the ball on the floor. Tomas Satoransky is an intriguing prospect who should turn into a solid role player as he adjusts to being stateside, but right now he's a turnover machine who can't shoot. Jason Smith hasn't missed a mid-range jumper in what seems like forever, but that's a house of cards. He's never been a particularly high-level role player—more of a replacement-level one. Kelly Oubre has shown flashes, but not much more.

One wonders if there might be a trade on the horizon for the Wizards, but it doesn't seem like there's a deal that would push them over the top into true East contender-dom, at least not with Paul Millsap apparently off the market. Millsap would be a much better version of the player Washington thought it was getting in Morris, someone who can stretch the floor and punish mismatches and make plays off the bounce and scoot all over the court defensively. He'd work magic with Wall and Beal and fit seamlessly between Porter and Gortat. But he'd also come at a great cost, one that the Wizards might not be prepared, or even able, to pay. Not after a summer that saw them fail to get a phone call with Kevin Durant, strike out on Al Horford, and scramble to spend tens of millions on relatively unproductive players (Mahimi, Smith, the forgotten Andrew Nicholson) whose long-term contracts are cap-eating negative assets.

Is there another move out there that would push the Wiz into the Toronto-Boston tier? I'm not so sure, especially not with the Sacramento Kings fooling themselves into thinking they're a real playoff-caliber team because the race for the West's eight-seed happens to be a joke this year. Sacramento probably wouldn't let the Wizards reunite Wall and DeMarcus Cousins anyway, but there would at least be more rumblings about him being dealt were the Kings their usual seven or eight games out right now. Instead, there are max extension rumors. As for Carmelo Anthony? He says he's not going anywhere, and he's the one who gets to decide that. Baltimore's home for Melo, so maybe he'd be open to it, but he's long seemed adamant about staying in New York.

Nobody else potentially on the market moves the needle enough to be worth it. The Wizards, for now, might just be stuck in the middle. That's OK while Wall is still under contract for two more seasons, but they're going to have to figure out a way to acquire someone who can push them to the next level, and that'll be more difficult once they hand Porter the extension that looks like it's coming his way. The road to the top is unclear this moment, and getting there appears easier said than done.

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