Wizards Blasted by Atlanta Hawks. Again.

The Tuesday night loss to the Atlanta Hawks was bad. The loss last night was worse. The Wizards fell behind quickly, made a first quarter run when the Hawks slacked off early, and then got their doors blown off. Again.

I’ve now written several versions of a sentence that communicates the idea that the competitive portion of this game ended early. They all landed wrong because in truth, there was no competitive portion. The players wearing Wizards uniforms tried. I have no reason to think Brian Keefe and his staff didn’t give a professional effort on the coaching front.

But the roster — designed to lose and lose badly — was missing several of its best players, and against a semi-competent team playing for something, there was no hope.

Less than four minutes into the game, Hawks legend/broadcaster Dominique Wilkins said it was going to be a blowout win for Atlanta. The score at the time: 14-2. It would be another minute of game time until Tre Johnson hit a three, which was Washington’s first field goal of the game.

Acknowledging the above is not complaining. Well, it is complaining because I love watching good basketball. This kinda begs the question of why I’ve spent so many years watching the Wizards and Bullets, and I don’t have a satisfactory answer. Over the past couple decades, I’ve taken to saying that I jumped on the bandwagon in 1978, and the exits are poorly marked.

In this one, the Wizards were annihilated by CJ McCollum and Corey Kispert — who they traded to Atlanta earlier this season for Trae Young, who may one day take the floor for Washington.

McCollum took his former teammates to school, pumping in 25 points on 19 shots in 26 minutes. The NBA mantra he got what he wanted was invented for games like this. Wizards defenders tried to slow McCollum. He was just better — routinely maneuvering them where he wanted to go and then pulling the trigger on the shot he wanted. If he’d actually been hot (9-19 from the floor and just 2-8 from three), the damage would have been worse.

Speaking of getting hot and causing worse damage, Kispert feasted on open looks to score a career high 33 points, including 22 in the first half — tying his career-best scoring output for a half. Kispert kept getting wide open threes, and I kept rewinding the action to see why.

Examples?

• With about a minute left in the first quarter, the Hawks had the ball in transition — two Hawks running up on offense vs. two Wizards back and in position to defend. Justin Champagnie picked up the ball. Will Riley for some reason just drifted back towards the basket — ignoring Kispert (a dangerous three-point shooter, especially in transition) sprinting to the corner. I jotted KYP (know your personnel) in my notes, which is pretty ridiculous considering these guys were teammates who went through training camp together.
• The very next possession — a Hawks transition possession — Anthony Gill was on an island needing to defend two. As the ball went to Kispert on the wing, Gill took his first step…towards Jock Landale in the corner. He redirected quickly, but Kispert got another open look (which he hit).
• To start the second quarter, Atlanta ran a basic pindown for Kispert. Jaden Hardy was trailing, but Gill was dropped way into the lane, so Kispert got yet another open shot.

The Wizards did react. About a minute later, they overplayed Kispert at the three-point line, and he responded with an easy drive for a layup. That bucket gave him 19 points with more than 10 minutes left in the second quarter. He’d been on the court for about seven minutes of playing time at that point.

Thoughts & Observations

• Tre Johnson has been guilty of holding the ball and not passing to open teammates when routine passes could initiate the offensive flow. Tristan Vukcevic gave a classic (but muted) “WTF?” gesture Tuesday night. Last night, other teammates had similar reactions. In addition to get the offense moving passes he missed, he either didn’t recognize or chose not to make simple passes to teammates wide open at the three-point line. Not something to worry about, but perhaps something worth monitoring.
• The Hawks had a giveaway going, which they decided to do by laying out t-shirts on seats. The result: pink seat backs that served to highlight how many empty seats there were.
• The Hawks broadcast is an often entertaining product at the intersection of interesting basketball insights, poor preparation, and mistakes.
• Atlanta play-by-play man Bob Rathbun (who I knew a little when he was calling games for Old Dominion University) very carefully mispronounces Vukcevic’s name. For the record, it’s VOOK-suh-vitch. Not VOOK-eh-vitch. Not VOOCH-eh-vitch. VOOK-suh-vitch.
• After saying the game would be a Hawks blowout, Wilkins watched as the Wizards went on a run. When they got the score to 20-18, Wilkins said, “I didn’t see this coming.” Atlanta immediately responded with a run of their own, and the game was never close again.
• At the 4:44 mark of the first quarter, Bilal Coulibaly hit a pullup midrange jumper. According to play-by-play data, about 4% of Coulibaly’s shots have come from that distance this season.
• Another Wilkins comment: “Riley has no idea what he’s doing on the floor right now.”
• More ‘Nique? After Johnson drove and dunked, Wilkins said, “He’s standing there posing. You just want to say, ‘Young man, you’re down 17.‘ ”
• At the half, Rathbun had a good line: “The old Wizards are sticking it to the new Wizards.”
• The Wizards developed a theme in my notes at the end of the first half and start of the second — “dumb” fouls. They included a pointless push by Johnson that resulted in a McCollum four-point play, an inexplicable take foul by Coulibaly, and then a non-flagrant foul that should have been a flagrant on Johnson.
• Bub Carrington is not a good lob passer.
• No one from the Wizards actually played well last night. Gill led the team in total production with a below-average 80 PPA. Johnson was the only player to crack average, and his game was just a 103. Average is 100.

Four Factors

Below are the four factors that decide wins and losses in basketball — shooting (efg), rebounding (offensive rebounds), ball handling (turnovers), fouling (free throws made).

The four factors are measured by:

• eFG% (effective field goal percentage, which accounts for the three-point shot)
• OREB% (offensive rebound percentage)
• TOV% (turnover percentage — turnovers divided by possessions)
• FTM/FGA (free throws made divided by field goal attempts)

Stats & Metrics

PPA is my overall production metric, which credits players for things they do that help a team win (scoring, rebounding, playmaking, defending) and dings them for things that hurt (missed shots, turnovers, bad defense, fouls).

PPA is a per possession metric designed for larger data sets. In small sample sizes, the numbers can get weird. In PPA, 100 is average, higher is better and replacement level is 45. For a single game, replacement level isn’t much use, and I reiterate the caution about small samples sometimes producing weird results.

POSS is the number of possessions each player was on the floor in this game.

ORTG = offensive rating, which is points produced per individual possessions x 100. League average so far this season is listed in the Four Factors table above. Points produced is not the same as points scored. It includes the value of assists and offensive rebounds, as well as sharing credit when receiving an assist.

USG = offensive usage rate. Average is 20%. Median so far this season is 17.7%.

ORTG and USG are versions of stats created by former Wizards assistant coach Dean Oliver and modified by me. ORTG is an efficiency measure that accounts for the value of shooting, offensive rebounds, assists and turnovers. USG includes shooting from the floor and free throw line, offensive rebounds, assists and turnovers.

+PTS = “Plus Points” is a measure of the points gained or lost by each player based on their efficiency in this game compared to league average efficiency on the same number of possessions. A player with an offensive rating (points produced per possession x 100) of 100 who uses 20 possessions would produce 20 points. If the league average efficiency is 115, the league — on average — would produced 23.0 points in the same 20 possessions. So, the player in this hypothetical would have a +PTS score of -3.0.

Players are sorted by total production in the game.