What has happened to the Wizards?
WASHINGTON –The Washington Wizards are headed for the playoffs in the Eastern Conference. But they're not playing like a playoff team, and if if they don't rediscover their winning ways, they could be headed for an early first-round exit.
Not that long ago, the Wizards weren't just a playoff team. They were one of the top teams in the East.
On the morning of Jan. 20, the Wizards were 29-13, in second place and cruising to their first 50-win season since 1978-79.
Since then, they are 5-14, losing ground for a top-4 seed and trying to fight off the Milwaukee Bucks for the fifth. They need to win 16 of their final 21 games to reach 50 wins.
They're looking at a first-round series starting on the road against Toronto, Cleveland or Chicago, and the remainder of the schedule isn't friendly: 15 of their remaining games are against teams guaranteed to make the playoffs or playing for final two postseason spots in the East.
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A season that was once promising and filled with high expectations has been replaced by questions and diminished expectations.
Randy Wittman pointed to one specific area: effort.
"Effort and non-effort, that's kind of basically where it is," the Wizards coach said. "Until we do that, we're going to struggle. It's all of us together in that. I wish it was a strategy thing. We just take too many plays off."
After watching video of Tuesday's 97-92 loss to the injury-depleted Chicago Bulls – no Derrick Rose, no Jimmy Butler, no Taj Gibson – Wittman counted 11 Chicago layups that he said were the direct result of "quitting on a play in the half-court, five-on-five. That's hard to do."
There have been bad losses during the past 19 games, dropping back-to-back contests against the Minnesota Timberwolves and Philadelphia 76ers, two of the worst teams in the league, and Washington hasn't beaten a guaranteed playoff team since a win against the Bulls on Jan. 14.
What propelled the Wizards through the first half of the season has disappeared on them. They were 13th in offensive efficiency, scoring 104.2 points per 100 possessions. Since the 29-13 start, Washington is scoring just 98.2 points per 100 possessions, better than just five other teams.
The Wizards' three-point proficiency has abandoned them, too. They led the league in three-point shooting (38.8%) as they raced to the second-best record in the East in mid-January. But since, Washington is shooting just 31% on threes.
Part of that can be traced to the absence of shooting guard Bradley Beal, who returned to the lineup Saturday after missing eight games with an injured leg. But Rasual Butler, Garrett Temple and John Wall all cooled off from three-point range.
Washington's defense has not been that bad of late. The Wizards were top-10, allowing 100.1 points per 100 possessions in the first half of the season. Since then, they're giving up 101.4 points per 100 possessions.
"When you play well and you win, a majority of your plays are good effort plays," Wittman said. "You're going to have screw-ups that are going to happen. We need to screw up aggressively, doing things too hard. Our screw-ups right now are because of a lack of effort. Right now, the pendulum has swung to too many of those plays – three to one that way."
Most good teams go through a down spell during some point of a long 82-game season. Cleveland had its turn early. Toronto has lost five of six games two different times. The Bulls ran into a 5-9 stretch in January and early February.
But a certain point, a bad stretch becomes a trend and a trend sometimes becomes reality. The Wizards have reached that point where they're either going start winning games at a rate they did earlier in the season or they're going to be a team that might not get out of the first round, a step back from last season's second-round effort.
Wittman's message has been heard. "We just have to change our mentality," Beal said. "We just have to get back to playing the way we did earlier in the year. We're taking a lot of shortcuts. We're taking the easy way out instead of working and doing everything we need to do to win.
"We're just trying to get by in a lot of areas in the game instead of just doing the hard things. Once we get back to that, once we start sacrificing ourselves … I think we'll be fine."
Wittman isn't panicking. He recalled last season when the Wizards hovered around .500 for a significant portion of the season but finished the season 16-10.
"We finished strong, played strong … and played some of our best basketball heading into the playoffs," Wittman said. "That can still happen, even going through a little bit of the slide we're going through."