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Are Wizards Stuck in Basketball Purgatory?

Congratulations to the Washington Wizards on a good season! Congrats are truly in order. The Wizards finished last season with a 41-41 record and missed the playoffs. They got off to a very rocky start this season going 2-8 in the first 10 games. To finish the season losing a game 7 in the second round of the playoffs is certainly an accomplishment. My biggest issue isn’t that they lost game 7 to the Celtics it’s how they lost.
I’m just going to come right out and say it…… Kelly Olynyk, really? He looks like an high school girls volleyball player. The Wizards made this dude look like Hedo Turoglu! Olynyk scored 26 points. He used and abused Ian Mahinmi, I will touch more on Mahinmi later in this post. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing from the Wizards defense. It’s one thing to let Isiah Thomas (IT) go off, it’s another thing to let Olynyk destroy you for 26 points.
I’m not saying the Wizards are the Pistons from the 80s (the bad boys), but to give up 26 points to Kelly Olynyk is completely unacceptable. This lost to the Celtics put major emphasis on the defensive issues the Wizards had all season. Most of their issue have to do with personnel chemistry.
John Wall and Bradley Beal are solid on ball defenders. They do a good job on most players in the league. Both of them are aggressive defenders. That means they play the passing lanes a lot and love to try to swipe the ball away from the ball handler once he is past them. There is nothing wrong with being an aggressive defender unless you don’t have a rim protected to stop the ball once a player gets past them. The Wizards don’t have that.
Ian Mahinmi was acquired to be the Wizards rim protected. He is supposed to pick up the slack with help defense and contest shots when players attack the rim. Due to injuries, Mahinmi only played in 31 games and wasn’t very effective all season. I will not pin all the defensive issues on Mahinmi because Markieff Morris was certainly a liability in that department as well. Anytime Kelly Olynyk scores 26 points, there is more than enough blame to go around.
Simply put the Wizards big men just weren’t effective enough on defense to get the win. Marcin Gortat is a sold center but he is to slow and has bad help defensive awareness. There were too many times that he vacated the middle trying to get out to Hortford leaving the paint completely open. Morris had no answer for Olynyk or Hortford. The Wizards issues are on the defensive side of the ball and many of those issues are with the big men. With money tied up in bad contracts, they won’t be able to make many improvements this offseason. Are the Wizards stuck in purgatory?


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