Ernie Grunfeld and Randy Wittman: Analog Players in a Digital World
The title of this article is inspired by one of my favorite scenes in the film ‘Ocean’s Thirteen’. Danny Ocean and Rusty Ryan are on a revenge mission to bring down Willy Bank’s newest casino after he under hands their good friend and original benefactor, Reuben Tishkoff. The plan hits a roadblock however when they can’t figure out how to disrupt the casino’s state-of-the-art security system (known as the Greco) to allow the rest of their plan to unfold.
Enter Roman Nagel, a friend of the Ocean’s crew and also former boarding school classmates with the creator of the Greco. Roman’s expertise is supposed to help cross that final hurdle but after listening to a summary of their predicament, he instead utters those famous last words; “You’re analog players in a digital world.”
Now because this is rosy Hollywood, Danny and Rusty eventually figure it out. They use their ingenuity to somehow find a way to stage an artificial earthquake and disrupt the system. The plan is a success, wrongs are officially righted, and the team unwinds with cigars in front of the Bellagio fountains as only they could.
People don’t need to be told twice that real life has no commonality with the silver screen. But it’s also not hard to draw the parallels between those movie characters and two vital pieces of the Washington Wizards organization.
Alas, the particular cruelty in D.C. is that there is no ingenuity to save our Danny and Rusty from irrelevance. They will forever be analog players in an increasingly digital world. And until they aren’t the ones calling the shots and running the team, Washington will never get to enjoy that cigar.
In Ernie Grunfeld and Randy Wittman, the Wizards franchise has a general manager and a coach who blatantly refuse to acknowledge the transformation of the game of basketball. To keen observers of the franchise, this has long been a forgone conclusion and the team’s constant vacillation between tepid success and total abomination is the proof in the pudding.
For the rest of the NBA landscape, this is the first time in 10 years that the Wizards have mattered enough to form a legitimate opinion about their prospects to contend.
After last season’s playoff run, the media lauded Wittman as the savior of the franchise from the Gun-gate days. That summer, Grunfeld reemerged as a likable executive for his savvy moves of acquiring Paul Pierce, Kris Humphries, and DeJuan Blair without affecting the sacred 2016 cap sheet.
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The team responded extremely well out of the gates, topping out 16 games above .500 at a robust 29-13 and 2nd place in the Eastern Conference.
Fast forward 2 months and the wheels have completely fallen off.
After losing to 12-win Minnesota on Wednesday by 20 points, Washington sits at 33-25 and only a ½ game up on 6th place Milwaukee.
Wizards Twitter has been sitting in code red mode for the last two weeks and is ready to explode at any moment. And as expected, the national floodgates have opened.
Deadspin wondered whether the team forgot to fire Wittman after he righted the ship as an interim coach. ESPN labeled the Wizards as skeptics in the advanced analytics movement, highlighting that they have the right personnel in place but do not heed their advice.
The wide open Eastern Conference race has pretty much come down to just two teams (Atlanta and Cleveland) with a third lurking as a flawed dark horse (Toronto). So now Washington stands in very close proximity to no-man’s land; not good enough to compete for titles and not bad enough to earn a high lottery pick. It’s the least enviable position in any sport, but the hardest in basketball specifically to remove oneself from.
Ernie Grunfeld and Randy Wittman would love nothing more than to buy real estate in this space, make the playoffs year after year, and stay competitive in the middling Eastern Conference. They’ve been as stubborn as it comes in changing their methodology and it’s pretty clear they still scout players by comparing them to what they watch in the ‘NBA Hardwood Classics’ series. Anyone who follows this team knows these two aren’t the answer, in either the short or long term.
But how did we get to this position? And where do we go from here?
The Architect:
Ernie Grunfeld was hired by the Wizards in June of 2003 after the unceremonious departure of a guy by the name of Michael Jordan. The franchise receive great fanfare during His Airness’ 2 year stop in DC (sold out all 82 home games) but the dispute between Jordan and owner Abe Pollin ousted MJ from the front office and resulted in Grunfeld taking over what has now become a 12 year reign with the Washingtno Wizards.
While we don’t need to hash out every piece of his history with the team (here’s a quick recap: created the Arenas-era Wizards, signed them all to huge extensions after their primes or major injuries, traded away valuable commodities for veteran role players, tried to build around the ‘Big 3’ of Nick Young, Andray Blatche, and JaVale McGee, subsequently amnestied Blatche before Year 1 of his new extension, whiffed on every draft decision from 2009-2011 except for John Wall, added high priced veterans to turn locker the room into a professional environment, achieved the team’s greatest success since the 1970s), one thing has been made clear; Grunfeld makes a lot of mistakes, knows how to clean them up, and goes overboard on the solution.
Whether it’s somehow unloading Arenas’ $118M extension (by handing out an unnecessary 1st round pick), or pulling off an 11th hour trade for Andre Miller to save the backup point guard position from Eric Maynor’s floater (thereby committing to $10M for the oldest player in the NBA), every positive move Grunfeld has made is done in excess and backtracks on a previous terrible decision.
His proponents often commend him for these transactions while conveniently forgetting he is solely to blame for needing them in the first place. Analyze this season’s roster and it’s easy to see that it has Grunfeld’s fingerprints all over it.
After watching Nene turn his frequent dance with foot and knee problems into annual 20-25 game absences, Grunfeld decided this team needed big man depth to protect against long periods of time without their most influential frontcourt player.
While that theory is certainly true, Grunfeld was convinced the best path forward was to use 6 roster spots on power forwards and centers, none of whom can do anything differently than the other (such as stretch the floor) and all of whom see their minutes consistently jerked around by the head coach.
Taking a look at the guards, Grunfeld almost threw out his shoulder trying to pat himself on the back for the selections of Wall and Bradley Beal in the 2010 and 2012 Drafts respectively. With the backcourt of the future in hand, who needs backups? Grunfeld must’ve expected both to play 82 games a season for 44 minutes a night because there’s certainly no one coming off the bench inspiring anything but grief.
Now with Beal suffering his third stress reaction in as many years, the likes of Garrett Temple, Martell Webster, and Rasual Butler are asked to play critical roles on a playoff team. Sorry, I should clarify – this is a playoff team, in the NBA, in 2015.
If Grunfeld’s greatest strength is to make something out of nothing, then his greatest weakness is definitely talent evaluation (as a rule of thumb, generally you’d like people in charge of player personnel decisions to be strong at that sort of skill, but I digress).
He’s drafted a grand total of TWO all-stars in his entire career as a general manager. Wall was a lock at the #1 pick and Michael Redd was…a solid find, I’ll give him credit for that. While Bradley Beal might make it three on that list, his draft record is littered with now unfathomable decisions.
On the flip side, once Grunfeld notices that he has a decent basketball player on his hands, he won’t wait long to lock that player up, take care of his future and that of his children and grandchildren.
That’s how you end up with Webster, a career reserve with back problems getting $22M and Marcin Gortat, a decent two-way center on the wrong side of 30 getting $60M after each submitted just 1 year of service for the Wizards. Even the John Wall extension (proven smart of course) was given after watching only a 50 game sample size of all-star level basketball.
Wittman gets a lot of flak (as will be covered momentarily) and deservedly so. But just remember who’s to blame for the coaching staff scrambling to find a bench lineup that works with the options on hand. The Patient Zero culprit of mediocrity is Ernie Grunfeld, and it’s time to end the term of the 5th longest tenured active GM in the NBA.
The Executor:
We know the deal is with Randy Wittman at this point.
He’s shown flashes as a good defensive mind, his players have mostly played hard for him, and he leads all NBA coaches (non-Gregg Popovich division) in most ornery responses to reporter questions before they’ve even finished their sentences.
He took over as the head coach in 2012 after Flip Saunders started the season 2-15 or 3-49 or whatever it was and at the time had the lowest winning percentage amongst all qualified coaches in NBA history. However he did manage to turn around his own and the team’s fortunes since, leading the Washington Wizards to their first playoff victory since 1982 and until a month ago seemingly poised for the first 50 win season in almost four decades.
By all accounts, Wittman is a good guy and a positive influence on the players. He took over during a transition period with the team and led them from the doldrums of the East to two wins from the Eastern Conference Finals.
What gets lost in the shuffle of the ‘Fire Wittman’ chants and the rest of the fury emitted from every Wizards-related orifice is that he was once the right man for the job, just not anymore.
There was a time when the locker room needed a disciplinarian; someone who wouldn’t coddle players; someone who would hold them accountable for their on and off court mistakes.
Fortunately, that time has passed entirely. The youngest players on the team (Wall, Beal, Otto Porter) have been total professionals and the veterans are obviously playing the role as expected.
This is the juncture where you really think about important outcomes when Randy Wittman is your head coach. To accept him in this role is to give up on proper player development.
Wall has undoubtedly improved as a decision maker and as a defender but he still struggles to formulate Plan B when Plan A doesn’t work.
The major difference in his game is that Plan A is a little more failsafe (running pick and rolls, finding corner 3 point shooters vs. running 100 mph into the teeth of the defense). Beal meanwhile has convinced himself that he’s ‘more comfortable’ with mid-range jumpers than from, despite shooting 34.5% outside the restricted area vs. 42.4% from beyond the arc, per Vorped.
Porter is the saddest case of them all, now in Year 2 of his once promising career but swapping starter’s minutes with DNP-CDs on consecutive nights without batting an eye.
Wittman’s offense is where creativity sees its final rites. Instead of understanding the roster make up and tailoring an offense that’ll fit those needs, he insists on maintaining his philosophies and watching unqualified players trying their best to accommodate his demands.
An offense led by the fastest point guard in the league and two athletic big men should not find themselves every year in the bottom half of the NBA in pace. A team that shoots the 3-pointer as prolifically as the Wizards shouldn’t spend their entire existence floating around 18-feet from the basket.
And the idea that Wittman rejects ‘analytics’ because he values open shots over smart shots provides all the needed evidence for why Washington can produce no better than a league average offense and one that scores very few easy points (namely free throws and 3s).
I already drew attention to the barren roster that Grunfeld has cobbled together after the top 4-5 guys. This of course is not Wittman’s fault because he can only play the hand he’s dealt. What is on him though is how he deploys lineups to best maximize their talent.
To reiterate his stubbornness, Wittman is pretty insistent on starting the 2nd and 4th quarters with all-bench lineups (occasionally featuring one starter, like Bradley Beal). This tactic would work wonders if he was coaching Golden State and rolling out a lineup of Livingston-Barbosa-Iguodala-Lee-Speights.
But here in Washington, that team looks more like Sessions-Webster-Butler-Humphries-Seraphin. I’d suggest staggering lineups with more offensive talent on the floor, but we know how that’ll end up. Let’s just move on.
The Verdict:
The Wizards aren’t quite in the doom and gloom state that most shell-shocked fans feel right after the way the past two months have gone. The team has a superstar, a second potential star, and multiple good pieces behind them.
The analytics department, though thoroughly ignored, exists in decent shape, and lest we forget Verizon Center was one of the earliest arenas to be outfitted with the SportVU tracking cameras.
The team isn’t constructed and doesn’t play a style that is conducive to the new age trends in the game, but the infrastructure is in place to get there one day soon.
The problem remains that two primary people involved won’t be the ones to carry that mantle. With Grunfeld and Wittman at the helm, this team may have been a title contender in the 1990’s for several years.
In today’s NBA, the Houston Rockets have already attempted 40+ 3’s in a single game nine times this year and the Wizards are growling about not liking a shot that they hit at a top-5 clip in the league (which also has a benefit of being worth 1 more point than a normal shot).
The Washington Wizards seem destined to stumble into the playoffs and either catch an undermanned Bulls team at the wrong time and advance or get wiped off the face of the Earth by the Cavs or Raptors.
Whatever the specific outcome of the season, the plan moving forward should not change. Leonsis has shown loyalty to a fault but the time is now to clean house and bring in a front office and coaching staff committed to playing basketball the way today’s NBA has dictated.
Let’s go find the next Danny and Rusty. Maybe with a little more ingenuity this time.