NBA position group rankings: How do the Washington Wizards stack up?
By Cem Yolbulan
As we are inching closer to the start of the NBA regular season, it’s time to look ahead and make projections about what to expect from each team and player. A day doesn’t go by without an NBA analyst releasing some sort of intriguing yet controversial list or ranking. The latest comes from Law Murray of The Athletic. (subscription required) Murray just released his positional group rankings, meaning ranking the strength of each position on every team, including the Washington Wizards.
The criteria for the exercise are described as follows:
"“I chose to rank the teams based on their overall strength at each nominal position, while listing each team’s possible starter as a representative of that position. While the starter is the primary source of evaluation (give it, say, 70 percent), a team’s reserves are taken into consideration.”"
The availability of each individual player and the depth of the position are considered part of the rankings.
Murray identified the Wizards starters as Tyus Jones, Jordan Poole, Kyle Kuzma, Deni Avdija, and Daniel Gafford. Categorizing Kuzma as the SF and Avdija as the PF is certainly disagreeable but it doesn’t change much in the bigger picture.
With the aforementioned rotation, the Wizards ranked 24th in the league at point guard, 19th at shooting guard, 15th at small forward, 22nd at power forward, and 26th at center.
The fact that there is no position that ranks at the very bottom of the league is a plus. To a team that is expected to be the worst team in the league next season, not having bottom-tier rotation in any position should give some hope.
It makes sense that the SF position with Kuzma and the SG position with Jordan Poole are the two strongest positions for the Wizards. In fact, SF is the only position that the Wizards don’t rank below average in the league. This is another example of how the forward position will be Washington’s biggest strength next season.
It’s obviously not ideal to have four out of your five positions rank in the bottom half of the league. In four out of five positions, the Wizards rank 4th out of 5 teams in the Southeast division.
However, that is all fine. This lack of high-end talent is by design. Having Bradley Beal and Kristaps Porzingis would have certainly helped the Wizards be in the top half in those positions, but that would have come at a cost.
A year of development will not only help the Wizards to build for the future, but it will also help the young players grow and move up in these positional rankings next year. We will be keeping an eye out for that.
