Yesterday evening, news broke that the Washington Wizards were trading John Wall and a moderately protected 2023 first-round pick to Houston for Russell Westbrook. As the two players have essentially years and dollars remaining on their contracts, the deal is a straight swap of two of the more athletic point guards of the last decade as time and injuries have stolen some of that burst. I’ll leave it for others to describe the whys and what fors that made this move happen in order to focus on what some of the on-court impacts might be.
How will Russell Westbrook look in Washington?
With Westbrook coming off of a Third Team All-NBA selection in his one year in Houston, it might seem counterintuitive to be skeptical of what he will bring to the table in Washington. However, the success he found during his Rockets tenure came in a context unlikely to be replicated in D.C. Westbrook’s best moments came after Houston fully embraced small ball by first excising Clint Capela from their rotation and then trading him to Atlanta. In that construct, Westbrook was used almost as would be a skilled center in a traditional offense, operating mostly from the middle of the floor and seldom spotting up outside the arc.
This was for the best, as continuing a trend of the last several years, Westbrook is no longer a reliable long-distance shooter, hitting only 25.8 percent of his 3-pointers, the lowest mark since his second season in the league (when he attempted only 104) and his third straight campaign. Once the Rockets replaced Capela with a fourth shooter in most lineups, Westbrook achieved liftoff. In 23 games from the turn of the new year until the COVID-19 shutdown, he averaged 31.7 points per game on above-average efficiency (54.2 Effective Field Goal Percentage and 57.6 and True Shooting) despite his sky-high usage (35.0). However, until Houston made that strategic change, he had been much more of an empty calorie scorer where whatever the benefits of his 24.2 points per contest, they were outweighed by his ghastly efficiency (45.4 eFG%, 50.4 TS%) on lower but still extremely high usage (31.4) in the 2019 portion of the season.
Meanwhile, his struggles in the bubble have been well documented, but we should probably give an injury, conditioning and COVID-related mulligan to that performance beyond noting that he performed poorly to the point of actively harming the Rockets in the postseason, which one suspects is a big part of the reason Harden soured on the pairing after only one season.
The bigger concerns about Westbrook aren’t about his own production per se. Given his druthers as far as playstyle, few players have been as ball-dominant and context warping as Westbrook. Since the introduction of player tracking data prior to the 2013-14 season, Westbrook’s last six OKC seasons have been among the top 15 highest Total Usage seasons among players appearing in at least 1,000 minutes in a given year. This includes three of the top four individual seasons between 2014-15 and 2016-17. Between 2015-16 and 2017-18, Westbrook was responsible for three of the seven individual seasons where a player has possessed the ball for more than half of the time his team has been on offense while he is in the game.
The effect on his teammates can be seen via quick comparisons of how Paul George and Victor Oladipo operated during their last season before playing with Westbrook, their first season with Westbrook, and after their first season after appearing with Russ:
Wings Before and After Westbrook
While George bumped his usage rates a bit higher in his second OKC campaign in 2018-19 (perhaps not coincidentally, the Thunder had their best post-Durant season with George moving to the fore that season), it is notable that he returned to a role similar to his Indiana days despite playing alongside another ball-dominant wing with the Clippers in Kawhi Leonard. While Westbrook did defer to James Harden, a little, it remains to be seen how a partnership with Beal might evolve. To the extent the Wiz are able to replicate the mini-ball Rockets style whereby Westbrook can play off of Beal with the floor spread, he might be able to achieve closer to his January through March 2020 efficiency rather than his fall 2019 destructiveness.
Perhaps more worrisome than what Washington can expect from Westbrook’s individual impact are the possible effects on the development of the Wizards’ top prospects. In OKC, young wings like Terrence Ferguson and Hamidou Diallo were relegated to the most bystanderish of roles playing alongside Westbrook. Even a big like Domantas Sabonis saw his playmaking and all-around game blossom when given more opportunities after being traded away from the Thunder. Will Washington’s prospects such as Rui Hachimura, Troy Brown and Deni Avdija get the opportunities needed to flourish or at least properly evaluated as they move through their rookie deals? Or will they be reduced to the same kind of “corners only” role in which Ferguson found himself?
Another open question is: To what extent will Westbrook address the Wizards’ biggest weakness in recent seasons: defense? While his peripatetic style and ability to ignite the fast break has given him a decent defensive reputation for portions of his career, this has to be balanced with his tendencies to gamble for steals and ball watch, making it hard to integrate him into a team defensive scheme. Floor-time metrics such as Regularized Adjusted Plus/Minus (“RAPM”), have tended to find Westbrook to have been a slight positive on that end of the floor in recent seasons, while Wall’s high-level early career performances have tapered away to well below average. Overall perhaps some room for cautious optimism on this front.
How will John Wall look in Houston?
For starters, weird. After spending all 10 of his seasons with the Wizards, Wall in another jersey is going to take some getting used to. The Rockets’ point guard spot is becoming a little like Spinal Tap’s drummer in this regard having cycled through 3 recent All-Stars in as many seasons.
In terms of on the floor, the first question is, of course, where is Wall physically. Following a series of serious injuries, including an Achilles rupture, the electric speed which made Wall an All-Star is almost certainly gone and not coming back. (For more on Achilles injuries and recovery after, my conversation with Dr. Josh Baxter was hugely enlightening.) So any notion that he’s going to come close to max level performance should probably be squelched. That’s the downside.
The upside is that Wall has always been an underrated reader of the game, and his ability to see read screens and see passing angles. Even if he might not have the burst to create the sorts of creases and angles which led him to be one of the more reliable generators of open corner threes for teammates — he has gotten Trevor Ariza paid at least twice — he will likely still be able to see and make the right play. While this skill might have been somewhat wasted in Mike D’Antoni’s stripped down and isolation heavy version of the Rockets’ offense, to the degree that new coach Stephen Silas re-integrates some more traditional pick-and-roll play, Wall coming off ball screens from Christian Wood could be a driver of at least decent offense.
Still, for as much as I talked about Westbrook being ball-dominant as a worry for Washington, Harden has become just as much of the heliocentric heart of Houston’s attack as Westbrook ever was in OKC. This likely means that Wall will have to play off the ball more than at any point in his career. Though this might prove uncomfortable for Wall, there are some indications he might have some success playing off of Harden at times. Before the Wizards decided to move him, there was similar concern about Wall’s off-ball ability due to Beal’s emergence as the team’s primary drink-stirrer. As discussed with Wizards’ beat writer Fred Katz back in September, there have been some positive indicators in this regard:
I do think Wall’s lack of floor spacing ability is overblown. For his career, he has hit 38.6 percent of his uncontested 3s, and though it’s on a low volume, he has shot a combined 38.3 percent on catch-and-shoot 3-pointers since 2016-17. A bigger part of the adjustment than “improving as a shooter” will be the willingness to catch and shoot or quickly attack a closeout in second-side action rather than catching and holding.
Given Harden’s centrality to the Rockets, that willingness to catch and shoot will likely be mandated to some degree. But he is clearly better equipped to play that off-ball role in a more or less traditional offense than was Westbrook.
As mentioned above, Wall has gone from being a borderline elite point guard defender early in his career to well below average even before the recent spate of injuries, and while there may be some improvement/reversion towards respectability based on a smaller offensive role and perhaps more imposed accountability due to a lower place on the pecking order, the diminution of his athleticism, especially the decline in lateral quickness, which Dr. Baxter noted could easily result from an Achilles rupture, are going to be hard to overcome.
Yesterday evening, news broke that the Washington Wizards were trading John Wall and a moderately protected 2023 first-round pick to Houston for Russell Westbrook. As the two players have essentially years and dollars remaining on their contracts, the deal is a straight swap of two of the more athletic point guards of the last decade as time and injuries have stolen some of that burst. I’ll leave it for others to describe the whys and what fors that made this move happen in order to focus on what some of the on-court impacts might be.
How will Russell Westbrook look in Washington?
With Westbrook coming off of a Third Team All-NBA selection in his one year in Houston, it might seem counterintuitive to be skeptical of what he will bring to the table in Washington. However, the success he found during his Rockets tenure came in a context unlikely to be replicated in D.C. Westbrook’s best moments came after Houston fully embraced small ball by first excising Clint Capela from their rotation and then trading him to Atlanta. In that construct, Westbrook was used almost as would be a skilled center in a traditional offense, operating mostly from the middle of the floor and seldom spotting up outside the arc.
This was for the best, as continuing a trend of the last several years, Westbrook is no longer a reliable long-distance shooter, hitting only 25.8 percent of his 3-pointers, the lowest mark since his second season in the league (when he attempted only 104) and his third straight campaign. Once the Rockets replaced Capela with a fourth shooter in most lineups, Westbrook achieved liftoff. In 23 games from the turn of the new year until the COVID-19 shutdown, he averaged 31.7 points per game on above-average efficiency (54.2 Effective Field Goal Percentage and 57.6 and True Shooting) despite his sky-high usage (35.0). However, until Houston made that strategic change, he had been much more of an empty calorie scorer where whatever the benefits of his 24.2 points per contest, they were outweighed by his ghastly efficiency (45.4 eFG%, 50.4 TS%) on lower but still extremely high usage (31.4) in the 2019 portion of the season.
Meanwhile, his struggles in the bubble have been well documented, but we should probably give an injury, conditioning and COVID-related mulligan to that performance beyond noting that he performed poorly to the point of actively harming the Rockets in the postseason, which one suspects is a big part of the reason Harden soured on the pairing after only one season.
The bigger concerns about Westbrook aren’t about his own production per se. Given his druthers as far as playstyle, few players have been as ball-dominant and context warping as Westbrook. Since the introduction of player tracking data prior to the 2013-14 season, Westbrook’s last six OKC seasons have been among the top 15 highest Total Usage seasons among players appearing in at least 1,000 minutes in a given year. This includes three of the top four individual seasons between 2014-15 and 2016-17. Between 2015-16 and 2017-18, Westbrook was responsible for three of the seven individual seasons where a player has possessed the ball for more than half of the time his team has been on offense while he is in the game.
The effect on his teammates can be seen via quick comparisons of how Paul George and Victor Oladipo operated during their last season before playing with Westbrook, their first season with Westbrook, and after their first season after appearing with Russ:
Wings Before and After Westbrook
While George bumped his usage rates a bit higher in his second OKC campaign in 2018-19 (perhaps not coincidentally, the Thunder had their best post-Durant season with George moving to the fore that season), it is notable that he returned to a role similar to his Indiana days despite playing alongside another ball-dominant wing with the Clippers in Kawhi Leonard. While Westbrook did defer to James Harden, a little, it remains to be seen how a partnership with Beal might evolve. To the extent the Wiz are able to replicate the mini-ball Rockets style whereby Westbrook can play off of Beal with the floor spread, he might be able to achieve closer to his January through March 2020 efficiency rather than his fall 2019 destructiveness.
Perhaps more worrisome than what Washington can expect from Westbrook’s individual impact are the possible effects on the development of the Wizards’ top prospects. In OKC, young wings like Terrence Ferguson and Hamidou Diallo were relegated to the most bystanderish of roles playing alongside Westbrook. Even a big like Domantas Sabonis saw his playmaking and all-around game blossom when given more opportunities after being traded away from the Thunder. Will Washington’s prospects such as Rui Hachimura, Troy Brown and Deni Avdija get the opportunities needed to flourish or at least properly evaluated as they move through their rookie deals? Or will they be reduced to the same kind of “corners only” role in which Ferguson found himself?
Another open question is: To what extent will Westbrook address the Wizards’ biggest weakness in recent seasons: defense? While his peripatetic style and ability to ignite the fast break has given him a decent defensive reputation for portions of his career, this has to be balanced with his tendencies to gamble for steals and ball watch, making it hard to integrate him into a team defensive scheme. Floor-time metrics such as Regularized Adjusted Plus/Minus (“RAPM”), have tended to find Westbrook to have been a slight positive on that end of the floor in recent seasons, while Wall’s high-level early career performances have tapered away to well below average. Overall perhaps some room for cautious optimism on this front.
How will John Wall look in Houston?
For starters, weird. After spending all 10 of his seasons with the Wizards, Wall in another jersey is going to take some getting used to. The Rockets’ point guard spot is becoming a little like Spinal Tap’s drummer in this regard having cycled through 3 recent All-Stars in as many seasons.
In terms of on the floor, the first question is, of course, where is Wall physically. Following a series of serious injuries, including an Achilles rupture, the electric speed which made Wall an All-Star is almost certainly gone and not coming back. (For more on Achilles injuries and recovery after, my conversation with Dr. Josh Baxter was hugely enlightening.) So any notion that he’s going to come close to max level performance should probably be squelched. That’s the downside.
The upside is that Wall has always been an underrated reader of the game, and his ability to see read screens and see passing angles. Even if he might not have the burst to create the sorts of creases and angles which led him to be one of the more reliable generators of open corner threes for teammates — he has gotten Trevor Ariza paid at least twice — he will likely still be able to see and make the right play. While this skill might have been somewhat wasted in Mike D’Antoni’s stripped down and isolation heavy version of the Rockets’ offense, to the degree that new coach Stephen Silas re-integrates some more traditional pick-and-roll play, Wall coming off ball screens from Christian Wood could be a driver of at least decent offense.
Still, for as much as I talked about Westbrook being ball-dominant as a worry for Washington, Harden has become just as much of the heliocentric heart of Houston’s attack as Westbrook ever was in OKC. This likely means that Wall will have to play off the ball more than at any point in his career. Though this might prove uncomfortable for Wall, there are some indications he might have some success playing off of Harden at times. Before the Wizards decided to move him, there was similar concern about Wall’s off-ball ability due to Beal’s emergence as the team’s primary drink-stirrer. As discussed with Wizards’ beat writer Fred Katz back in September, there have been some positive indicators in this regard:
I do think Wall’s lack of floor spacing ability is overblown. For his career, he has hit 38.6 percent of his uncontested 3s, and though it’s on a low volume, he has shot a combined 38.3 percent on catch-and-shoot 3-pointers since 2016-17. A bigger part of the adjustment than “improving as a shooter” will be the willingness to catch and shoot or quickly attack a closeout in second-side action rather than catching and holding.
Given Harden’s centrality to the Rockets, that willingness to catch and shoot will likely be mandated to some degree. But he is clearly better equipped to play that off-ball role in a more or less traditional offense than was Westbrook.
As mentioned above, Wall has gone from being a borderline elite point guard defender early in his career to well below average even before the recent spate of injuries, and while there may be some improvement/reversion towards respectability based on a smaller offensive role and perhaps more imposed accountability due to a lower place on the pecking order, the diminution of his athleticism, especially the decline in lateral quickness, which Dr. Baxter noted could easily result from an Achilles rupture, are going to be hard to overcome.
