The Wizards' new offense is working. Why didn't we see it earlier?

The answer, of course, is logical, even if faulty. Saunders has a system that’s been highly successful everywhere he’s gone. It’s been strengthened by scoring point guards, or at least point guards who function well with the ball in their hands. Chauncey Billups. Sam Cassell. Terrell Brandon. Stephon Marbury. All of those guys have had their best seasons playing in Saunders’ system. Gilbert Arenas, as much as some of you don’t want to buy it, was cut from the same cloth as those guys. Arenas is a scoring point guard who can also pass when necessary, and is really best when he’s creating. Saunders and Arenas seemed like a perfect match.

You said it. Flip has proven that his system can maximize offensive production through many different players on different teams for over 13 seasons. And Arenas fits the qualities of the best point guards that have ever played for Flip.

There were two main problems though: Arenas’ rustiness and his off-ball ability. The Wizards essentially decided in training camp that they were going to throw the whole load onto Arenas right away. Saunders talked all preseason about how Arenas was going to have the ball the majority of the time and how everyone else was going to play off him. In theory, it made sense, but it was also asking a lot of Arenas to play in a completely new system when he hadn’t played enough games recently to know for sure that he could play in any system. The end result is that the entire team played off Arenas’ disharmony. For this, I do blame Saunders to a large degree. He had to expect Arenas would struggle to get his rhythm back, so he should have instead relied on an offense that was less point-guard heavy in the short term.

But if you do that, then Arenas has to get used to a whole new offense in the middle of the season, with less time to perfect it before going into the post-season. If a player is rusty, I think it is prudent to patiently wait for that player to play through it, get used to the system, and shake the rust off. If you try to change things around, it can cause the player to take even longer to figure things out, needlessly complicating things for him.

The other thing is Arenas does have some off-ball ability. He obviously wants the ball and can do wonderful things with it when healthy, but in the Princeton offense, he was more of a combo guard than anything. As we discussed last year, Arenas’ ideal backcourt mate is someone who can both shoot and create. Having him play point guard in a Hawk-like system only uses one of his strengths.

Maybe Flip would have figured it out earlier if Arenas hadn’t brought guns into the locker room and got himself suspended. Every point guard Flip has ever coached, for the most part, works best in Flip’s system. Flip can adapt, but he had a perfectly good reason to think that Arenas’s early season struggles had nothing to do with his system not utilizing Gil the best, but rather the rust issue addressed above. By the time Arenas started to shake the rust off, he got suspended. That’s not Flip’s fault.

A two-guard offense with Arenas and Caron Butler, or Arenas and Mike Miller, sounds pretty good to me. Both those guys can pass well enough to make it work. So why didn’t we see it?

I’m skeptical that Caron’s lack of passing the ball had anything to do with Flip’s system. Caron has posted close to career lows in assist percentage this season, which you could argue was Flip’s fault, until you consider that his assist percentage has gotten even worse in Dallas. We know for a fact that Caron had refused to listen to the coach on at least one occasion when Flip had wanted Caron to pass the ball. So to imply that Flip could have gotten more production out of Caron by installing a new system is to ignore the fact that Caron would have had to listen to the coach for that to work. Seeing how Caron has continued his ball-hogging, blackhole offense in Dallas, I doubt that would have happened.

Now, the one thing that I can’t really argue about here is the inside-out aspect of this new offense. Unless the Wizards did the unthinkable and elevated Andray Blatche into the starting lineup ahead of Antawn Jamison, they didn’t exactly have the personnel to run a post-oriented offense.

Yep, which is probably why Flip didn’t tinker earlier, because his front court was designed for a more traditional offense, before Ernie blew up the old crew.

If this sounds like sour grapes, it probably is. I realize how difficult it is to ask a coach to deviate from his system, and I don’t think it’s fair to say we should have scrapped all our Hawk sets altogether. But in light of how things are “working” a bit better now with these new plays, it makes you wonder why we didn’t see them sooner, before our season completely fell apart. Surely they were worth trying out, right?

As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, our Big 3 declined big time this season, and you can’t really blame that on Flip. To say that a different offense would have made them more productive ignores the fact that Caron and Antawn have both gotten worse on their new teams, despite playing on two of the best offenses in the league. You should save your sour grapes for Arenas, Butler, and Jamison instead of pouring them all over Flip.

I would also like to point out that before Josh Howard got hurt, the old offense was working ten times better, even without a true point guard. But then our 2nd best scorer got hurt and Flip had to adjust yet again. Flip had to adjust his system to the Big 3, then he had to adjust to Arenas getting suspended, then he had to adjust to a complete lineup turnover at the All-Star break, then he had to adjust to Josh Howard blowing out his knee, then he had to adjust to using Livingston as his only real point guard and Blatche getting double-teamed. To say that Flip didn’t adjust fast enough is being very unfair, IMO.

Kyle Weidie talked about Flip’s new offense in an article here. The players interviewed said Flip installed the new offense a “couple of days ago”; that was on March 28th… The previous off-day was March 25th, and had to be the day they installed the new offense…

Why worry about the date? I was wondering if the new Offense had any measurable statistical evidence that it was working better than the “old” offense. Just like everyone else here, I noticed that more of the Offense was initiated by getting the ball to Andray Blatche in several of his favorite spots on the floor…. and that there are several options (posting Livingston, posting Singleton) and there are some open 3-point shot opportunities when the opponent double teams.

BUT – what do the statistics show….

Well, first off, Since March 25th, Andray Blatche ( averaging 2.0 assists this season) has averaged 6.7 assists per game over the last 6 games….. and the Wizards as a team have averaged almost 21 Assists per game (vs about 18.5 for the previous 70 games)…

Obviously, the “new” offense has stimulated ball movement and player movement – because the assists are up….

One more thing, Mike Miller is averaging almost 17 ppg for the last 6 – not sure if he’s getting more open looks as a result of the new Offense, or if he’s just decided he needs to shoot more… but it’s encouraging….