What's a fan to do? There's a tide of general resentment lacking a sure target since Flip Saunders' firing. The Ten Point Plan isn't under fire and it isn't like Ted is charging an arm and a leg for tickets. And who knows, maybe he's inciting the blogosphere to take heat off the team. Apologist insanity aside, Randy Wittman is playing what he's got (Rashard Lewis must be played 20 to 35 minutes a game or every volcano in the world will erupt simultaneously) though I said it before and I'll say it again, it isn't possible to give a full season's worth of Knute Rockne speeches and you damn well shouldn't have to. One can only get pumped up so many times before tuning out the noise. It is impossible to sustain emotional overdrive with the best part of the season still ahead and no clear indication help is on the way.

It's easy to be pessimistic. If we look to the Thunder rebuild, John Wall can't stack up with Kevin Durant (since no one can). There is no Nick Collison. We have no other homerun draft pick to put next to John. If we look to the Celtics rebuild, Javale McGee's trade value won't stack up with Al Jefferson's on his best day. And that's if Ernie Grunfeld is ready to pull off a trade coup that will make Danny Ainge sit up and blink. Twice.

If the fans heard Ernie was ready to pull off a deal for Stephen Curry and Ekpe Udoh involving our lottery pick and Javale McGee, where would we be at? If we heard the Wizards were going after Ryan Anderson, Omer Asik and Chase Budinger in FA, letting Nick Young walk? That's just one cockamamie thought, but I'm posing it for the purposes of asking whether or not there's any hypothetical scenario outside of highway robbery where Ernie Grunfeld redeems himself before his contract is up.

Direct all eyes to (what I believe is) the trade deadline on March 15th. Less than six weeks away.

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Much has been made in recent days of Washington Wizards' interim coach Randy Wittman saying the following after Saturday's loss to the Los Angeles Clippers:

Maybe I gotta sprinkle in another veteran that knows what that game's all about before it starts. I think once that game started and they saw how hard they came at us that it was a 'Holy smoke' type of thing. I'm searching, too.

It's a fair premise. Young players, from time to time, lose focus, so it's nice to have a proven guy to plug in when that happens to be a band-aid and provide motivation for the young players to improve. Except, there's a problem, as Kyle Weidie pointed out over the weekend.

A veteran in addition to Rashard Lewis (even though Wittman said ‘other than')? A veteran aside from Lewis (because he does bring needed veteran traits, aside from playing so poorly)? There are no other veteran options. Searching for... no one really knows.

The only other nominal "veterans" on the roster are Ronny Turiaf, who is injured, Roger Mason, who never shoots as well in games as he shoots in practices, and Maurice Evans, who isn't in tip-top shape due to being signed late and solving the lockout. So what is Wittman supposed to do, exactly?

This strikes me as one of the major problems with stockpiling youth in the NBA. Basketball isn't hockey. In the NBA, you only have 15 roster spots, injury or otherwise. If you devote eight of those spots to first- and second-year players, and three of those spots to Andray Blatche, Nick Young and JaVale McGee, you have four spots left to devote to veterans. If you're also trying to keep costs down, you end up hoping Turiaf's injury history doesn't pop up, Lewis' knees stay upright and Mason and Evans discover a fountain of youth they haven't seen in two years. That's not fair on a coach.

This is why I was so adamant that the Wizards needed to sign some guys this summer. At the end of the day, you need guys who can play, if only to act as a buffer to aid the development of the youngsters. Player growth is never linear. There are peaks and valleys along the way. When those peaks and valleys happen, a coach needs a steady hand to rely on that still can play a bit. That becomes hard to make room for when 11 players need their hands to be held.

Wittman's right to be searching, but I don't think he's going to find much. That's not his fault.

Our sun is dying. Mankind faces extinction. Seven years ago the Icarus project sent a mission to restart the sun but that mission was lost before it reached the star. Sixteen months ago, I, Robert Capa, and a crew of seven left earth frozen in a solar winter. Our payload a stellar bomb with a mass equivalent to Manhattan Island. Our purpose to create a star within a star.

[long pause]

Eight astronauts strapped to the back of a bomb. My bomb. Welcome to the Icarus Two.

Sunshine via IMDB

There is no book when it comes to rebuilding an NBA franchise. There are recommended courses of action, but fickle circumstance being what it is, each rebuild is practically a case study.

The Wizards are on their second head coach this season and GM Ernie Grunfeld has bet the farm on a team flush with rookie contracts. Fandom alternates between shades of incredulity, disgust and tortured hope while attempting to cling to their basketball sanity. With the coaching staff being assigned the ether of mid-first round draft picks and John Wall with the responsibility of fielding a new team out of the ashes of the old, Sunshine came immediately to mind. And of course, the thought of Randy Wittman, or perhaps Ted, soberly intoning the opening passage of the film with Wizards mad libs inserted amuses me.

But the simple fact remains that a few years into the rebuild we're still sailing in the fog without a compass, map and occasionally minus a rudder. That causes a problem that may not be readily apparent. If we can't calibrate our expectations as fans, how can we measure progress? If we can't measure progress, how can we justify all the losing to ourselves? So how do we balance our fandom and our expectations?

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The pace of the lockout-shortened season has put the screws to rosters around the league. Youth is a major advantage in combating the grind, but experience also allows a player to be more effective with less energy expended. Youth combined with basketball IQ is a force to be reckoned with in the redline model. Embracing the maxim of 'attack on defense, rest on offense' requires superior (or any) off-ball movement in the halfcourt and the Wizards aren't quite there yet.

There isn't a thing that happens outside of context, a fact I let myself forget during the Rockets loss last Friday. Normally, I hold myself back in such moments, but I had my 'What's Going On?' moment (thanks for putting up with me, Sean). Yes, it was a 27 point loss in a game completely winnable at half-time against a team that had wrenched another close game away in the second half earlier this season. But the coaching change and vow to get out and run more constituted more than disingenuous window dressing, and expectations need adjustment once more.

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I knew the Washington Wizards had a lot of young players, but I guess the uniqueness of their roster didn't really sink in until Randy Wittman mentioned this fact prior to the game against the Houston Rockets.

Coach Randy Wittman provided an interesting stat: Nine of the 15 players on #wizards roster on their rookie contracts

— Michael Lee (@MrMichaelLee) January 27, 2012

That's kind of crazy. Two-thirds of the Wizards' roster has less than four years of experience. More fundamentally, eight of those nine players have less than two years of experience. There's young, and then there's the Wizards.

It's easy to look at this and think that better days are ahead. Alas, here's the problem: can all of these guys actually develop? If so, will the Wizards have all their weaknesses addressed as they look to become a winning team?

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As Sean and Mike have already said, Flip Saunders' firing is no panacea. The simple fact that the Wizards' struggles are so easily recognizable as systemic failure necessitates an uncomfortable course of action for Ted Leonsis. The 'Changing out our Coach' edition of Ted's Take discussed putting everything under a microscope, and highlights a subtle tension that could reshape the landscape of the organization.

The comprehensive situation the Wizards find themselves in is fast forcing them to a watershed moment in Leonsis' ownership; making a decision on a current GM without an incontrovertible case pointing to either retention or dismissal. When the Mystics dismissed Linda Hargrove, it was after several seasons of losing with nothing approaching a demonstrable plan and a ride on the coaching carousel no DC fan is a stranger to.

So, when Ted says:

Right now – everything is under a microscope – we know we have to make more investment in additional player development and we shall.

via Ted's Take

He has to know how disturbingly reactionary that sounds in conjunction with the abrupt hiring of Joe Connelly. Was Flip Saunders against such a personnel move? In other words, was this a premeditated move Flip was against?

The club maintains that assistant coach Don Zierden acts as a big-man coach for JaVale and other post players, and they were unaware of Pamela’s specific concerns.

Mike Wise via Washington Post

If the club didn't know (although the thought of Pam McGee quietly enduring any perceived injustice to her son beggars credibility), Flip certainly wasn't against it, which directly implies a snap decision to fix an embarrassingly glaring need in the wake of the Mike Wise interview. Firing Flip Saunders and hiring Joe Connelly in rapid sequence while promising to make player development a priority feels like slapping a Band-Aid on a broken bone.

What happens between now and the end of the coming free agency period is crucial to the future of the franchise. How Ted navigates the paradox of active ownership and effective organizational management will determine the fate of the current rebuild.

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One of the things Randy Wittman said during his first press conference as the Washington Wizards' head coach is that he wants to get out and run a little more. This was laughed off by a number of people who noted that the Wizards are already second in the league in pace factor, so it's not like they can push the ball more.

On the one hand, I'm snickering with them in this respect: the phrase "we want to get out and run" is the "I want to lose weight" of NBA coach-speak. Everybody says it, but few have the discipline to actually follow through. Coaches find that pushing the ball doesn't always lead to easy layups, and players find that sprinting up and down all the time makes them tired. Many coaches and players -- some being very good ones, mind you -- just realize it's not possible to stay disciplined to follow through on their promises.

But on the other hand, I think screaming "LOOK AT THEIR PACE NUMBERS, LOL" misses the point. This brings up a issue I've long had with pace factor: it doesn't differentiate between fast breaks and quick shots. If a player forces a turnover and scores a fast-break layup in five seconds, it counts as a possession. If a team forces a dumb shot in a half-court set in the first 10 seconds of the shot clock, it counts as a possession. The former jives with the idea of "getting out and running," but the latter does not. Nevertheless, if you do the latter a lot, you're going to have a high pace factor.

In the Wizards' case, they do the latter a lot. They're fourth in the league in jumpers from 16-23 feet and hit 33 percent of them. They shoot 54 percent of their shots within the first nine seconds of the shot clock. They are a below-average offensive rebounding team. This all means that they end a ton of possessions with missed jumpers in half-court sets. When they do fast break, it's often John Wall rushing against three defenders and missing with his teammates lagging behind him. This all drives up the Wizards' pace factor, but it also means the team as a whole isn't "getting out and running" as Wittman suggests.

To reiterate: I'm skeptical that Wittman can actually get the Wizards to run more effectively. I'm just combating the idea that they're doing it already. They're not, despite being a "fast-paced team."

I come here not to bury Flip Saunders, nor to praise him. Instead, I believe that his dismissal should instead be viewed as a continuation of the status quo at the Verizon Center, and one that should bring no small amount of worry to Wizards fans who are currently celebrating the exit of a coach who had lost his way.

To understand this problem correctly, I believe that one has to return to the last days of Eddie Jordan, another tenured head coach of the organization who was dumped at the side of the road by the organization after leading through what was arguably the most successful period in the franchise's modern era. At the time of Jordan's dismissal, fans were calling for his head due to many of the same issues that resulted in Flip's firing -- the young players were not getting time, the coach had "lost the players" and the substitution patterns remained baffling. Eddie Jordan had to go because he wasn't getting results with all that "talent," and now Flip Saunders is being let loose for the same reason.

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