FanPost

John Wall Hits a New Low

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You don’t have to be a J.J. Barea style truther to scrutinize the Washington Wizards tumult laden season and arrive at some fairly alarming conclusions about the state of the franchise and the value-plus-baggage its most highly paid player, the dependably blithering John Wall, brings to the table.

Let’s make one thing clear: this is not an article arguing the Wizards are better without Wall. They decidedly are not. Put a healthy Wall, i.e. the one who took the league by storm last season, on the court with Peak Bradley Beal, Always Improving Otto Porter, and the team’s motley cast of role players (Markieff Morris, Kelly Oubre, Mike Scott, Marcin Gortat), all of whom have the uncanny ability to elevate their level of play at the exact moment you were ready to give up on them, and I’ll show you a team that could, in theory, contend for the Eastern Conference. (And no, I’m not delusional on that last point. The Celtics are not as good as their record indicates; the Cavaliers implosion is real; no one other than Alan Grant fears the Raptors.)

Unfortunately, Wall has failed to find his best form this season, and it now seems clear that his reliably balky joints are the reason the trademark speed just hasn’t been there. Because Wall’s effectiveness is almost entirely predicated on his athletic ability, the loss of even a quarter step constitutes an existential threat to his game. One can only hope the latest clean-up procedure he’s undergone will rid him of any lingering pain and allow him to retake the court at 100 percent before the playoffs begin. If nothing else, it would be nice to have another backcourt player in the rotation so Beal wouldn’t have to continue logging heavy minutes night after night.

But even supposing Wall returns to the court in fine fashion and maybe even helps the Wizards surmount the albatross that is the second round of the playoffs, it’s easy to look at what the team has been able to accomplish without him in the lineup and wonder why the franchise dedicated $170 million in cap room over the next few seasons to a player whose leadership style involves infantilizing hard working teammates on national television.

This year the Wizards are 9-7 without Wall, which means their winning percentage without their "franchise player" is essentially the same as it is with him. (And a quick note to all the reactionary haters who love nothing more than to retort "They’ve only played 16 games without Wall, and that’s not a big enough sample size from which to draw any reasonable conclusions": please don’t get your panties in a bunch. Sixteen games is almost one fifth of an entire NBA season, so it is a big enough sample size to draw some reasonable conclusions.) They’ve beaten five playoff teams—Minnesota, Portland, Indiana, Toronto, Oklahoma City—without Wall, though the Indiana win deserves an asterisk since Victor Oladipo sat that one out. During a recent five game winning stretch without Wall, the team averaged around 30 assists per game and generally exhibited the type of ball movement and offensive execution normally reserved for exceptional franchises like the Golden State Warriors and San Antonio Spurs.

Perhaps just as importantly, the players genuinely seem to enjoy themselves in the contests where Wall is nowhere to be found. This may seem like a trivial point, but those who follow the team closely will tell you without hesitation that while this season’s Wizards with Wall have been a complete and utter eyesore—a mouthy team that wins ugly games in ugly manners—the Wizards without him have been pure, unfettered joy, a symphony of team basketball whose notable individual components—Beal evolving into a true leader, Porter discovering his true talents, Tomas Santoransky doing Tomas Santoransky things—form a whole much greater than the sum. If the team can be this effective without the highly paid Wall, then compensating him so lavishly, and restricting the front office’s capacity to add additional pieces, suddenly seems like an insurmountable albatross in and of itself.

All of which brings us back to Wall, whose recent behavior both on and off the court has been just as ugly and lacking in judgment as the Wizards play during the absolute low parts of this season. Start with the J.J. Barea incident, where Wall, a perennial All-Star, went out of his way to take a cheap shot at Barea for no justifiable reason whatsoever. Wall may have been frustrated by the Wizards lackluster performance that night against the lowly Dallas Mavericks, and he may have been frustrated by the knee soreness that was (probably) bothering him at the time. But a franchise player picking a stupid fight with an inconsequential back-up well past is prime is never a good look.

Then, there was Wall’s similarly indefensible decision to disclose via a nationally televised interview details about a players only meeting the Wizards had held the previous week, a meeting he described as "pointless" and used as an excuse to suggest some of his teammates don’t know how to handle constructive criticism. Well here’s some constructive criticism for Wall: disclosing details about a players only discussion to a national media outlet reeks of amateur hour. Keep those discussions between interested parties and don’t rag on your teammates for reacting poorly in a meeting that, if recent actions and quotes are any guide, probably involved Wall emphasizing his skills, his stature, and the indispensable role he clearly believes he occupies within the organization.

But the cherry on top of this sundae of shameful conduct has to be Wall’s reactions to some recent comments made by teammates regarding the Wizards surprising five game win streak and the team oriented basketball that made the streak possible. After the Wizards defeated the Toronto Raptors, the always goofy and eternally lovable Marcin Gortat tweeted "Unbelievable win tonight! Great "team" victory!" to which Wall quickly replied "lol". It’s not important that Gortat felt the need to publicly affirm the win or to put "team" in quotation marks on social media. Gortat is a candid goofball whose comments on Twitter don’t carry any sort of weight in the larger ecosystem that is NBA basketball. What’s important is that Wall, a player with one of the most lucrative contracts in league history and recent recipient of a shoe deal from Adidas, still feels so insecure about his standing in his own locker room that he responded defensively to a Tweet sent out by a role player. I’m not justifying Gortat’s actions. But in this equation, Wall has to be the bigger person and either let it go or speak with Gortat directly.

But that’s not what Wall did because that’s not who Wall is. And so it came as no surprise that on the same day the Wizards were gearing up for a nationally televised game against a rising Philadelphia 76ers squad, Wall chose to appear on The Jump and continue piling on his teammates, specifically Gortat, about the joy they have expressed over the newfound on-court chemistry. The five-game win streak leading up to the Philly contest was without question the biggest bright spot of the Wizards season thus far. So having the organization’s franchise player go on national television and question the same teammates who’ve stepped up so magnificently in his absence while generally behaving like a whiny man-boy had a profoundly dampening effect. Was Wall’s self-directed media tour the reason the Wizards came out flat against the 76ers and put themselves in a hole from which they would not recover? Probably not. But it certainly didn’t help.

Throughout his career, Wall has always had a chip the size of Dirk Diggler’s most prized appendage situated directly on his shoulder. On The Ringer this week, Haley O’Shaughnessy beautifully articulated the history of Wall’s large and clearly not diminishing inferiority complex.

Wall has been paranoid about being underappreciated since he entered the league. He attributed his years without a signature shoe deal to disrespect. There was bitterness when Beal signed a maximum extension before Wall got his (reportedly, but come on). In 2015, Wall complained about getting only nine shots in a game while Beal took 22—a minor but notably petty detail. In 2016, Wall said he and Beal "have a tendency to dislike each other on the court."

Now that same inferiority complex, the one that lies at the essence of Wall’s persona, appears to be creating some real friction within the Wizards locker room. The situation may not be as dire as "his teammates don’t like him," but when you consider everything that’s happened on and off the court over the past few weeks, it’s hard not to conclude that a slight air of toxicity now hangs over the franchise, threatening to inhibit the postseason run Wizards fans have been dreaming about since game seven in Boston. The Wizards are still a few steps away from outright dysfunction, but the team certainly doesn’t possess enough pure talent to overcome even a slightly divided locker room. If the players aren’t taking the court every night willing to go the extra mile for each other, then yet another second round playoff loss looms in the not too distant future.

The Wizards are better with Wall. There’s no denying that. He’s too dynamic a player not to help the team from a basketball standpoint. He’s too much of a threat in the open court not to make any defender quake in his shoes. But when you take into consideration his massive contract and absolutely shoddy leadership skills, it becomes reasonable to ask whether the Wizards might be better off in the long-run without him. If given the choice—and yes, I understand this is, for myriad reasons, a purely hypothetical exercise with absolutely no chance of coming to fruition in the real world—I’d rather take the squad that went 5-1 over the past six games and add quality free agents to that lineup then try and integrate a whiny, insecure, self-aggrandizing point guard into the currently harmonious mix.

Wall’s value is offset by the baggage he carries, and his recent behavior makes you wonder why Ernie Grunfeld has made a habit of offering fragile, ego-driven point guards massive contracts before absolutely necessary—and handicapping the team’s finances in the process.

Kevin Craft has written about sports for Slate, The Atlantic, GQ, and Bleacher Report. He’s the author of Grunge, Nerds, and Gastropubs: A Mass Culture Odyssey.

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