The Wizards ended their five-game homestand and five-game losing streak in grand style with a 9-point win over the league-best Utah Jazz.

Russell Westbrook and Bradley Beal carried the team to victory. As you can see in the table below, they didn’t get much help from their teammates.

This was probably Westbrook’s best game of the season — 12-23 from the floor, 2-5 from three-point range, 9-11 from the free throw line. That tallies to 35 points to go with 15 rebounds, 13 assists, 2 steals and a block. The one mar on his statline: 5 turnovers. But the sheer volume of positive contributions outweighs the miscues. By a lot.

Where Westbrook had a do everything, be everywhere performance — he was even captured during a timeout teaching Rui Hachimura how to protect the ball and draw fouls inside — for Beal it was about surgical scoring.

He had 43 points on 24 field goal attempts with just 8 trips to the free throw line. He shot 16-24 from the floor and 4-6 from three. One of those misses was a garbage time fling after the Jazz had conceded the game and emptied the bench. His effective field goal percentage was .750.

The rest of the team is probably best not discussed. Raul Neto hit a couple shots, Robin Lopez was a big body to play against Rudy Gobert, and I’ll stop there.

One health concern — Davis Bertans left the game with tightness in his right calf. That’s the same one that caused him to miss a game last week.

The Wizards get a couple days off now before heading to Brooklyn to see if they can finish a season sweep of the Nets. The Nets are formidable on offense. Since acquiring James Harden from the Rockets, Brooklyn’s offense has an offensive rating of 121.6, which would be the best in NBA history by a wide margin.

Their defense has been worst in history bad — 116.5 points per 100 possessions allowed — but they’re still +5.1 per 100 possessions because of the offense. Expect lots of scoring.

Four Factors

Below are the four factors that decide who wins and loses in basketball — shooting (efg), rebounding (offensive rebounds), ball handling (turnovers), fouling (free throws made).

I’ve simplified them a bit. While the factors are usually presented as percentages, that’s more useful over a full season. In a single game, the raw numbers in each category are easier to understand.

PACE is possessions per 48 minutes.

Player Production Average

Below are Player Production Average (PPA) results from last night’s game. PPA is my overall production metric, which credits players for things they do that help a team win (scoring, rebounding, play-making, defending) and dings them for things that hurt (missed shots, turnovers, bad defense, fouls). PPA is a per possession stat that includes accounting for defense and role. In PPA, 100 is average and higher is better.

PPA is a per possession stat. The table below is sorted by each player’s total contributions for the game.

POSS is the number of possessions each player was on the floor in this game.