Wizards at Thunder stats: Turnovers, poor three point shooting defense cost Washington Friday’s game

Hey everyone. Kevin Broom is out for the next week due to some commitments at his day job. So for today, I’ll take his place with the statistics behind the Washington Wizards’ 127-110 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder.

The simple stats

From looking at the box score, here were the Wizards’ high, and mostly ... lowlights.

The good:

• Free Throw attempts: Washington attempted 36 vs. OKC’s 14.
• Bench contributions: The Wizards outscored the Thunder on the bench 41-31. Will Barton scored 14 points in just 17 minutes. Jordan Goodwin and Delon Wright added 9 points each.

The bad:

• Turnovers: The Wizards committed 20 turnovers while only forcing 9 from the Thunder. This
• OKC’s three point shooting: The Thunder made 17-of-37 threes (45.9 percent) and the Wizards, just 7-of-24 (29.2 percent). Since the rebounding battle was rather even (46-41 in favor of Washington, I’m not surprised this was a lopsided result.
• The Thunder took advantage of the Wizards’ obvious two focus points on offense, both of whom didn’t have great nights: Since Bradley Beal is out due to a hamstring injury, it makes Kyle Kuzma (26.3 percent usage) and Kristaps Porzingis (31 percent usage) bigger focus points for the Thunder defense. No other Wizards starter had a usage rating above 18 percent. Kuzma committed six of Washington’s turnovers though he did score 23 points. Porzinigis had a double-double of 14 points and 10 rebounds but shot 3-of-11 from the field.
• All of OKC’s starters scored in double digits, shared the ball and weren’t turnover prone: The five starters for OKC dished 23 combined assists and 5 turnovers with each starter dishing at least three assist each. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was the best perfromer with 30 points on 12-of-23 shooting.

Here are the four factors figures from last night. The most important is eFG%, which is the number of field goals PLUS half of the number of threes divided by field goal attempts. The Wizards were significantly behind, 52.5 percent vs. 59.7 percent for the Thunder. That disparity is there in large part due to OKC’s three point shooting as mentioned earlier.

The second most important factor is turnover percentage. Given the simple turnover disparity, it’s no surprise that the Wizards were at 17.4 percent while the Thunder were at 8 percent.

Ultimately, these two factors out of four spelled Washington’s doom last night.