Rookie Rui Hachimura Is a Good Reason to Endure Lots of Horrendous Wizards Basketball
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The Washington Wizards are supposed to be bad.
Not necessarily in any indefinite, decreed-by-the-cosmos sort of way (although you can’t rule it out), but certainly over the course of the 2019–20 NBA season, they are supposed to be bad. That’s more-or-less fine — franchises go through down periods, and even if they didn’t the Wizards have been broadly bad for so long that adjusting to this or that particular flavor of bad shouldn’t be too painful for fans. Instead of rooting for, say, another relatively pointless and unlikely shot at the Eastern Conference eighth seed — which, in this top-heavy conference landscape would earn nothing more than a brief and humiliating shellacking at the hands of an overpowering contender — properly calibrated Wizards fans have settled in for a lost season and will source their hope and joy from the incremental improvement of exuberant rookie swingman Rui Hachimura.
A precocious rookie is a fine reason to tune in for some bad basketball. And the opportunity to root for a rookie’s development, unencumbered by the pressures of the franchise’s latest feeble and doomed effort to climb the conference ladder, is a rare delight in what we will agree to call the John Wall era. Otto Porter and Kelly Oubre and Tomas Satoransky all had to carve out roles on playoff rosters; worse, they had to do so on rosters built in the characteristic house-of-cards style of former general manager Ernie Grunfeld, where a rookie’s learning curve might realistically wipe out the team’s hilariously slim margin for error. Hachimura, to his benefit, will and should be given more rope to figure out how much winning basketball he can inspire all on his own, without the stakes of, you know, needing to win.
There’s plenty to like about this particular precocious rookie. He’s got a go-to move — the pull-up two-point jumper — which he can get to reliably, even against veteran NBA defenders. The mid-range jumper may generally be out of favor in today’s optimized NBA offense, but Hachimura is good enough at knocking these jumpers down — 47%, tied with offensive weapon Danilo Gallinari for 16th leaguewide — to flip the math over and turn these shots into good outcomes for a modern offense. Washington’s league-best offensive efficiency — use that sequence of words aloud and in public as many times as you can right now, while it is still true — performs better with Rui on the floor than off. That’s something for any rookie to hang his hat on, to say nothing of a rookie playing for the Unstoppable Offensive Powerhouse that the 2019–20 Wizards have become.
That’s not all. His turnovers are low, especially for a rookie; he creates an uncommonly high percentage of his own buckets; and his overall efficiency metrics are in the range of productive veterans at his position, like Orlando’s Aaron Gordon and Minnesota’s Robert Covington, and at least one budding superstar in Boston’s Jayson Tatum. Rui is already a solid and useful offensive player, which is nothing to sniff at for a rookie, especially one wearing a dreaded Wizards jersey.
I’m tempted to end the discussion there! The Wizards are an offensive juggernaut! Young Rui Hachimura is a big part! The future is bright! Unfortunately, the Wizards do not play in the professional H.O.R.S.E league, which means defending is still part of the job. The Wizards uniformly stink on that end, clocking as the second-worst defense in the NBA by points per possession, ahead of only the Golden State Warriors, who last I checked were recruiting passersby to suit up and play rotation minutes while every regular member of their roster recovers from various painful injuries. (Editor’s note: The Wizards are actually now last by that metric.)
Hachimura, I am afraid to say, is an even more prominent part of Washington’s defensive ineptitude than he is of their surprising offensive excellence. Among Wizards players only diminutive and diminished Isaiah Thomas and well-meaning but hopelessly frantic center Thomas Bryant carry a lower defensive rating, according to NBA statistics. Nate Silver’s egghead math blog rates Rui as the worst rookie defender in the league, by a substantial margin. Watching Rui at the defensive end is like watching a toddler chase falling leaves on a windy day. Even when he catches one, you know that it was not because he knew where it was going or why.
Here is where expectations matter very much. When the Wizards were expected to be pure and total crud, a rookie who can’t play defense for 12 seconds without somehow knotting his shoes together was nothing to fret over. Sooner or later he’ll figure out the rhythms of opposing offenses and learn to anticipate and communicate in a coherent defensive system. But it’s tempting, while the season is still young, to attach hope to Washington’s glossy offensive numbers, perform some quick back-of-the-envelope math, and conclude that Rui’s defensive shortcomings are stifling what would otherwise be a push into the lower part of the upper tier of Eastern Conference playoff teams.
Don’t fall for it! Wizards fans are free, for the first time in 16 years, from the tyranny of Grunfeld, whose signature move was undermining long-term and larger-scale success in pursuit of superficial short-term gains. We don’t need to suddenly become snarling Process maniacs, but the least we can do is soberly accept the relatively minor consequences of granting the best possible developmental opportunities to the players who represent the best shot at stabilizing the team’s future.
Besides, if anyone should be stapled to the bench over bad defense, it’s Thomas. Rui’s defensive metrics go from eyeball-searingly awful when sharing the floor with Thomas to recognizably rookie-ish when playing alongside Ish Smith. It will shock exactly no one if it turns out that Hachimura’s defensive confusion is being magnified somewhat by sharing a starting lineup with probably the worst defender in all of basketball. While we’re here, it will come as no great surprise should we learn that Rui’s offensive contributions — and indeed, the entire team’s surprisingly hot start on that end — are being propped up by Bradley Beal’s superhuman performance as an offensive engine. So while Rui’s efficiency may slide some on those lovely pull-up jumpers, the good news is he is likely to improve incrementally as an overall basketball player for some time, so long as he is getting opportunities to compete with and against NBA veterans. It’s reasonable to expect some of those long twos to turn into threes; it’s reasonable to expect some of those pick-and-rolls to morph into pick-and-pops; it’s reasonable to expect his defense and rebounding to improve, even if he never becomes a defense stalwart or a bonafide glass-cleaner. Even his minutes with Thomas are potentially minutes spent learning to put out fires and cover the vulnerabilities of exploitable teammates. Silver linings!
Keeping a healthy perspective during a lost season requires finding a way to take hope and joy from small victories while anchoring yourself in the big picture. That Rui has a reliable way of helping out on the floor during his first weeks in the NBA is encouraging; that he is a miserable defensive player right now is normal and fine; that he is out there mixing it up and working it out while his team has no serious expectations is healthy and smart.
As reasons to care about dreary and inconsequential regular season basketball go, Rui is more than adequate.
