I just published an update on Deni in the Forward — he’s enjoying a strong run of form lately and his sneaker statement gave me a chance to highlight it.
He actually told a reporter he planned to write Am Yisrael Chai on his sneaker following the team’s previous game, and though he doesn’t like to talk off-court stuff, he shared a little bit about how he’s feeling after a pair of terrorist attacks in Israel (it’s now up to three, with a total of 11 Israelis dead in the attacks).
Late last night Deni Avdija had an on-court altercation with Latvian teammate Davis Bertans that ended far short of fisticuffs but was notable nevertheless. I wrote a Twitter thread explaining what they were arguing about.
The context you need is this: Bertans, a sharpshooter signed to a 5 year, $80 million contract two years ago, has not been playing well, and he plays the same position as Avdija. Which means the two compete for minutes.
Unlike Deni, Bertans has one elite skill, his three-point shooting. But if he’s not shooting well — and he’s not, at about 31% from behind the arc this year — Bertans is pretty useless on an NBA court because (also unlike Deni), he can’t do anything else — defend, rebound or make plays for his teammates. And in the last two weeks, Deni is having the first extended stretch of consistent statistical output in his career, finally producing numbers that match the intangibles everyone kvells over all the time.
Deni’s averages for his last five games: 12.6 points, 6 rebounds, 2.6 assists, 1.4 steals and 0.8 blocks on 59% shooting (!!) and 43.8% from behind the arc. That’s the player the Wizards thought they were drafting. He reaches legal (American) drinking age on January 3rd.
I tweeted a thread about the altercation which I’ll include here. For more posts on Deni and sports and Judaism you can follow me @thislouis.
You’re reading the final issue ofDENI DIARY, a dispatch from Deni Avdija’s rookie season by Louis Keene. (Follow me on Twitter!)
When you know there’s Agadir waiting for you at home.
Deni Avdija, the central character of DENI DIARY, the rookie small forward out of Kibbutz Beit Zera, who the Washington Wizards drafted ninth overall, the highest an Israeli player has ever been picked in the NBA draft, fell awkwardly chasing a rebound of his own missed layup on April 21. The scene immediately became grim, with Deni writhing under the basket and teammate Jordan Bell running to cover his apparently injured leg with a towel so that Deni and/or the television audience couldn’t see it. Deni, in tears and biting down on a towel, was wheelchaired off the floor.
An hour later, Adrian Wojnarowski reported a hairline fracture of Deni’s fibula would cut his season short. What timing. Avdija had just reclaimed his place in Scott Brooks’ starting lineup, and the Wizards had once again turned their season around (they’ve done a full 540 since the beginning of the season!); they seem a lock to make the Eastern Conference play-in round. The injury should only take 12 weeks to heal — a much better prognosis than was anticipated; he will not require surgery — but that’s enough to knock him out of the postseason. Enormous bummer that he will miss this precious opportunity to make a splash. By the rivers of Babylon, the Jewish people sits and weeps and waits for Playoff Deni.
I won’t sugarcoat it. If you had read me his final stats at the beginning of the season, if you had described to me the narrative arc of his rookie year, rattled off a couple highlights, I would have been disappointed. My expectations of him were perhaps unreasonably high. What went wrong? He basically lost his shot after the first month or two of the season and never rediscovered it. It’s a well-worn truism that the NBA is a make-or-miss league, and that’s especially true for a player at Deni’s position, which is oversaturated with “make” guys. It’s one of the reasons, perhaps the primary reason, Deni didn’t go top-5 in the draft. The most discouraging part of this season is that Brooks seemed to recognize this, and instead of highlighting the more complete aspects of Deni’s game, sought to brute-force this weakness into a strength.
It didn’t work. Deni finished the year shooting 41% from the field, 28% from three. His shooting numbers got worse as the season went on. The season ended with him in tears. Now the team is surging in his absence.
How much of this season’s disappointment is on Avdija, and how much of it is on Brooks? It’s pointless to give these things percentages, but it’s fair to say the season would look completely different for the rookie if not for things out of either’s control. Like the Covid-19 pandemic. Even before Deni tested positive for the virus, Covid isolated him thousands of miles and an entire ocean away from his old support system. I haven’t seen anyone write about what this season has been like for foreign players in general, let alone rookies. But when you're in a funk and you need to just...get outside and away from the game, eat home cooking or sit in the car for an hour with your A1s, you haven't been able to this year. And then you factor in the other things that have been inconsistent, like Deni's usage in terms of both role and playing time (which are hard to understand on a team that's spent the majority of the season more than 10 games under .500).
Still, acknowledging bad luck doesn't make your numbers better, and there simply are not many players shooting as poorly as Deni did this year who see more than 15 minutes a game. The pair that come to mind who do, Ricky Rubio and Draymond Green, are both gifted passers who help their team defensively. Avdija could meet that description eventually. But in the meantime he needs to make more shots, and I believe he will. His jumper is shaky, but it's not broken. I still think he can be an above-average shooter down the road. And as he improves, the skills he did preview this year, like his passing and his post game, will flourish.
There's plenty to be optimistic about. If he's not making shots, he's still thinking the game at a high level. He sees the court well. The NBA is a fast league, but he rarely looked out of step. He should start getting the benefit of the doubt on defense, too. And late in this campaign he was already getting the hang of moving without the ball. Two examples of that came during his April 14 game against Sacramento, one of his finest performances of 2021.
There is an outside possibility that Deni's team looks very different next year — if the Wizards trade Beal, for example, and go straight into rebuilding, or if they trade Deni to get Beal more immediate help. After Beal, Avdija is the Wizards' most valuable trade piece; he's proven talented and he's on a team-friendly rookie contract. But I think Washington is invested in Avdija's success — the franchise launched an entire Hebrew-language content platform around him — and he will almost certainly stay put.
Deni's rookie season was plenty cool though. Even aside from looking like he belongs on the court with sweet passes and solid defense and having a distinct on-court flow. Aside from when tried to dunk on a 7'6" player when he had like three dunks all year up to that point. Aside from him shutting down LeBron James and hitting the dagger three to beat the Lakers.
This year also provided the revelation of him identifying as Jewish, and then doing Jewish stuff like it was no big deal. A few years ago I was walking with a couple friends on Melrose Ave in Los Angeles and some Chabad guys pestered us to put on Tefillin, right then and there. I had already wrapped that day so I encouraged my friend to do it. He was absolutely mortified, as was the girl we were with, and refused to do it. All of us went to Jewish high school in LA. I have observed a reluctance among day-schooled American Jews in to observe Judaism in secular society, in public. It's not perceived as cool. Your office does not have a Hanukkah party. I don't know enough about Israeli domestic life to say whether Deni is bucking a trend by lighting Hanukkah candles. But I can definitely say after a lifetime of hearing professional athletes praising God after every game or pointing to the sky after every three pointer, that an NBA player saying "Baruch Ata Adonai" is a new experience.
Those are Jewish words, not just Israeli ones. And whereas Israeli athletes can become proximate Jewish ones in the American imagination, this clearly isn't that, and whereas even totally secular American Jewish athletes, by virtue of their rarity, can be perceived as more Jewish to a Jewish fan, this isn't that, either. Nor is the Israeli rookie just Edelmaning (doing Jewish fan service). He's doing his Jewish thing to the extent he relates to it. And it's not only promising, but inspiring, that he's warmed to the ambassadorship as a highly visible Israeli in the Diaspora. All while he's finding his professional footing at 20 years old in the hardest basketball league in the world. (And playing with Russell Westbrook, phew!)
Controversy-averse but accessible, good-natured and sensitive, Deni will decide what he wants this role to be. Maybe it will amount to more NBA Birthright trips (the Omri Casspi special), or maybe it will become something bigger or more meaningful than that. In the meantime, it's nice to have a famous Israeli doing good things without being ensnared by the culture wars. What a joy it has been to follow the journey of an NJB coming of age in the NBA, a talented kid whose success seems anything but preordained, a mensch who still needs rooting for. I can't wait to pick up the story again next season, as a fan if not a newsletter writer.
It's been a blast writing Deni Diary, too. Thank you so much for following along and sharing it.
Deni hit the rookie wall. He’s put up a couple more zero-point performances since last week. He looks lost on the floor. His minutes have become sporadic — now he starts, now he plays 11 minutes — and he still rarely touches the ball. I’m going to let other people do the talking. Here’s the Wizards’ blog @BulletsForever weighing in on how disastrously mismanaged Deni’s rookie season has been so far.
Our suffering Wizards pals report the same frustration watching Deni Avdija, a feisty playmaker with bright flashes early in the season, grow dispirited and gather dust 27 feet from the hoop while Russell Westbrook achieves self-actualization: under-50 percent true-shooting, over-30 percent usage rate. So while some of the developmental challenge might have to do with the small-mindedness of coaches and front offices, some of it might have to do with the way basketball is played now. Modern heliocentric offenses keep the ball in the hands of a lone decision maker like Randle or Westbrook, which creates, in the negative space, that newfangled position called “just sort of stand over there.”
It’s generally accepted that circumstance is critical to an NBA player’s trajectory. But figuring out how much of a player’s struggles are the result of his situation is hard. Look, Deni is shooting poorly, there’s no way around that. An open shot has to be made no matter what team you’re playing for. What’s not his fault is his inability to showcase all the other positive things he can do while he’s missing those shots. More and more frequently his shifts on court are coming up empty. Like Giri said, that’s because his role in Scott Brooks’/Russell Westbrook’s offense is “stand around and wait for the pass.”
I’ll add one more reminder, which is that Deni got coronavirus this year and that this whole year is hella weird because of Covid. In a different environment he’d be in greater control of his own circumstances.
The Jews were in slavery for 430 years. Deni will be out of this funk sooner than that.
I’m keeping it short this week because I need to, you know, slaughter a lamb and slather its blood on my doorpost or whatever.
Speaking of firstborn sons, Deni Avdija had one good game this week (14 points) and laid two eggs (zero points). It’s going pretty rough in Washington, D.C., right now. The team is spiraling again and the season seems less worth salvaging in the win-loss column and more worth using for player development. You would think Deni Avdija might get more than 11 minutes on a team that now has twice as many losses as wins (14-28 as of Thursday night’s loss to the Knicks). You would think!
Not that the 14-point scoring performance made Avdija feel any better, coming as it did in an 18 point loss (also to the Knicks, somehow). I’m going to embed a tweet below explaining why, and then light a scented candle and use it to search my apartment for leavened bread. Then I am going to log out of this hell world for three days, like any Wizards fan wishes they could. The tweet is in Hebrew but the video is in English.
