2/12: Deni Comes Off The Bench
It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault. It's not your fault.
You’re reading DENI DIARY, a weekly dispatch from Deni Avdija’s rookie season by Louis Keene. (Follow me on Twitter!)
The Wizards are still sputtering, so Deni Avdija lost his starting job to Davis Bertans after a quiet performance last weekend. It’s not his fault.
Re-signing Bertans was the Wizards’ offseason priority, and now that they’ve committed to pay the Latvian sharpshooter an average of $16 million for each of the next five years, the franchise need him to not suck. What he has brought to the table so far this season is the accuracy of someone shouting “Kobe!” during every shot attempt. It’s not totally his fault either. He didn’t play any basketball between March and December because of the global pandemic everyone keeps talking about. So he came into the season very out of shape. And to his credit, he accepted his reserve role professionally. But he’s kind of allergic to rebounds, too? And defense. So if he’s not making shots, he’s not really an NBA player.
Whereas Deni (cut to image of smiling, handsome Deni!!) can be useful even if he’s not making his shots. He does things on defense (probably a bit overrated in that respect, but still a significant upgrade over Bertans) and can, you know, dribble and pass and stuff. (Case in point: in his first game as a reserve, Deni posted a +15, with a career-high 10 boards, in a game the Wizards won by four.)
There was a sign that the lineup change was coming. Deni was benched to start the second half against Charlotte, provoking an expression from him that we hadn’t seen before. We call this “Wizards Face.”
Deni didn’t get back into the game late in the blowout loss to Charlotte, which was eyebrow-raising. But it perhaps cushioned the blow when head coach Scott Brooks promoted Bertans to the starting lineup the next day. Brooks noted that he had recently held a private film session with Avdija and second-year forward Rui Hachimura, and while he emphasized the lineup change was more about jump starting Bertans than demoting Deni, Brooks also offered some criticism of the young Israeli’s performance in recent games.
It’s a tough league, you have to learn game by game. He has to bounce back and play better tomorrow. We need him to be consistent. We’re not asking him to make every shot, we’re just asking him to be prepared, being aware, know who you’re guarding and how you’re guarding—those are things that we have to get better with.”
More importantly, the coach heaped fairly lofty praise on the youngster after the game. I’m putting the block quote with emphasis mine:
He handled it like we knew he would handle it. He's a great kid that's tough, that works hard. He's gonna be a starter in this league for 12-15 years.
We know that Deni is a good kid, his give a crap level is high, and he’s committed to his craft. After both games, Deni was spotted getting up extra shots with an assistant coach. It’s somewhat commonplace to see basketball stars do this after bad performances. It’s less common to see lottery picks do it during their rookie season, though it’s possible that they do it all the time but nobody really cares.
The change worked, sort of…at first. Bertans made some shots, the Wizards won their first game with that lineup, and the team altogether more coherent. Their win over Chicago, decided on the last play of the game, was arguably their strongest performance of the season.
But with a three game sample to work with, the lineup change seems to have had little net effect. The Wizards won the first and then were blown out twice (once without Bradley Beal). Bertans has shot 34.6% from deep in those games. Compounding the issue, Deni (3/16 in those three games) is now shooting like Bertans was two weeks ago. Maybe it’s something wrong with the chairs. Still, the plus/minus numbers remain telling — Avdija is a net minus-1 in those three games. Bertans? Minus-38.
If you personally have Wizards Face from reading this, allow yourself a spectacular highlight from one of those three games:
“My mind is different when I’m in the open court,” he said. “I just see things differently. I don’t know how to explain it — it’s all in my head.”
I don’t think it really matters whether Deni gets his starting job back in the short term. (Getting his rhythm back post-Covid is more important.) But I admit I’m afflicted by a morbid curiosity about whether he will during Brooks’s tenure as the coach of this team. The Wizards are spiraling again, but…does it even make sense to replace your head coach during a pandemic with all the protocols and procedures that have become routine for the members of the team at this point? What would they get out of putting assistant coach Robert Pack in charge?
Here’s ESPN’s Kevin Arnovitz in 2013 — when Pack was a Clippers assistant, pre-Doc Rivers era — in an article listing assistants due for a promotion:
Pack raised his profile as a hard-nosed but fair instructor, the guy on staff unafraid to get in a player’s face and tell him when he’s disrespecting the game.
That was seven years ago! He’s still an assistant. Just a thought. Anyway, Happy Valentine’s Day. Save this one for Tu B’av.
