5/3: Deni Goes Home
An injury ends the Wizraeli's rookie season. Let's talk about it.
You’re reading the final issue of DENI DIARY, a dispatch from Deni Avdija’s rookie season by Louis Keene. (Follow me on Twitter!)
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.
BeHatzlacha,
Louis