“[Bradley Beal] is very talented. … He can play without the ball, he can put alot of pressure on the defense and he can shoot it. He is the future of the NBA.” —Jason Kidd.

[video below / quote via TAI's Adam McGinnis]

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Twenty-eight percent of 3-pointers taken in the NBA are from the corner, and they go in the basket 3.6 percent more than above the break 3-pointers. The Washington Wizards, with John Wall, are the best shooting team in the league from the corner. This is significant.

[Wizards 3-Pointers in 2012-13 before John Wall.]

[Wizards 3-Pointers in 2012-13 WITH John Wall.]

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[Editor's note: This is Mohamed Abdihakim's debut for TAI. Mohamed blogs at TheHoopDoctors.com and is an editor at Hoops-Nation.com. He is currently working toward a multimedia journalism degree from Florida Atlantic University. —Kyle W.]

82games.com has made available a certain simplified metric.

Belying otherwise extensive research, “Simple Rating” (SR) provides a relatively digestible look into a player’s value on the court versus their positional counterpart. The values used in this rating are Production—”a variant of John Hollinger’s PER”—and a plus/minus unit.

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By now, most people will agree that Bradley Beal is a keeper—and that isn’t just because his agent, Mark Bartelstein, recently said, “I’m sure lots of teams would like to have Brad, but the Wizards have absolutely no intention of trading him.”

But that’s not all that interesting. Beal was projected to be a “keeper,” and was expected to produce as the No. 3 pick in the last draft. And he has. Beal was named December’s Eastern Conference Rookie of the Month, and, over the last three games, the former Florida Gator has averaged a plus/minus of plus-10.7 per game, along with 18.3 points (63.6% from 3-point range), 3.7 rebounds, and 2.7 assists.

What’s more interesting is the reason why he’s been able to get better game by game, even before John Wall made his season debut. The easy analysis would be to say, ‘Oh, the game is finally slowing down for Beal.’ He even said so himself after Monday night’s 29-point thumping of the Orlando Magic: “The game’s starting to slow down for me more, and I’ve gained a lot more confidence.”

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[D.C. Council: setting the scene, rating the starters, assessing the subs, providing the analysis, and catching anything that you may have missed. Unlike the real DC Council, everything here is on the table. Game No. 32, Washington Wizards at Miami Heat; contributor: Kyle Weidie from his standing desk (Why, yes, this is quite late ... thank you for understanding).]

Smug LeBron. Read more »

[D.C. Council: setting the scene, rating the starters, assessing the subs, providing the analysis, and catching anything that you may have missed. Unlike the real DC Council, everything here is on the table. Game No. 21, your Washington Wizards vs. the Heat in Miami; contributors: John Converse Townsend and Kyle Weidie from the other side of the boob tube.]

A coach trying to avoid an amber alert with his players… Read more »

Here to provide the DC Council Opening Statements for Washington’s 20th game of the season against the Heat in Miami is TAI’s Kyle Weidie (@Truth_About_It). Usually there is a guest to these bits, but this Kyle character didn’t reach out to anyone in time. And otherwise, it’s hard to get people to care about/to be interested in/to spend their time on a franchise as bad as the Wizards. So here I am.

Wizards Starters (3-17):

Jordan Crawford, Bradley Beal, Martell Webster, Chris Singleton, Emeka Okafor

Heat Starters (14-6):

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Here to provide the DC Council Opening Statements for Washington’s 15th game of the season against the Miami Heat in D.C. are TAI’s Kyle Weidie (@Truth_About_It) and guest Surya Fernandez (@SuryaHeatNBA), who writes about the Heat for the SB Nation blog Hot Hot Hoops.

Wizards Starters (1-13):

A.J. Price, Bradley Beal, Trevor Ariza, Chris Singleton, Emeka Okafor
(More changes to the starting crew in consideration? We will see.) 

Heat Starters (12-3):

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Truth About It.net turns a whole five years old at the end of October, which is right about now.

Hard to believe/interesting. Nonetheless, over the life of the site from the 2007-08 season to 2011-12, we’ve seen/lived/suffered through 131 wins, 263 losses, four coaches, two owners, one GM/team president, one Phil Chenier mustache removal, and 56 total players (amazingly, 48 players over the last three seasons).

You may have heard of ESPN’s #NBArank project, now in year two. Now hear of #WizardsRank, where we rank each of those 56 players during Truth About It.net’s five-year run. TAI anonymously polled 27 members of the Wizards pixel establishment — from mainstream media to new media, TAI staffers included, to a few pixel consumers (readers of the site) — and got 17 responses.

Participants were given the full list of 56 in alphabetical order, and included for each player were total games, minutes, PER (player efficiency rating), and WS/48 (win-shares per 48 minutes) only from the last five seasons. Participants were asked to rate each player on the scale of 1-to-10 according to this criteria: on court performance; off court performance; intangibles; and own personal memory. Yes, this is totally subjective, but relatively collective.

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[D.C. Council: setting the scene, rating the starters, assessing the subs, providing the analysis, and catching anything that you may have missed. Unlike the real DC Council, everything here is on the table. Preseason Game No. 7, Washington Wizards at Miami Heat (in Kansas City, MO); contributors: Adam McGinnis, Rashad Mobley and Kyle Weidie.]

Jordan Crawford can pass? Yes, Jordan Crawford can pass… to Jan Vesely, a GIF.

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