[This is Part Two of a two-part post on Washington Wizards team president Ernie Grunfeld looking back at his almost 25-year tenure making player personnel decisions in the National Basketball Association. Part One can be read here.]

[...continued from Part One...]

>>Damage in the District

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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. 68, Washington Wizards at Los Angeles Lakers; contributors: Conor Dirks, Rashad Mobley and Kyle Weidie via television broadcast.]

A3IZA [It was a head-shaker for Kobe Bryant once Trevor Ariza started raining 3s.] [Ariza game face?] [Randy, relieved.]

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Truth About It.net will turn a whole five years old at the end of this October.

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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ShareBullets … news, randomness and tidbits from around the web. The previous ShareBullets was about current Wizards, this one is about past Wizards/Bullets…

Cards in Meridian Hill Park, D.C. – photo: K. Weidie

> Crittenton’s Song & Bookie Ball

Remember Kendrick “Bookie Ball” Long? Of course you do. Long, a “playground pal of [Javaris] Crittenton’s from Atlanta,” was the primary source for Peter Vecsey’s initial somewhat false, somewhat true article in the New York Post about the December 2009 locker room gun incident between Crittenton and Gilbert Arenas. We later found out Arenas was playing the joker and Crittenton, despite the official court report, did, in fact, have bullets for his gun.

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[Remember planking? Or is G-Wiz just dead on Ted Leonsis' desk?]

Here at the 2012 NBA All-Star break, exactly halfway through Ted Leonsis’ three-year rebuilding plan, it’s hard to think about the future of the Washington Wizards without contemplating how they got here. Before this season, Leonsis stated that he wanted to rip the rear-view mirrors off his Ferrari of a franchise and only look forward. The glaring metaphorical omissions by the owner being, a) he may have made modifications to the car, but he didn’t change the driver, team president Ernie Grunfeld, and b) no race car driver would ever compete without a way to see behind them, else they put themselves in an unnecessarily dangerous situation. And we wonder why the Wizards are where they are now.

Teams like the Cleveland Cavaliers and Utah Jazz have been broken down and are now stocked with better future talent than the Wizards. The Cavaliers only got a trade exception, a couple future first-round picks and a couple second-round picks from Miami in return for LeBron James. But the key to their current situation was sending Mo Williams and Jamario Moon to the Los Angeles Clippers for Baron Davis and a 2011 first round pick. That pick turned out to be the first overall selection, Kyrie Irving. Combined with Cleveland’s fourth pick, Tristan Thompson, and whatever player development they have working in their favor (really, look at Cleveland’s roster and tell me it’s more talented than the Wizards), the Cavaliers have achieved post-LeBron promise faster than anyone expected.

The Jazz were able to parlay Deron Williams off on Jay-Z and the Russians for a bounty of prospects — Derrick Favors and two first-round picks. One of those picks netted Utah Enes Kanter third overall in last year’s draft, and they used their own ninth pick to select Gordon Hayward in 2010. Utah also simply had a better core of players and better player development in place. They found Paul Millsap with the 47th overall pick in 2006. Al Jefferson came from Minnesota in a July 2010 exchange for Kosta Koufos, a first-round pick that turned out to be Donatas Motiejunas, and another future first-rounder. In rebuilding past the Deron Williams-Andrei Kirilenko-Mehmet Okur-Carlos Boozer core that was swept by the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2010 Western Conference semi-finals, Utah put better veterans in place to support the young core now in development.

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ShareBullets = links and random tid-bits.

This old NBA Skybox card features Zarko Paspalj, who delightfully reminds me of Hans Klopek from the movie The Burbs. Zarko only appeared in 28 career NBA games, all with the San Antonio Spurs, so his relevance to the Wizards/Bullets is zilch. However, Zarko’s Wikipedia entry is one of delight. Namely, it points to a 2006 article from the San Antonio Express-News, which can now be found here. In being part of the inital wave of Eastern European talent to NBA, Zarko, in one of his early interviews, expressed his love for Pizza Hut and Marlboros. Classic enough as that may be, the Express-News article also relayed that when Spurs officials went to clean out the townhouse rented for Zarko, they found two pieces of furniture: a bed and a pool table — the place comfortably tied together with the smell of smoke instead of rugs. This guy could’ve been a blog star, probably would’ve extended his NBA career. Then again, likely not.

But as this pertains to the Washington Wizards, here’s to hoping that this collection of supreme basketball-playing structures has enhanced their eating habits over this past summer, as they relate to basketball performance. Athletes need calories, but they don’t always need bad calories. I’ve overhead players several times in locker rooms talk about getting greasy, fried food after workouts. Andray Blatche himself has revelad that he hasn’t always eaten lunch on gamedays and how that might affect his energy. And of course, there was that semi-infamous story in the Washington Post about John Wall, which included revelations of his pantry of junk food. Ted Leonsis was quick to say thereafter that the Wizards hired a personal chef for Wall, but he can’t  be the papa-bear for his players all the time.

I’m sure all the culinary details will be attended to by Monumental Sports & Entertainment, but nonetheless, as we hope for a lot of things going into this season, aside from wins and development (such as free throws!), here’s to also hoping that there is no Pizza Hut and Marlboros with Zarko in the future of the Wiz Kids. Read more »

Seeing that pro basketball fans are essentially suspended from the NBA due to squabbling amongst millionaires and billionaires, passing time might be aided by chronicling all NBA and team suspensions of the Washington Wizards since circa 1995. Why? Well, because we humans love stories about crime and punishment, and to most, the NBA lockout fits the bill for both.  So away we go (with old basketball cards to accompany on occasion)…

[Note: This listing is incomplete and unconfirmed for accuracy; information has been gleaned, copied and pasted from eskimo.com/~pbender and prosportstransactions.com with the understanding that all suspensions and fines might not have been publicized or reflected.]

1/5/95
Bernard King suspended by team for altercation with head coach at practice.

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It’s struck me as odd when recently, before being traded to Orlando, Gilbert Arenas deferred to Josh Howard as a more vocal leader on the Wizards than him. Yes, the same Josh Howard whose past record will almost cause more scoffs than Arenas’ … the same Josh Howard who has played all of five games in a Wizards uniform since arriving via trade back in February, compared to Arenas, who appeared in 357 total regular season games with the franchise since being signed to D.C. by Ernie Grunfeld in August of 2003.

After a home game against the New York Knicks on December 10, Arenas was asked about the then forthcoming return of Howard.

“It’s going to help more in the locker room and on the bench because, you know, he has a strong voice. You know, I usually don’t say anything, but he’s more of a vocal person. So when we have those lulls like we did in the third [against the Knicks], he’s going to speak up,” he said.

When I asked Howard about needing to fill the role of vocal leader after the Miami game on Saturday, he said, “It’s different for me. I mean, I haven’t did this in a long time as far as college, and I led by example in Dallas as far as my play on the court. As far as being vocal, I have to remind myself that I can speak.”

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The Wizards are what we thought they were. They also showed a side that we didn’t imagine them to be. Or perhaps naively didn’t consider.

The goal over the summer was to get bigger, tougher … in comes Kevin Seraphin and Trevor Booker via the draft. Unfortunately, the rest of the front-line is much too frail. Of course, that was magnified by the juggernaut Magic, but frail in every sense nonetheless.

And it was evident that the team was short of shooters coming into the season, again, magnified without Gilbert Arenas for the opener. The following charts express long distance experience coming into 2010-11: Read more »

{flickr/Keith Allison}

I’ve written about Caron Butler and Josh Howard being different players off the court. But what about on the court? To get the best perspective, I turned to Rob Mahoney of the ESPN TrueHoop Network Dallas Mavericks blog, The Two Man Game. In addition to his Mavs blog, Rob does great work all over the internet, including his contributions to Hardwood Paroxysm and NBC’s Pro Basketball Talk.

Below is the question I asked Rob about Howard and his answer, and then my response to his question about Butler.

Tell me about Josh Howard. I know about all of his off-court stuff. I know about some of his “can’t control what the ball do” statements regarding on-court stuff. I know about a debate between you and Mike Fisher of DallasBasketball.com over whether Cuban and the Mavs were coddling/babying Howard too much. Any other reasons why Howard fell so far from grace in Dallas? Did you get any indication that he was a disturbance in the locker room? Or can his down year mostly be attributed to injury issues? The Wizards likely see J-Ho as just an expiring contract, but he certainly will play. How healthy is he now? How motivated do you think he will be to contribute to his new, yet very, very bad, team?

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