With the Wizards’ season concluded, we’re reviewing the Wizards, position-by-position. First up, the shooting guards with Bradley Beal backed up by Jodie Meeks.
When Bradley Beal grows frustrated — and he often did during the Washington Wizards’ tumultuous season — he smolders with a controlled rage. Rarely does his voice register over a low-tenor mumble. His facial expression remains placid. When the season screeched to a halt late in April, Beal stayed in character while expressing the depths of his irritation following a 43-39 season and first-round exit.
“This one is more of a disappointment. More anger,” Beal said. “It was definitely frustrating this year because we had high expectations for ourselves as well as everyone else around the league had expectations for us and we fell beyond short of them.”
Beal, who just completed his sixth NBA season but won’t turn 25 until late June, speaks with the same steady drone and appears just as unfazed when addressing the one real highlight of the Wizards’ year: himself.
Although 2017-18 will go down as a season of underachievement, Beal’s game matured to an all-star level as he did the heavy lifting in the absence of John Wall. For the first time in his career, Beal played all 82 games and thus, led his team in minutes (2,977) and total points (1,857).
On Dec. 5, Beal scored a personal-best 51 points during a road win against the Portland Trail Blazers — the most ever by an opponent in Portland, topping Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (49 points in 1972). The moment crystallized how Beal carried the team without Wall as he unleashed his biggest scoring game on the night after one of the most embarrassing losses in franchise history, a 47-point beatdown in Utah. The game also started Beal’s all-star campaign in earnest. By February, he was selected by Eastern Conference coaches and drafted by LeBron James to play on his team.
Although Wall was selected to his fifth straight all-star game, he could not play after undergoing left knee surgery in late January. Wall’s injury shifted the limelight to Beal as Washington’s sole representative at All-Star Weekend in Los Angeles. Even more, Wall’s void for half of the season forced Beal into the sole leadership role.
“For me it’s upsetting because I missed 41 games,” Wall said following the team’s elimination in Game 6 of the opening round against the Toronto Raptors. “So, for these guys to compete the way they did and for Brad to have an MVP-type season for our team and make even more strides is big time for us. He held it down for us.”
As the responsibilities mounted, Beal both soared and shrunk. He faced double teams while having to facilitate an offense that necessitated more ball movement. In turn, Beal averaged a team-high 6.6 assists in the first 22 games following Wall’s surgery. The Wizards went 14-8 over the stretch. But the unfamiliar point guard duties also created a slew of high turnover games. Beal committed 11 over three straight losses to the Golden State Warriors, Raptors and Indiana Pacers.
The March 4 Pacers game epitomized the up-and-down nature of Beal’s playmaking. Although he shared the ball for a career-best 11 assists, he also committed a pair of costly turnovers late in the game before Washington fell, 98-95. Beal revealed the area in which he must take the next step with his game: performing in the clutch.
Beal missed 10 of 11 shot attempts in situations where the Wizards were tied or trailed by one possession in the final 10 seconds of the game, according to statistics on NBA.com. As the team’s go-to deep threat, Beal could not connect from the three-point arc with the game on the line: 0 for 12 when Washington was tied or behind by five points in the final minute, 0 for 5 when tied or down by three in the final 30 seconds and 0 for 4 in the last 10 seconds.
After those moments, Beal, with the same calm demeanor, shouldered the loss and blamed himself. He was also low key when Wall praised him at the end of the season for playing like an MVP. As he listened, like always, Beal remained unmoved.
“I thought he was embellishing,” Beal said with a hint of a smile. “I had a good year, but MVP I feel like is a whole different category. It is tough to carry a team throughout a year, but I didn’t do it myself. I’m not someone who’s going to say I take full responsibility for the position we are in and our success this year because that isn’t true. There are 15 of us. Everybody contributed one way or another. We didn’t have the year that we wanted to, but it speaks volumes for John to say that. That’s my guy. We’ve grown tremendously over this year for sure both on and off the floor. We’re just going to continue to get better.”
Off the bench: Jodie Meeks
To say that Jodie Meeks’s first season in Washington did not go as planned would be an understatement. He was the player brought in to replace Bojan Bogdanovic’s shooting off the bench and, conceivably, back up Beal as a two-guard.
Those plans never panned out.
Meeks scored more than 20 points only twice this season, as the team waited and waited for him to turn the corner. Instead, Meeks remained in a season-long shooting funk (.399 percentage from the floor and .343 from the three-point arc) and as the misses piled up, so did his time on the bench.
Although Meeks, who battled injuries over the previous two and a half seasons, came to Washington as a healthy 30-year-old, he was only entrusted to give Beal a break every now and then.
Overall, Meeks averaged 14.5 minutes per game. Before the trade deadline, Meeks’s camp floated the prospect of welcoming a trade so that he could get more minutes elsewhere. The Wizards found no takers.
On March 14, Meeks produced his season highlight when he hit a game-tying corner three-pointer against the Boston Celtics. Meeks extended the game into an extra session and the Wizards, who once trailed by 20 points, defeated the Celtics in double overtime. After hitting that shot, Meeks remained confident that his production would turn around.
“The cream always rises to the top, the old saying says,” Meeks said a day after that game, “and I feel like that’s going to happen.”
But the momentum ended there as Meeks received scattered minutes for the rest of the year. Then, Meeks’s season ended with a surprise announcement by the NBA.
Just before the start of the playoffs, Meeks received a 25-game suspension without pay for violating the terms of the NBA-National Basketball Players Association anti-drug program. Meeks has a player option to return to the Wizards for next season.
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