Bradley Beal and John Wall Settling Slightly Less

Mandatory Credit: Brad Mills-USA TODAY Sports

Yesterday, the Washington Wizards finished an emphatic sweep of the Toronto Raptors. Their offense averaged 113.7 points per 100 possessions in the series, according to Basketball-Reference, a full ten points better than their regular season mark. The Washington’s offense has been much maligned during the regular season, particularly the propensity of Bradley Beal and John Wall to settle for mid-range jumpshots and the encouragement of this strategy by Randy Wittman.

Given their dramatic improvement in this series against Toronto, it could be assumed that Beal and Wall have undergone a transformation in their shot selection.

The graph below, showing all players with at least 100 drives this season and 100 pull-up two-pointers[1. Both identified using SportVU player tracking statistics at NBA.com], is one way to illustrate the criticisms of the Wizards’ offense.

In theory, once a player dribbles inside the three-point line they have two choices—continue the drive into the basket area or stop and shoot. That’s a vast oversimplification. Not every foray inside the three-point line can turn into a drive all the way to the basket. A player could also pass before they reach the lane, so these two SportVU statistics are not perfectly capturing the options available to a player. However, this graph is illustrating that fundamental criticism—Wall and Beal have a tendency to settle for pull-up mid-range jumpers. Compared to the rest of their peers, they are far more likely to settle for a pull-up two pointer than take the ball into the lane. Most savvy defenses will encourage this for the reasons you’ll see below.

Beal and Wall are both dramatically more efficient when driving[1. Points per Drive is team points per drive, so it includes points created on assists by Beal and Wall after they’ve driven] as opposed to pulling up. That’s likely the case for almost every regular rotation player in the league. We have to acknowledge that simply driving into the lane is not plausible on every possession. Still, the ratio Beal and Wall have settled on is fairly out of whack with both the rest of the league and the ideally efficient distribution.

If we compare those regular season numbers to their performance against the Raptors, we can see where a big portion of the team’s improved efficiency has come from.

Beal was much more efficient in this series, particularly on drives, and drove the ball nearly twice as often, relative to his pull-up two-pointers. Wall was also much more efficient on drives and drove slightly more often. This doesn’t represent the entirety of that ten-point bump in team efficiency, but it’s a big piece.

The slope of the trend line in the first graph represents a ratio of roughly two drives for every one pull-up two-pointer—that would be the average across all players who are regularly capable of both plays. Even with the increase in their drives in this series, Wall and Beal would still be more tilted towards long two-pointers than the average. If Wall and Beal keep this up, perhaps pushing their individual balances even closer to the norm, the Eastern Conference playoff race could get a whole lot more complicated.