The Unpossible Brilliance of Wizards Coach Randy Wittman

A strange and unexpected thing happened in the 2014 NBA playoffs. Randy Wittman outcoached Tom Thibodeau over a full NBA playoff series.

Even typing these words is surely causing catastrophic magnetic shifts in the cosmos; the Earth's poles briefly and terrifyingly flipped simply with the appearance of the words "Randy Wittman outcoached" with another coach's name after it. I would hate to be traveling anywhere near the Bermuda Triangle right now. And yet this really happened.

Wittman takes a lot of well-deserved shit for running one of the NBA's most cramped, confused, and self-defeating offenses, and steadfastly refuses to take it to heart. The prospect of this relatively inexperienced and Wittman-afflicted Wizards team meeting the playoff-tested Bulls—coached by the man who practically invented the modern brand of NBA team defense—was thought to spell doom in the opening round. The Nets openly tanked a few games to avoid the Bulls. The plucky Wizards were supposed to be meat for the grinder.

And then the series started, and Bradley Beal and Nene were brilliant, and the Wizards defense was tough as hell, and, incredibly, Randy Wittman took Tom Thibodeau to school. Beal and John Wall sliced open Chicago's vaunted defense, Nene poured in buckets from the post and the midrange, halfcourt sets generated open three-pointers, and Wittman's substitutions and lineups were sensible, even inspired at times. In Washington, with this coach, that's no small thing.

Wizards fans expected that offseason to begin sooner than it did, and they expected the replacement of Randy Wittman to be the team's most important and beneficial move. When the Wizards soundly beat the Bulls and played the Pacers tough in the divisional round, Wittman's job was secured for another season. More than that, a certain wild and mostly unpleasant idea crept into the light: is it possible to be a surly, intractable, and mostly crummy regular season coach, but somehow a good playoff coach? Are everyday regular season basketball and its intensified playoff version different enough that you can be bad—actually, truly, teeth-grindingly bad—at the former while being very good at the latter?

And—no, no, it can't be, this simply cannot be—is it possible this is true of Randy Fucking Wittman?

If you begin with that premise—that somehow Randy Wittman is a good playoff coach—you can sort of see the faint outline of a shoddy but serviceable rationalization, the kind of thing that will absolutely fly in a very crowded bar if everyone is very drunk and very partisan, and exactly nowhere else. This rationalization being that Randy Wittman's miserable offense, which is designed to generate bad shots so long as the defense cedes them, might make the Wizards a tricky team to gameplan against over the course of a series.

Bear with me, please, and join me in this sodden, terrible, speculative sports bar. The general thinking goes that good NBA defenses, with their focus leveled on just one team, will have actions and counters to take away the pet plays and recurring tricks that form the bread-and-butter of the opposing offense's halfcourt attack. Sets will be anticipated and disrupted. Plays that smoothly and cleanly generate a corner three-pointer in the regular season will be bumped, chased, hacked, and otherwise foiled in a series, until both teams are relying upon willpower, luck, depth, and, crucially, talent to scrape together points.

Randy Wittman's offense undoes all this: how do you take away pet plays and recurring tricks that are designed to generate exactly the kinds of shots your defense would prefer to allow? Do you abandon your defense of the three-point line and the paint in order to stop Bradley Beal and John Wall from pulling up for 18-foot jumpers they're not likely to make? How do you box a fighter who keeps firing crisp jabs into his own nose?

Reach even further, and there is a case to be made that the Wizards offense is perfectly suited to NBA playoff basketball precisely because they are more practiced than anyone at taking the kinds of last-resort shots that offenses are likely to be stuck with against playoff-intensity defense, if only because Wittman has been drawing up plays aimed at generating those very shots all year long. Gearing up to take those shots away at the expense of literally anything else would be foolish, ergo the Wizards are the lone team in the playoffs who can and will get what they want. This is insane.

Insane, but also terrifyingly plausible. The goddamn Wizards might be the only team in the entire postseason that won't have to adjust their offense one bit to deal with the strictures and stresses of the playoffs.

This is what the Wizards take with them into the postseason, and part of what helped them become the only team to win on the road so far in these very young playoffs. Wittman has built a team that is the basketball equivalent of a weirdo who wears a fully inflated life jacket every day, day and night, who suddenly wakes up in a flooded town. The life jacket was an entirely useless obstruction to the normal processes of everyday life, and then the environment changed and look who's floating!

This will be a thing to watch, as the Wizards wade into the 2015 playoffs—where Randy Wittman has already extended his improbable and record-setting run of road success with that ugly Game One win in Toronto—with a talented core and the same dopey offense. Will they bungle their way into success? Will all the tedium and self-sabotage pay off? Is Randy Wittman, arguably the worst coach in the NBA, one of the league's better postseason coaches? These are not great questions, but the answer is coming all the same.