At the Feb. 10 trade deadline, the Washington Wizards enacted a fairly significant shakeup of their roster, sending talented guard Spencer Dinwiddie and sharpshooter Davis Bertans to the Dallas Mavericks in exchange for former All-Star forward/center Kristaps Porzingis.
With most Mavs fans viewing Porzingis as a disappointment, despite his more-than-respectable counting and rate stats, this had all the markings of a salary dump.
But for the Wizards, it was a chance to take a flyer on a player who the team hopes will become a viable second option alongside Bradley Beal after the Beal/Dinwiddie pairing didn’t work out (Washington had a minus-5.9 net rating when those two shared the floor).
So, did the Wizards make the right choice trading for Porzingis?
Is Kristaps Porzingis a viable co-star for Bradley Beal?
Unfortunately, we won’t get a concrete answer to this in 2021-22, as Beal will miss the rest of the season following wrist surgery, and Porzingis still out with a knee injury.
On paper, the idea of pairing a prominent high-usage scorer up with a big that still has a solid reputation for spacing the floor is a good one, but that feels more like a drawn-up fantasy if you look at where both have excelled and faltered offensively this year.
Before his injury, Porzingis’ shooting numbers could be best described as “yuck”, with his spot-up points per possession numbers sitting in the 41st percentile and his catch-and-shoot three-point rate resting in the 28th percentile. Combine that with Beal’s pedestrian pick-and-roll stats (48th percentile in PPP before the injury) and the expectations become a little direr.
That said, there’s no reason to expect Porzingis will continue to chuck up this many bricks (career 35 percent from behind the arc), and if he can replicate what he’s done as a roll man this year. If he can do that and Beal starts to look more like the guy who carved opposing defenses up with ball screens in 2020-21 (96th percentile), there will be a pathway to success with these two on the court together.
(This is without bringing up Porzingis’ success this year as a rim protector [95th percentile in blocks per 75 possessions, 88th percentile in rim dFG% vs. expected] and how that could help cover for Beal’s sketchy defense.)
In general, it’s hard to blame the Wizards for taking this chance. Even factoring in the hot start this team got off to, it was clear that they weren’t going anywhere with this roster. So rolling the dice on a guy who’s still pretty young and has shown himself to be productive (plus-2.4 estimated plus/minus) is worth it compared to, say, hoping that Beal and Dinwiddie figure it out.
And, again, it’s not a guarantee that Beal and Porzingis will figure it out. After all, if the big man struggled to mesh with Luka Doncic, that doesn’t speak well for his pliability elsewhere. But the Wizards have to try something to improve this team that is stuck in mediocrity.
With the clock continuously ticking for this team to maximize Beal’s prime, upgrading along the fringes will only do so much. The Porzingis addition could easily sum up to the same results, but we’ll have to wait to see how the formula plays out.