There were a lot of topics to cover at yesterday’s post-NBA trade deadline press conference with Wizards president of basketball operations Ernie Grunfeld. Although he’s notorious for revealing very little and maintaining the party line no matter the consequences, I tried to ask a couple of questions that took the longer view of the team’s downfall, which arguably began the moment that Gilbert Arenas and Antawn Jamison signed their contract extentions in the summer of 2008.
First, I asked Ernie to characterize what happened from that point, how it all went so wrong.
“We’ve had things that were out of our hands as far as injuries were concerned,” said Grunfeld. “We had a nice four-year run. After not being in the playoffs for almost 18 years, we had a good four-year run. Two years ago, we had injuries to Gilbert and to Brendan Haywood where they missed the whole season. Obviously in the off-season, we made a couple of key acquisitions in Randy Foye and Mike Miller, and had Gilbert and Brendan come back. We had high hopes – as did everyone in this room – to be one of the top four or five teams in the East and win between 45 and 50 games, and it didn’t happen.
“It didn’t come together for a variety of reasons. Maybe it’s injuries, Mr. [Abe] Pollin’s situation, then of course the situation in the locker room, the reason the team did not live up to expectations. I don’t think the chemistry was good. We didn’t play with the fire you need to play with and a certain competitiveness. I thought for the best interest of the organization, we need to make some changes. We had these players playing together. We were only 17-34 (sic), and that’s not what we want around here. We don’t want to be 17-34. We had players who were putting up big numbers and doing statistically well, but we weren’t winning, and the bottom line is we want to put together a team to win ballgames. This group together had gotten stale. It wasn’t going in the right direction, and I thought for the best interest of the franchise _ short-term and long-term, moves needed to be made.”
Though he didn’t say it in that quote above, Grunfeld repeatedly used “stale” to describe the team. Given that, and given that he said that the chemistry was a problem, I later asked him, to what extent were things missed when the team was put together that allowed that to happen?
“I don’t know what happened from that standpoint,” said Grunfeld. “I think everybody thought we had a very solid team going into this season, and we did. Like I said, there were things that happened that were out of our control, things from the injury standpoint, situations in the locker room, and I think all those things were major distractions. Sometimes those things are hard to overcome. Our players were getting a little bit older, and since we hadn’t accomplished the things we needed to do, I thought this was a good time where we could still get some assets back and try to do the things we need to do to have a lot more flexibility from a salary cap standpoint and also get some young assets back that can help us down the road.”
They are interesting answers. Not everyone is the Wizards president of basketball operations.
Add Pick & Roll to your RSS: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Pick-and-roll
Follow me on Twitter @craigstouffer
