Wes Unseld Jr. is out as Wizards head coach, moved to the front office with assistant Brian Keefe taking over on an interim basis until they begin a full-scale search this offseason.
“The statement thy put out makes it seem like Wes is someone they really respect in that building – he’s put in a lot of time and energy, and it seems like he has a lot of fans in the new brass,” Grant said. “But he was 77-130 as the Wizards’ head coach, so it has not gone well, even discounting this year where they’re supposed to be losing and developing players.”
Perhaps the numbers are what they are, but why now?
“What is the metric? This is what I’m fascinated by here,” Danny said. “If this was a team with the roster to be at the top of the conference and they weren’t there, that’s fine – but if the goal here is to build for the future, what are we judging this on? Unseld was brought here to coach one team before they decided to blow it up; they are bad, and worse than I thought they would be, but I wonder what the metric is – like they can’t lose a lot of fourth-quarter leads, or be the worst defensive team in the league, or whatever.”
“I don’t think it’s those things if I had to guess. Maybe the defensive problems he’s had since the day he took over as head coach, honestly, I just have to imagine this is more about player development. The goal is not truly to win games, so you can’t fire him because they’re not winning games. To me, this is about them clearly seeing bad habits that are being developed or aren’t being fixed, or maybe their ideas on how minutes are being used, aren’t the same as his. What’s odd is some of the kids are developing nicely, so it’s not like you can say by and large guys are regressing, so my guess is it’s usage and philosophical differences.”
Take a listen to the entire conversation above!