THE MODERATOR: Good morning, everybody. Thanks for coming out today and for Monday as well. We'll have Michael Winger and Will Dawkins here for our end of season media availability. They will both have an opening statement and then once they're finished with that, we'll open it up for questions.
We will begin with an opening statement from Michael.
MICHAEL WINGER: Yeah. Hi. First I want to offer my sincerest thanks to our fans, to our players, to their families, our families, to our partners, to our staff, and to Ted. What we're undertaking is hard and everybody showed up. They showed up every day to help us along the way. They deserve our deepest gratitude for their resilience, for their care, for their support and their trust this season and for future seasons. I just want to say thank you to them.
Thank you, you guys, too. You spend so much of your time and your journalistic passion following us, telling our story as you see it, maybe not with the optimism that I would tell it, but nevertheless, I appreciate your truth searching, your truth telling, your professionalism, your commitment to your craft. We are a hard cover right now, and yet you guys also show up every day. You reach out, you try to find the truth, you try to find the story, and the one thing that I do really want you guys to know is that the two of us are here to help you, not run from you. So to the extent that we can do anything for you guys, just reach out. That's partly why we are here too.
When we came together in May of 2023 with the objective to reinvent the organization and set a course to fulfill our highest aspirations, it started with a first day and then a second day and a third day, and we're nearing our first anniversary together. We developed a plan. We communicated that plan and we started the journey. We are now sort of at the conclusion of season one of that journey. We have some difficulties that we'll talk about, but a tremendous amount of hope came from this season, and we'll talk about that too.
We began the rebuild knowing that -- I used it -- we began the rebuild acknowledging that it was going to be hard. It was going to be long. We were going to have to make some tough decisions and endure some tough days, some tough games along the way. Clearly, we did that. But eventually, we wanted it to start to feel like a new place for the folks that had been here, with higher standards, loftier expectations, and a heightened level of accountability and togetherness. I think that a lot of you heard from our players the other day. I hope you heard some of their positive reflections in those areas.
We acknowledge that the gains that we would make organizationally were very unlikely to show up in the box scores, very unlikely to show up in the standings. They would show up in how our players and our staff felt every day when they came to work. They would show up in their individual improvements, whether it was skill, leadership, performance, their physical health, their mental health, whatever the case may be, that it would show up in how their bodies respond to heavier minutes, how their bodies would respond to injury, and importantly, for us, whether the people that came into our building every day were enjoying being here.
And again, you heard from a lot of our guys and we heard from a lot of our guys over the last handful of days and they registered that, and so from that limited perspective, we're proud of that.
In our exit interviews, like I said, we received a lot of encouraging feedback. It's refreshing to hear in the early stages of a rebuild, particularly under the weight of -- that we feel of win-loss scrutiny. When we came into the season, there were a handful of things that we wanted to see. One, we are very, very pleased with, and that is individual player improvement, particularly improvement befitting what turned out to be a completely reconstructed player development program. So our players and our staff leaned really heavily into that program and their individual result -- their individual results I think are a testament to their work and the quality of the program that we tried to put in place, and so we're really, really pleased with our players' individual improvements.
The one that was most disappointing, frankly, no secret, was our competitiveness. It's one of our five organizational pillars, and I think that there were just far too many games that we didn't bring the level of competitiveness that we are capable of bringing and that a team that is walking into a game trying to punch above its weight that was really the one thing that we couldn't forfeit, and there were just too many games, too many moments, too many halves along the way where we forfeited competitiveness, and if you do that in this league, particularly when you're sort of in the cycle where we are, you're going to have a really hard time recovering.
So there were games that we just -- we didn't show up to compete or we showed up to compete for 12 minutes or 24 minutes or whatever the case may be, and that's not what we talked about, it's not what we preach on a day-to-day basis, and it cost us a lot of games. So on a going-forward basis, that's just going to be one of the things that's going to make us better going into next season, is a renewed focus on competitiveness, teaching it, coaching it, practicing it. Some encouraging signs on that front, particularly as it relates to the second half of the season, it is undeniable that we won only 18 percent of our basketball games, but in the second half of the season, we won 40 percent of our quarters and we won 40 percent of our halves. That's clearly not a whole game, but we're looking for signs, and those are really encouraging signs.
A couple of others. 60 percent of our games we were within six points, two possessions, in the final three minutes, and then in a third of our games, we were within three points or a single possession in the final 30 seconds. We had a really hard time closing games. But we were in a lot of these basketball games, particularly in the second half of the year, and that's momentum that we get to carry into the off-season and into next season.
Two more areas that were really important to us, enhancing our professionalism, our accountability, and our habits. We feel like we are more mature, we are more focused, we are a more professional outfit than we were a year ago. That's on the court and off the court. Our staff and our players have taken a responsibility for their professionalism and they take it seriously. We have developed an accountability to each other, to the work, to the increments, and that will bleed into the off-season. We'll continue forward refining those habits and eventually those habits are going to make the work that we do stickier and easier. So, generally speaking, we're satisfied with the professionalism, accountability, and the habits that we demonstrated this season.
And then the last one on that front is enhanced organizational appeal. One of our objectives effective, really immediately, when we came aboard was to level-up the operation and demonstrate to the player talent and staff talent both in our walls and outside of our walls that we're going to be become an appealing place to play and work. I've heard from our players, you guys have heard from our players, I have heard from our staff, that they believe in what we're doing, and they can articulate some of the gains that we've made, and they shared that information with their friends and colleagues around the League. We've heard from staff and agents and players elsewhere as well and they say, hey, look, we're hearing good things. It's clearly not showing up in the standings yet, but we're hearing good things. And they pay attention to that kind of thing.
It's really important for us because at the very end of the day, we want to win at the highest levels and that requires high-level talent. You want high-level talent to want to play for you. You want high-level staff talent to want to work for you. So it's our job to create an environment where they can thrive when they're here, but in order to get here, they first have to want to be here. So we're very pleased with a lot of the feedback that we've gotten on that front.
We do not believe that wins are produceable on their own. We believe that there's no secret lever, no magic pill, that just one moment helps you achieve the goals that you've set out to achieve. We've talked about it ad nauseam. Our players are tired of hearing it. They're going to -- they're not going to stop hearing it. But for us, it's a lot like tilling a field. You have to turn over the soil multiple times, you have to aerate, you have to fertilize and fertilize and fertilize, and you have to plant seeds, and then you have to wait, you have to pour in everything required to get those seeds to germinate so that you can eventually harvest them, but it takes a long time.
So, for us, harvests and wins, we think of them as a result. We think of them as a byproduct of an extraordinary quality and volume of investment of deposits, of work, of belief requiring the right people at the right time all coming together and we have to continue our focus on those deposits, we have to continue the focus on tilling the field.
Meanwhile, there is no tolerance organizationally for mediocrity, there is no tolerance for shortcuts, and absolutely no forgiveness for poor effort. So to the extent that you saw that this season, it is intolerable and it's something that we're going to talk about with our staff and our players in the off-season, and we'll preach these things very heavily going into training camp.
We're mindful of our stakeholders and the respect and appreciation that each of them, each of you guys, deserve. We have -- we feel very strongly that we have the right fans, that we have the right principles, we have the right market to build a sustainably great team, and we set out to do that a year ago. That plan has not changed at all, and so that's why we're still here doing our thing.
WILL DAWKINS: Thanks, Mike. Thank you all for coming this morning as well. I would say the professionalism that you guys have shown in coverage has helped me in year one. I've learned to enjoy the season, learned how to work with you, but before we get into Wizards, I do want to say, Go Caps. Big win last night. That was huge. I'm looking forward to playoff hockey. I know my family is as well. We've had a good time going to Caps games.
But when Michael and I kind of sit down and look at the season, in our roles, you're kind of asked to do things in the day-to-day. Like, focus in on the day-to-day, be in the fight with the staff, be in the fight with the players, while also keeping the long-term vision of the organization, like, in view. So it's kind of like me trying to get here this morning, 495, like, the day-to-day is the traffic, like, the players, we're in the traffic every single day, but we also got to be the helicopter that's above it that's seeing where everything needs to go, playing Tetris on how you can get there.
So that's a delicate balance for us. At times it can definitely be difficult. But when you kind of take a step back, when you kind of search in between those moments throughout the season, I think you can look at the totality of the season and find that there was a lot of periods of progress for us. For me, as we're sitting here today, to put a bow on 2023-2024, I think it all comes back to what drives us and what's most important, and that's the mindset of continuing to build towards our ultimate goal, and that ultimate goal hasn't changed. It's to create sustained team success for a long time and to do so in an environment that is both professional, but also repeatable day after day, no matter what happens the day before, and I think we took some serious strides towards that this season.
Was it easy? Definitely not. I think Michael touched on some of that stuff. It definitely wasn't a linear season. There were mistakes, there were set backs, miscues. But at the end of the day, those hard times created growing pains, and through the growing pains, you grow and you learn, and I think by the end of the season we learned a lot about our staff and a lot about what goes into being a Wizard and Wizard player.
So I know the record might not reflect success to some. As we stated in September, those outcomes won't define us. Our success was going to be measured in our players' improvement and our players development and the stacking of those incremental wins. From the helicopter, can you kind of see those. When you're in the traffic every day, you can't. So it's kind of on us to make sure that we highlighted those to the players when we're going through it.
The other thing we said that I thought was important at the beginning of the season was breaking the season up into segments, every 10 games, 20 games, 30 games. We did trimester meetings with our players, 25 games, 50, 75. So people knew where they stood and they were, like, things to achieve within the long run of the season. And we can talk about what those things were, but I think we progressed and got there, and Michael hit on some of them the second half of the season.
So for me, I saw progress in that. We did get stuck in the mud. There were times during the season where my GPS was going off saying, recalculate, recalculate, turn around, figure it out. But we did, and our players stayed with it, and we were better at the end of the season than the beginning and that was a goal of ours. So we've talked last month or so just kind of getting a feel for what the rest of the season was going to look like, spent time with our players individually, going to dinner with them, just recapping the season. These exit interviews this last week with our staff and players have been really helpful.
Three main things kind of stood out to me. The first, it kind of goes hand in hand what I said before, but we maintained our cycle of discovery from the beginning of the season to the end. We will always look to be an innovative organization. We will always look to try new things. But I think we were purposely more intentional this season and I think we learned a lot. I think we learned a lot about the organization, we learned a lot about our players, and in talking to our players they learned a lot about themselves that they didn't know they had, and for me, that's important.
I believe the stat was 18 players on our team this year played at least 300 minutes, which would have been top 5 in the League this year, and it wasn't -- it was a pretty healthy year for us until the end of the season, so these guys were getting opportunities during the season, during the beginning of the season, and then they did a great job of staying in the stay-ready games, working on their body and playing with the Go-Go, the alignment there. When people were called up to the Wizards, they were ready to go and ready to play.
So along with learning stuff about the players that were actually on the floor and discovering those things, we discovered stuff about individual skill improvement, about the pace of play we want to play with, I think we ended up second, and just stylistically the things we want to throw out there, what type of big you want to play with. Not all of it worked, not all of it was pretty, I completely understand that, but I am happy that we had that mindset to try to undercover and discover and we kept that from the beginning of the season on.
The second thing that stood out to me -- Michael touched on this as well, is we made some really positive deposits into the environment. We're building the foundation of what that's going to look like, we're at the early infancy stages of that, but our players really chipped in. I think they spoke about it on Monday. You guys probably know a little bit better than us. We paid attention to what they were hearing and what they were saying, but this is a place they enjoyed coming to work. There was a camaraderie that they hadn't had in some other places, there was professionalism that they felt and that they helped create, and the consistency that I saw came from them doing the work. They were really rooted in doing the work, coming back, trying to improve, trying to get better, and a lot of players helped define what professionals looked like with the Wizards, but pulled myself, pulled Mike, pulled the staff around themselves into defining what professionalism looks like for the staff as well.
That's just now, that's the bar now. That's the new standard. We will continue to work and improve and make another standard, but I think we took positive steps on that. And off the court as well, that stuff's super important to me, making sure family services got improved upon, making sure that the guys had a more player-centric environment that they walked into every single day, more bonding on the road. Another driver of the organization will always be the community aspect, and I think our guys are serious about that and did a really good job on that.
So we put a lot of deposits into the environment that we saw grow already. Some things will grow slower, but I thought that grew pretty fast.
The third theme, I would say, that kind of stuck out to us, where we're at now, it's kind of where we're going this summer. A lot of people call it the off-season. I'm kind of the guy that calls it a get-better season. You're not really off we're. We're really working. I like to call it the jump season. I try to tell the guys, like, we are here to make jumps in the summertime, whether it's in your mental fitness, whether it's on the basketball stuff you want to improve on, whether it's in the performance strengthening and conditioning space, or just working on your body, being more flexible, getting in a stance lower. Those things are important and you have to make jumps.
I believe Sunday when the ball stopped bouncing in Boston until training camp officially starts is 170 days. That's a massive amount of time to get better, a massive amount of time to take jumps. We don't expect players to show up October 1st, you're better. No. Let's take a jump in May, take a jump in June, flatten out a little bit in July, come back up in August, and then you get there. So it's just like we did throughout the season, checkpoints, getting to where we need to get to, and having a program where everybody improves to make those jumps. So that's why I call it the jump season, not the off-season, because I can guarantee you we're going to work, we're going to do that.
For the staff as well. Last year was a little rough, would you say? We got here and had to get right to it. We have a year under our belt. We have our staff, more continuity with the scouts, with the front office. We have a lot of stuff that we have to come up with this summer. Obviously, it starts with the head coaching search and then goes into the draft. We'll be able to find out soon what level pick we have at the top of the draft, but we'll get a good pick there. We have another pick in the 20s, a pick in the second round, so we'll be able to add some young talent. It will just be more developmental pieces to the puzzle. But we're excited for them and we're excited for soon to go into free agency after that and summer league and see the jumps that we made as an organization.
So, for me, I have a lot of optimism. I'm really optimistic about everything we have going on here in DC, DC. I'm happy about that. Year one was a true learning experience for everyone, I would say myself especially. I can't wait to kind of debrief all of this and just really reflect on myself and how I could have been better and things I can do moving forward, but I know I learned a lot. But my optimism stems from -- I would say my optimism looking ahead stems from how committed the staff and the players truly were this season. I don't take that for granted. I want to thank them for that. But it also comes from knowing that the staff, the players, and truly the fans understand the vision. I can't tell you how many times I've been at the arena and someone's grabbed me, had a quick conversation, hey, we support you. Keep doing what you're doing, or been at the airport where I find myself often at the airport someone's grabbing me, talking to me, just talking about the team, and I love having those conversations at the season ticket member events.
The fans get it. They understand what we're trying to do, they really support us, and they're so knowledgeable, and I really appreciate that. To the fans I haven't communicated with yet, I would just say, what's being asked is difficult, it really is, but just know that we intentionally chose this route, this route to escape mediocrity, as Mike said, and we'll remain focused on that end goal, which is finding that sustained team success and we won't skip steps in doing it.
So I appreciate the way that I've been received by everyone in the city, my family's been received by everyone in the city. Year one was enjoyable for me. There's things we know we need to improve on and we will and we're excited for what that jump season will be allowed to do for the organization.
THE MODERATOR: Thank you, Will. Start with questions.
Q. Will, you mentioned the pace. You guys were actually No. 1 in pace. Curious, was that a product of the personnel that you had or is that something to expect moving forward like sort of an overarching philosophy?
WILL DAWKINS: Yeah, I think the way the game is going and how diverse the skill sets are, playing faster is as you see more scoring, allows for guys to touch the ball and move it, get more time in the shot clock, because defenses are getting better when you have a set defense. So for us, it was definitely personnel-based. We had a lot of guys that are young and can get up the floor and move, but we also had a lot of decision-makers that can get the ball going. So the faster you play, the harder it is to predict what you're going to do. It also, when the ball's going in, allows for more possessions on the defensive end, so we got to get a little better on that part. But we were definitely intentional in trying to get up and down this year.
Q. You guys had a lot of players have good years individually and put up good individual numbers. How do you differentiate between that when you evaluate players' performances and, okay, this could apply to winning down the road, that sort of thing?
MICHAEL WINGER: I think it's a function of the continuity of those players playing together. So we haven't had a lot of that. Obviously we had a coaching change in season, which sort of reshuffles the deck. We had a lot of new players this season. I don't know the number. I think it was maybe 10 new players. I don't know. I don't know if that's right. It's like nine or ten new players to the team this year. So there's a pretty extraordinary lack of familiarity with each other, lack of continuity, and so to the extent that you, we, have that individual talent, whether it's the jump season training camp together, I think more of that continuity on its own will help us perform better as a unit and sort of take a lot of those individual gains and feed them into game performance.
Is that your question?
Q. Sort of, yeah. It was kind of like, if you're trying to sift through a lot of players who had good individual years and you're trying to say like, okay, well, that could work on a winning team however many years from now, it seems like it would be a hard thing to segue.
MICHAEL WINGER: I think the game evolves, to be honest, and styles dictate -- kind of your personnel will dictate your styles. I think what goals we give a lot of the players are to improve individually and they really, really embrace those, and end of season, we're handing guys their booklets, like, here's how you did on the season. A lot of people checked off their goals. Some even during the season checked 'em off and we had to create new ones.
So that got us to the point where that second half of the season, like Mike talked about, we in those games, we were competing in those games. Now turning that into more team dynamics, I think it starts with the bonding that he's talking about during the jump season, spending more time together, working on end-of-game situations. It was the first time Kyle was put in a lot of those situations to be the main closer and defensive doing things. Jordan seeing him when he's making plays. That stuff's going to get better the more you see it, and we'll practice it a lot more too. But the individual gains allowed us to be in those situations. The next step is try to win more of those situations.
Q. You talked about evaluating the season in segments. Especially that final segment of the season, did you sense a culture and identity start to emerge. For both of you, I think about games like the Lakers, where they had to put their starters in or even Toronto where you're down by 29 in the first quarter, but you win the final three quarters. That's a mental strength that I -- just your comment on how you evaluate that. As you said, it's not a wins and losses.
MICHAEL WINGER: Yeah, you sort of answered the question within the question. It does showcase that resilience, it showcases the resilience amongst the players, it illustrates the continued competitiveness of the coaches to position the guys to potentially do something different in quarters two, three, and four than they were doing in quarter one. Teaching the guy to play -- or coaching the guy to play until the buzzer, games are long, and I know it seems ridiculous, it's only 48 minutes, but games are long and not just air time. If there are players on the floor that don't take a possession off, they're going really hard the minutes they're on the floor.
Just being able to eek out more and more of that as the season wore on -- you almost don't even have to call attention to it because they know, I mean, they know, whether it's the Laker game -- there was a handful of games like that. But they know. Those are those incremental wins that we talked about early in the season. We used examples like we come out of halftime and force the opponent to call the first timeout. It's, like, that's a win for us. These are these incremental wins. Or putting the starters back in late in the fourth. Like, these are incremental wins, they're building blocks, and we can call upon those again and again and again over the summer and in future seasons.
Q. We know that obviously Jordan's season started off in a very disappointing fashion, and then he was able to turn it on these last six weeks or so post-All-Star break. What were the conversations like with him throughout the season and what insight can you give us into how he was able to get out of that slump and finish the way he did?
MICHAEL WINGER: Yeah, Jordan is -- he's an incredibly introspective and kind person. I don't know if you've had a lot of time to spend with him. But the Jordan that sort of generally gets written about and the Jordan that exists behind the pair of spectacles are two different people. He loves talking hoop. He loves it. He's a really smart, a really smart kid, and so he knew what he was going through early in the season. He just kept telling us, I'm going to put in the work, I'm going to do the work, I'm going to do the work, the work will pay off, the work will pay off. He was taking darts and bullets and everything else throughout the course of the season. He just ignored it. He ignored it better than I did, quite frankly. He just kept saying, I'm going to work, I'm going to work, and the work will pay off.
To your point, I mean, I'll be damned, but, I mean, he had a slump, a long slump, and it was hard for him, it was hard for us to watch, not as objective observers, but as people who couldn't just reach in and fix a problem for him. But he came through because he's a worker, he's a gamer, he's a hooper, super high-character basketball player. Sometimes guys will surprise you by the amount of work they put in and how it pays off and he did that. It was moving to watch him sort of come out of what he went through early in the season.
Q. Did you have anything you wanted to add?
WILL DAWKINS: I think Mike said most of it. Just to take you behind the curtain with Jordan, my experiences with Jordan, they were always be where your feet are, and he was really good at that. He understood that this was a phase, it was going to pass, and what was going to get him through was his consistency and his work ethic. And, like Mike said, he ignored the noise better than most. I don't think what people understand is what got to him was the losing and not being competitive. It wasn't the stuff that people were saying about him, because he always worried about the end result in terms of team, how can we be better, not just me, and he had a deep passion for that. He reached out to his teammates. We would have a lot of text exchange, a lot of talks on the plane after games, and I just knew that he would break through on that stuff.
Did he have the season that he wanted from beginning to end? No. But did he finish the season on a way to give him more confidence to go into the summer and be the player we know he can be? Yeah. And, again, that's how I kind of look at the season, not in just small little increments, but you break it down and then you see where you're at at the end.
Q. One follow-up on that. The one change that you made structurally for him was putting the ball in his hands. Obviously first the move to the bench, and then ultimately when Tyus goes out putting the ball in his hands as the starting point guard. One, what conversations were that, just like Brian making the decision versus you all doing that collaboratively; and then two, Tyus is an unrestricted free agent, you guys with not trading him, and also in the comments have said, we want him back. How do you square that of how that all could potentially work together moving forward?
MICHAEL WINGER: You're hitting upon what will be a very complex conversation for us. Jordan does like having the ball in his hands and he's really good with the ball in his hands. Tyus likes having the ball in his hands and is also very good with the ball in his hands. It's our job, along with the head coach and coaching staff, to figure out how to make that work. Both are really good basketball players and really good people. An organization like ours -- or, frankly, any organization, but for where we are right now, we can't have too many of those kind of guys.
Tyus, to your point, he is an unrestricted free agent and there are 29 other teams that know he's a good player and a good dude and he's going to have a lot of options. He deserves to have those options, he deserves to have those conversations. He did express to us an interest in coming back and we expressed to him an interest in coming back -- or bringing him back. We'll have those conversations in July.
But I truly have no answers for you right now as to how we make all of Jordan's bests and all of Tyus's bests coexist. Once we have a coaching staff in place, that will be one of the very first things that we roll up our sleeves and try to figure out.
Q. Couple of forward-looking questions for you. Draft is coming up in a couple months. We obviously don't know what pick you have yet, but where are you in the draft scouting process and what qualities are you looking for both on the court and off the court with the player you're going to take with presumably a very high top-3, top-5 pick?
WILL DAWKINS: Well, first, can you work with the NBA so that I don't get yelled at for the lottery being on Mother's Day? That wasn't ideal when I saw that come out. But we will be in Chicago and see how that goes and see where our fate lies. Nothing really changes on the draft. I think we've had this staff in place for longer than we did last time, so we definitely have more continuity, we have more feeling of what we're looking for in terms of characteristics, but any draft -- and anytime you ask me, I promise this is not BS, we're going to draft people first, not players, and they have to have the core characteristics that will work in this building and will push us moving forward.
So once we figure out who those people are and get to spend time getting intel and talking to them at the combine and really knowing what's underneath them and what really makes them tick, then we'll kind of talk about more positional stuff and things that go on. But at first, we got to figure out who they are and if they can fit inside these walls.
Q. Similar question, just on the head coaching search, what does that search going to look like? Are you going to interview just everybody and anybody or how is that going to work?
MICHAEL WINGER: Yes, literally, we're going to go to the phonebook and just start interviewing people.
They probably don't even make phonebooks on a --
WILL DAWKINS: Is that Yellow or White Pages?
MICHAEL WINGER: That was the White Pages.
WILL DAWKINS: Got it, got it.
MICHAEL WINGER: When we made the change in January, we talked as a small group and we decided that we were going to give Brian and the team -- we wanted to give them a respectful distraction-free environment to coach and play, and so the commitment we made was to give them no reason to wonder what a coaching search might look like or folks we might want it talk to or anything like that, which is a different way of saying the creation for us of our coaching process actually starts today. Like, we're meeting today as a group to talk about how we want to move forward with the creation of that process. We don't have the process in place, we don't have a list of names ready, and that was intentional. It was basically our way of giving our players and this coaching staff the freedom to be who they are without having to read about names or process or visits that we're making whatever the case may be. So we've now concluded the season. Our core group will get together and we will sketch out sort of how we want that process to look. We'll have more details and more information on that, even internally, in the coming weeks.
WILL DAWKINS: The only thing would I add to that is we'll look around and we'll definitely be inclusive. At the end of the day, I think we're going to find the right person who has the right core characteristics to lead this organization and lead this team, the things that we value most, and will be able to lead us and move us forward in this current phase that we're in as a basketball club.
Q. Sticking with BK for a second. He never talked about himself. He always talked about pouring into the group. I'm curious, from management's perspective, what did he give the group that you didn't have before when he was just an assistant coach?
MICHAEL WINGER: Probably just a bigger megaphone with which to express his belief in the guys. As an assistant coach, it's hard to pour into every single player because that's not the job. But to your point, like, he did pour into the guys and he gave them belief. He gave them belief as individual basketball players, he gave them belief as stewards of an organization, he gave them belief that they could achieve something that they hadn't individually achieved yet, that they could go out and perform. That's hard to do as an assistant coach. It's hard to touch every player as an assistant coach.
So moving into the head coaching seat, you are no longer whispering in the ears of players. Like, you're standing on stage with a megaphone and you're telling them all exactly how you feel in front of everybody else. I think that that really helped uplift the group. I think it showcased who Brian is as a motivator who isn't afraid of conflict, who's not going to run from holding the guys accountable, and I think that just from that chair, he had the capacity to have a bigger audience.
Q. One last question. Both of you kind of articulated the small wins through the season, but when you are in traffic on 495, what is the one thing that you're extremely proud of that you two were able to accomplish this season?
WILL DAWKINS: I'll start. Mine were the environmental gains that I touched on at the beginning in my open, just because you got to create a culture or an environment where people want to be here. They want to come and they want to get better. I think that's what we saw this season, both from the staff, but from the players. And if we're creating and cultivating that, I think we're heading towards the right place to have our foundation to build up from.
Specifically, we can go through a handful of players who had those career seasons who bought into the player development system. So there's not just one player or one thing, but the idea that we enhance the environment from when we got here in June, that's probably the one thing that I'm most proud of.
MICHAEL WINGER: There's a lot for me. At the risk of discounting the others, the one that comes to mind for me the most is I'm probably guilty of being a little bit too much of a pleaser and maybe not turning off the noise, whether it's the positive noise or the negative noise. But in our exit interviews the last couple days, there were a couple guys that sort of made themselves vulnerable and shared with us how they felt about the organization, particularly the player development program and how we surround them with our staff. They talked about, I've never seen anything like that before or in all the places I've been, you know, nobody ever seemed to care that much about me. Like, guys coming into exit interviews, particularly when we finished the season with 15 wins, you sort of -- you have your flak jacket on waiting to just be peppered with all the things you did wrong, and that's not at all what happened.
They came in and they were saying thank you for things, and we're like, thank you? What are you talking about? You created this environment. So just the togetherness that they exhibited throughout the season, and then the candor with which they expressed a lot of the things for which they were grateful for this season and encouraged us to continue going forward. That was sort of the -- I was proud of -- it sort of made the standings disappear for a day for me.
Q. I believe you touched on this a little bit earlier, but if you guys could go a little bit more into how different this off-season is going to be for you guys, given that now you've been through the phase where you're learning about gathering information and understanding how things work, how much more will you be able to kind of hit the ground running this summer? And then second to that, aside from the coaching search, what are some of your guys' off-season priorities? What are some tangible things that you're looking forward to hitting?
MICHAEL WINGER: It won't be an easier off-season. It will be a -- I'm sort of embarrassed. I just keep using the words over and over and over. We did a lot of heavy lifting last off-season, and we moved, like, humongous features of the organization, and we don't necessarily have to do that this off-season. So this off-season is probably a lot of incremental moves, whereas last off-season was a few significant moves, and that's just transactionally I'm speaking about. We have more time, we have certainly more education, we have more wisdom about who our people are. So, whereas, for the better part of the last calendar year we've been so roster-focused, transactionally focused, that despite some of the gains we made in the environment, we didn't really get to spend a lot of time on the environment, and so this off-season we do. I guess that's one of the rewards for having that time in April and May and June.
And so we'll do a lot of that. We'll do a lot of organizational work, we'll do a lot of -- it's like environmental work, whether -- we just redid some space in our practice facility, for example. We'll do more of that kind of stuff this off-season.
And then this is our first off-season to have our way of, as Will said -- we didn't have a jump season last year, and so this year, we actually get to have our young players commit to their individual jump season programming, and every now and then they come together and do it together. So we didn't have any of that last summer. We're going to have a lot of that this summer.
Then the to-do list, you mentioned it, obviously we have to higher permanent head coach. We do have a high pick in the draft. We do have a couple free agents that we are very interested in, at minimum, having a conversation with, and at maximum, bringing back. We're going to start -- we're pretty eager to dig into the schematics of redesigning Capital One Arena and that's pretty fun.
Then it's just a bunch of little stuff. It's adding more talent to the staff. It is -- I'm going to spend a lot of time with the Stics. You know, Will and his team, they have a draft in two and a half months, and we currently have two first round picks and, as Will said, a second round pick. That could change. That could become three first round picks. Like, who knows. But, I mean, the eval team has their work cut out for them for the next two and a half months.
Q. Sorry, the sticks?
MICHAEL WINGER: Mystics.
Q. Oh, the Mystics. I thought you were going golfing.
MICHAEL WINGER: I'm going to go see them in concert. (Laughing).
Q. You don't hear much about how your scouting department is growing or developing or performing. What are you both seeing with your scouting department and where do you want it to go in the next three, four months?
WILL DAWKINS: Very pleased with our scouting department. I think people don't understand it's a 365-day job. The second the draft ends you start working on the draft that's upcoming. If I'm being honest and taking you behind the curtain a little bit, we have some people who are already working on the draft two years from now, that's their sole focus. So you just kind of just feed it into the next group who takes it from there. So, I enjoy being around that group, it's a bigger group for a reason, because there's a lot of things to cover now and you have so much talent internationally, you have so much talent in the high school, grass roots spaces, and the League's allowing us to go to more of those events. But the group is excited for -- this is our time to play. A lot of you put the team together and then you kind of watch it, you can help it a little bit throughout the season, but now it's the jump season where we hike, we go. And those guys are on their way to Portsmouth today, and go on to the combine, get draft visits going, and summer league and so on, so on. And obviously there's still some live games going on in Europe that we'll be attending as well. So it never really stops, but this is when it really -- have more time to focus in on that and I feel highly confident that we'll be prepared for our summer.
Q. This being obviously an Olympic year, how do you balance trying to figure out, if Bilal is invited to play with the French National Team, and then the fact that it also leads right from summer league, how do you balance that of wanting him to play for his national team, but also wanting him to potentially play in summer league and coming off the injury.
WILL DAWKINS: Yeah, very good question. I think a lot of our players have massive summers in front of them. None probably bigger than Bilal, just the steps he needs to make. And though -- I give the guy a lot of credit. Coming in, transitioning into a new country, a new league, with the maturity and the everyday approach that he did. It really hit me when I'm texting him after the Bulls game and he goes up, lands, tries to dunk on someone and hurts his wrist, plays through it, didn't even tell our staff that he was hurt until after the game. He was like, Yeah, my wrist hurts a little bit. Text him after the game. Keep with it. Yeah, I can't wait for these last 15, 20 games to do a little bit more. Then, that next morning I got to sit in front of him and got to say, Your wrist is broken, you're done for the season. There was probably two minutes of "woe is me", then he was like, How am I going to benefit from this. It was like, we get a jump start on your body, we get a jump start on your summer plan, because you didn't have that last year. You played deep into the playoffs for France. You came straight here, straight into the summer league, and your body hasn't really gotten a break. And he's 19.
So, we instantly got really lucky that he can actually grasp the bar and do a lot more weight training and started his summer program. So, we support all of our players if they want to play in the summer with their national teams and go to the Olympics. He's got to go in there and do what he needs to do to make the team. I hope he does. But at the end of the day he's going to be here a good amount before that, really training and impacting and putting work in his game and putting work in his body. He's still here today challenging me to left-handed horse competitions. So he's still in the building, still working, and he's got the mindset that this is a massive summer for him. And whether he's playing for us, whether he's playing for France, we'll be involved, we'll be around and we'll have a program in place to make sure he takes the jumps that both he thinks he needs to take and that we think he needs to take.
Q. I would like to ask you about two guys who were here before you guys got here that had quantum leaps in their games. Deni and Corey can you speak to where they made the most improvement in their games throughout the year?
WILL DAWKINS: Yeah, I'll start with Deni. When Michael and I first got here that was one of the players we met with right away. Took him to dinner and just like, Hey, we need to learn you, learn about you. Kind of what works, what you're about, what do you see, what do you want to be. And he was really open. You guys know Deni, he's probably too open sometimes to even you guys, but he's just a true genuine person. He was like, I think I can do more. I think I can do more with the ball. Okay. Well how are we going to work this summer to make sure when you get those opportunities you'll be prepared. And they did a good job putting a plan in place for that and Deni had a tremendous year from beginning to end. In terms of, physically, he realized how strong he truly was. He was getting downhill, moving people. The basketball stuff spoke for itself on offense, having career high shooting the ball, career highs in usage, career high in potential assists which, again, you're playing the right way, whether the shot goes in or not, you're making the right reads and right decisions. Also remained a plus defender. So he took a massive jump.
And then we had similar conversations with Corey and it was like, This is how people view you around the League. As this guy who you got to run off the three-point line and then you're good. But you don't hunt enough threes. We sat down, like, these are the players that are around the same number of threes taken per 100 possessions as you. And he was like, Hmm, that ain't it. And these are where you want to get to. He made a massive jump. Extended his range, improved his arc, kept the efficiency high, and then was elite getting to the rim. I think he finished up 89th other 90th percentile finishing at the rim, while also being able to shoot the ball and stretch the defense. And he was able to take pride in, I'm finishing games, not being targeted on either end of the floor, like, I'm contributing. And for those guys who have seen it before we got here and really invest in what we were asking them to do and really kind of champion that player development program, couldn't be more happy with both of those guys. But they're both so young and still have jumps to make and they know that and I think they continue, that will continue.
Q. When Kuz was walking out of the exit interview he informed us that we have no idea how fun his summer is going to be.
WILL DAWKINS: He didn't share any of it with you?
Q. No, and I'm sure I do have absolutely no idea how fun it's going to be for him. But how much do you expect your guys to be in DC this summer and how important is that kind of off-season program for what you were talking about in turning the individual success into on-court?
WILL DAWKINS: Yeah, without revealing all of Kuz's summer plans, I have a good idea where he's going to be most of the summer, and it's going to be in the gym. It's just going to be in gyms around the world. But he's going to start here. A lot of our guys will be home based here. A lot of the players in their first to third year, we'll see them in a few weeks to a month. They want to get back, they want to train, and they want to go through a program where it's not team training, they're coming back and doing their individual training here. They will have their own strength coach, and they will be working with their own athletic care person, and spend time with their own individual basketball coach and work on their plans.
So I think a lot of our guys plan on being in DC this summer. We talked about potentially going to visit, hey, if someone's got something going on in their hometown, let's all go to their hometown and hang out. Let's all come to summer league and hang out and be around each other. So I think you'll see more bonding outside of DC, but you will see a lot more bodies in the gym in DC from May all the way through August.
Q. Are we invited then?
WILL DAWKINS: In DC, I said. You'll see the bodies in DC, not in MHPC. A little different, yeah.
Q. Michael, I wanted to ask you also, you've been in building situations before on previous stops. I wonder if there's kind of a singular thing that you didn't realize before you started the job that makes DC different from all of those other places -- I assume there's a lot of similarities -- and saying, okay, here's what I want to put in place, and you know more things than you did in DC than L.A. and everything, but how did this, how does this one sticking up, I guess? That's a big question, sorry.
MICHAEL WINGER: There's the gut answer and then there's the, let me be super, super diplomatic answer. I'll give you the gut answer. The other places that I've been where we sort of undertook various degrees of a rebuild, where, in some cases on the heels of -- like with the Clippers, for example, like they had a lot of success before we sort of reset the cycle. They were just coming off Lob City, Chris, Blake, D.J., J.J. and the gang. They were fun, great theater, deep playoff runs, and they were always like an injury away from potentially getting to the next place.
In Oklahoma City when I got there early, they were a brand new franchise and so there was just so much excitement around the city just to have a team. Then you have this just incredible core of young talent in Kevin, Russ, Serge, James, Jeff, like you could just see how much talent was in the gym and you knew at some point this was going to take a monestrous leap.
It's been much harder here than I anticipated, and I think it's because it doesn't feel yet like the reset of a cycle. It feels like -- we're not a new franchise. We didn't just come off of seven, eight years of Conference Finals appearances. I sense -- I poorly predicted, and I sense now just the fan difficulty. I mean, they have been extremely supportive, they show up to every game. They're there. When our guys play hard, I mean, our guys got standing ovations this year, sometimes in losses. That was awesome. But they have been starving for longer than the other places I've been, and I am now appreciating how that can feel. And of course we have to take that, like, we have to own that. It's not like we can just ignore it. But that would be one way I would characterize sort of the difference in my experiences.
Q. Michael, I know you've known Will for some time and, but what have you learned about him during this year that perhaps you didn't know before or what did you have reinforced in your perception about Will over this past year?
MICHAEL WINGER: I had always known and reaffirmed this year that I'm considerably more handsome than Will.
WILL DAWKINS: Debatable. (Laughing).
MICHAEL WINGER: We talk about it internally a lot as a group, but his range is absolutely incredible. And I don't mean -- well, his court range is pretty good, too. I mean his ability to ace any exam in any subject at any time. I didn't -- I mean, I knew I wanted him to be my partner in this, I didn't realize that in the seven years or six years that we didn't work together that, I mean, every subject matter, every subject matter, every exam, any time, he'll ace it and I didn't know that.
Q. I don't know what to say. (Laughing). What have you learned a little bit about Michael in the, in this year, with him in the role that he's never had before?
WILL DAWKINS: I have to say it on the mic? (Laughing). A lot. I think it's more reaffirming than anything. He's all about his actions and the content of the character and what he truly believes in and what matters. I haven't been around someone who's been more supportive and given me more grace, but also been empathetic along the way. He truly cares deeply about what we have going on here, about the people who work here, and about what people think. His commitment level, I knew he wanted this job and I knew he was going to be committed and we were going to be a good pairing, but the commitment level he has to making sure we get this right is inspiring to me every single day, and gives me more passion and more belief when I come into work.
So, it doesn't come through, you guys don't see him every day, but he wears it, he wears a lot of this stuff, and he takes it seriously. And we're going to be nonstop in partnership trying to make sure we get this to where we wanted to get it to and I couldn't ask for someone better to have that belief in me, but also continue to mentor me through this whole process.
Q. A number of the players said that Jared Butler, Justin Champagnie getting opportunities, how important was the Go-Go to the establishment of the foundation you wanted, not only this season, but going forward, and just how important is it to have them in the same building?
MICHAEL WINGER: Will can articulate it way better than me. The word that comes to mind is enormous. Enormously huge. Like, enormously huge, that's how valuable they were. Having them in the same building, in the same market, being able to toggle back and forth. The coaching staffs had really amazing synergy. But, like, Will says it way better than I can and do, but what an amazing opportunity to have them coexist.
WILL DAWKINS: Yeah, the alignment kind of jumps out to me. When we first got here, we spoke with people that had experience with both last year. And a lot of times the left hand didn't know what the right hand were doing. And we wanted to day one to fix that. I give Amber Nichols a lot of credit for seeing that on the day-to-day. She does a tremendous job of making sure -- our GM of our Go-Go -- that things are aligned. We went through a pretty extensive coaching search, you can ask Coach Thompson, to try to really find the right person who would fit in, would bring new ideas, but also allow the systems that our head coach with the Wizards wanted and Cody was able to bring that every single day. He brings a lot of juice, a lot of joy to the guys. And he's sharp. And when we talk about innovation, he's coming up with some cool things. Even the last game of the season, the .4 play, where we throw it off the back board from out of the bounds and tips it in, and everyone else is looking and our players know what they're doing. So there was a lot cohesion on than.
And I think the player development plan, like, there were goals when you were the wizards, there were goals when you were with the Go-Go, and you were expected to play the same way. It wasn't like, You're in the G League, go get 30. It was, Work on what you need to work that will allow you to help with the Wizards. I think Mike gave you the stats on how competitive we were at the end of the season. We were third in the NBA and 60 percent of our games with were in those clutch moments, and a lot of that stuff was with Jared Butler on the Florida. With Eugene, with Justin, with Jules, with Johnny, with Patrick who took huge steps. So for them to be able to be in competitive games in the NBA, after finishing competitive games with Go-Go, I think that's a testament to that, and the last half of the season our shot quality, in terms of where we took shots from on the floor, was top 5 in the NBA second half of the season. Our potential assist second half of the season was top 10. So we're playing the right way, taking the right the shots. Need to take jumps in our efficiency in making those shots. And a lot of those guys were playing that way. So, for me I felt really good about that and I think that cohesion starts with the Go-Go and stylistically ladders up to how we played with the Wizards. So Brian did a really good job of reaching out to Cody as an assistant, and then once he got the head job they were in communication daily, and the players never felt like they were disconnected. And like Mike said, being in the building, it's just massive, it's huge.
Q. Once upon a time when there wasn't this G League there was stories of players that developed wouldn't have happened, fair to say?
WILL DAWKINS: It was a lot harder. Credit to the NBA for allowing us to expand the roster, adding two-way players, adding a third two-way player this season. There's so many guys that, like, can you break through that are -- probably 400 guys that can be on a rotation -- or can be at the end of a roster. But, like, what breaks you through to becoming a rotation player, and I think we saw some of our guys take jumps and as we continue to evaluate who is going to be here, who won't be, and take a fresh look at the roster every year, guys that can fight through and show that they have promise are better off than they would be if they were playing in Europe or not connected as tightly with the team, with their own minor league system, and soon every team is going to have their own minor league club, including Mexico city, so there will be more chances to watch everybody. So I think the League in general has done a really good job with that.
Q. You're farming analogy you used earlier, where did that come from? That was great. I mean, that was the best farming analogy I heard. Is there a farmer in the background in you?
MICHAEL WINGER: No, I've always wanted a farm. I wouldn't know how to till a field though.
WILL DAWKINS: That's good.
THE MODERATOR: Thanks, guys. Really appreciate your time.
FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports