Engineering ‘The Leap’: An NBA Supertrainer’s Plan for DC’s Prized Sophomore

One after another, the Washington Wizards marched in for their exit interviews with owner Ted Leonsis and general manager Ernie Grunfeld. After a disappointing 2015-16 campaign that ended with a .500 record, no playoff appearance and head coach Randy Wittman’s ouster, there was bound to be some bickering and grumbling about what went wrong and why.

One point on which every player could agree: Kelly Oubre Jr. should’ve played more.

“No matter what it was, he was going 100 miles per hour and doing it 100 percent, and you couldn’t be mad at it,” one of those Wizards, Bradley Beal, told Bleacher Report. “With where we were in our season, heck, we probably should’ve just thrown him out there and let him continue to play his way through it.”

Out of the five-month-long regular season, Oubre spent only one in Wittman’s regular rotation. Over a 19-game stretch between mid-December and mid-January—during which he started in place of the injured Otto Porter Jr. nine times—the New Orleans native played 19.3 minutes a night, drained 43.9 percent of his threes and proved to be a pest on defense.

He logged fewer than five minutes in 41 other games, 19 of which he didn’t play in at all.

Oubre had already been humbled by a draft-day drop to 15th, where the Atlanta Hawks picked and promptly traded him to Washington. The experience of spending so much of his rookie campaign tethered to the bench silenced his ego to a hush but also lent a fresh perspective on the NBA career ahead of him.

“It helped me to know how to work,” Oubre explained, “because the games that I didn’t play, I was in the gym after the game. I didn’t get my game in, so I’ve got to go work out. It taught me how to go hard at everything and just how to get better, man.

“It was a blessing in disguise, honestly.”

Godspeed