It must be nice to be a big man on the Wizards right now. Nobody expects you to put in more than a token amount of effort on defense. Non-big players get away with not playing defense all the time, which often leaves the bigs to pick up the slack, but on the ‘Zards, there’s no expectation that the big guys step up for the completely absent defense of Bradley Beal and Isaiah Thomas. They just let teams score on them and then run back up the court to expend their effort on the infinitely more fun part of basketball, the scoring part.
(Note that I don’t care about defense at all, and am actually happiest when teams don’t play any. Teams that don’t play defense tend to have more possessions, so they score more points, and the opposing team scores more points too, so more fun is had by everybody.)
Yeah, Thomas Bryant has it pretty good. The amount of offensive freedom he gets, plus the fact that he never gets too tired from playing defense, means that he has established himself as one of the premier young scoring bigs in the league. Eventually, if he wanted to play for a winning team, his lack of defense would catch up to him, but for now, he can just run around, shoot jumpers, and cram on people. What more could a guy want?