

(By Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

Randy Wittman knows you’re watching his face.

His daughter filled him in about Twitter’s #WittmanFace hashtag — “Faces of Randy Wittman, or whatever it’s called,” as he put it. So he knows that his various scowls, grimaces and frowns have been screen-grabbed and saved over his nearly three years as Wizards head coach.

The Wizards were not a great team during much of Wittman’s tenure, but this season promises something different. Through 25 games, they had matched the franchise’s best start to a season. For weeks, they’ve been among the best teams in the Eastern Conference. National analysts are talking about them as NBA Finals contenders. The “Faces of Randy Wittman” often have suggested displeasure — “I’m sure there are not-happy ones and there are happy ones,” he joked — but I’ve often wondered exactly how Wittman feels after wins, an issue he’s confronting with increasing frequency as the Wizards win percentage hovers above .700.

“Every time you win a game — even if we play bad … I’m ecstatic, because it’s hard to win,” Wittman said, conceding that other coaches might be “laughing and happy and all that; that’s not who I am.”

“I mean, I show it in different ways. They know when I’m ecstatic,” Wittman said, pointing toward his players.

Players confirmed this. But they also admitted that their coach’s on-court mannerisms don’t often suggest ecstasy.

“I mean, he probably gets about 100 squats in a game, just from getting up and down from his seat back onto the court,” said Drew Gooden, who suggested that Wittman likely ranks among the league leaders in Minutes Coached While Standing.

“He’s out there living and dying with every possession during the game, because he’s played before,” Rasual Butler said. “So he’s in those plays. I mean, the way he’s moving his body out there sometimes, it’s almost like he’s physically on the floor.”

The mannerisms might suggest hard work more than joy. But give him a chance, and Wittman will tell you how fun his job is, that he has spent 31 straight years in the NBA because that’s where he wants to be, that he would spend all his time watching NBA games if he weren’t coaching, so he might as well do it for his career.



(By Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)

“If I didn’t have fun, I wouldn’t be doing it,” the coach said last week. “I could be doing some other things at this point in my life. I mean, everybody talks about TV, radio, you know, being able to stay around the game. I don’t want to do that. I like preparing teams to play. And whether it’s during the season, after the season, getting ready for practice tomorrow, that’s fun. When I don’t enjoy it, I’m not gonna do it just to hold a paycheck. I don’t need to do that. When it becomes not fun, I’m gonna be gone.”

Winning, of course, is more fun than losing, so this could be the most fun season of Wittman’s head coaching career. His previous stints have been well-documented: injuries helped derail his two seasons in Cleveland, and a youth movement marked his time in Minnesota. Through his first seven seasons as an NBA head coach, none of his teams had a winning percentage above .400. Then came last season’s trip to the second round of the playoffs, and now his Wizards already are thinking about their playoff seeding in December. That must feel incredibly gratifying, right?

“Absolutely,” Wittman said. “Going through what we went through here, where we were almost at ground zero, and seeing it move in this direction, it is gratifying. When I took over, I told Ted and Ernie, this is what I believed, and if you guys believe something different, then you need to hire somebody else. We needed to decide what young guys we were gonna move forward with, and then bring in some veteran guys around them that know how to play, that know how to teach these guys how to be professional on and off the floor, so I don’t have to have my office in the middle of the locker room.”

So the Wizards moved away from their touted youth movement and imported veterans in waves. Their play didn’t always matter — Wittman said Al Harrington was “instrumental” in molding last season’s roster — but their voices did. When Wittman first took over the team in January 2012, seven of his top nine players were in their first or second seasons in the NBA: John Wall, Jordan Crawford, Chris Singleton, Trevor Booker, Kevin Seraphin, Jan Vesely and Shelvin Mack.

“That’s career suicide,” Wittman said. “So I told [Ted Leonsis], you’re not gonna win that way. You can’t have [that many] of ’em. We’ve got to get it to three or four, and then those other four spots we’ve got to get veteran guys in here that can teach these guys how to play. I said that’s what my belief is, and they believed it too, and that’s kind of what we’ve done.”



(By Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)

Wittman, clearly, is big on maturity, which is why I was so tickled to stumble upon what might have been the only immature act of Wittman’s life. As detailed by the Pioneer Press’s Bob Sansevere, a teenaged Wittman once decided he didn’t like his older sister’s boyfriend, so he egged the inside of the boyfriend’s Dodge Charger. He was caught, thanks in part to leaving the egg carton in the garage. The lesson he learned?

“Stupidity usually gets you in trouble,” he said with a laugh.

That, though, wasn’t the only childhood lesson you could shoehorn into a rumination about the Wizards. There was also the lesson Wittman learned from delivering the Indianapolis Star from fifth or sixth grade until he was a senior in high school: that daily newspapers are a credit to our nation and everyone should subscribe, immediately.

Wait, no, that wasn’t it. The lesson was that if young Randy Wittman wanted the latest model of sneaker or a shiny new bike, he would have to tromp through the pre-dawn snow (with daily newspapers!) and earn at least part of the cost himself. It was about hard work, and patience, and you could use it to write cliches about this Wizards team and its fanbase, but you could also use it to write cliches about a guy who coached some fairly bad teams, and now has a really good one.

“I gained as much, I think, going through tough times as you do good times,” he said, when asked about his previous coaching stops. “My patience has become so much better, going through tough times like that.”

That word — patience — has been his mantra for years. This season is making it look justified. Now someone just needs to figure out how to capture “patience” on one of those Faces of Randy Wittman.