For the past couple of years, I've been somewhat less than kind to the Washington Wizards when reviewing their giveaway offerings each fall. It's an exercise that's turned into a strategy (if you can call it that) of handing out a schedule magnet, a bobblehead and a team poster and calling it a year. No imagination, no outside the box thinking, no multiple bobbleheads. It's like they think that fans don't care about useless things being handed out at the doors of Capital One Arena on game night. News flash: we do care!
Most of my ire in the last several years about the freebie schedule has revolved around the Wizards' tired and true (not a typo) approach to bobbleheads, meaning they only give away one each year. Yes, that's right...while the Golden State Warriors, Dallas Mavericks, Milwaukee Bucks or some other franchise is handing out multiple bobbles in any given season, the Wiz are determined to stick with one. Sure, sure, there have been years where there's an extra bobblehead available through the Kids' Club for a fee or through Monumental Rewards (R.I.P.) but there's a cost associated with those above and beyond a game ticket and they appear to have stopped all that anyway. I have no idea why this team doesn't set its sights higher with the promotional schedule.
So given all that, April 5 was likely the most bittersweet Wizards game of the season. First, it was the last game I attended his year which brought the frustration which was this season to an end. I should never be welcoming the end of basketball season, not with a team allegedly this talented. Second, it was bobblehead night which simultaneously made me happy and also pointed out that the Wizards had pretty much only made me this happy on this one night this season, either with their play or due to the fact that no other games had bobblehead giveaways.
Now, one of the perils of just having one bobblehead handed out per year is that the team pretty much creates a no win choice for themselves: make a bobblehead of a popular player or go unconventional and give a role player a shot. The former choice risks the ardent fan having multiple bobbleheads of the same player over and over again; the latter risks nobody bothering to show up explicitly for the bobblehead because nobody knows who the heck the player even is. Of course, this year by the second to last home game of the season, there weren't many Wizards fans there; the San Antonio Spurs fans were way more vocal.
The Wizards, to nobody's surprise, over the years have opted for the first tact, whereby they give away the same players in bobblehead form over and over again. At the beginning of this season, I had on my bobblehead shelves (yes, shelves) four John Wall bobbles, three of Bradley Beal, two Ottos and a Kelly Oubre bobblehead and no other active players on the roster. When the Wizards announced the promotional schedule this year, they didn't name who was on the schedule for April 5, preferring to go with the enigmatic "bobblehead". In all my stupidity I first assumed it would be Dwight Howard but then got my hopes up for Tomas Satoransky or Thomas Bryant.
Of course, it ended up being John Wall. I now have five Wizards-issued John Wall bobbleheads.
So the first and obvious question here is: WHY? Why give us another John Wall bobblehead? If the decision was made at the beginning of the season, why schedule an end-of-season bobblehead for a dude that missed half of last season? If the decision was made during the season, it's even more puzzling with Wall missing more of this season than last season. I know I've already answered these questions earlier in this post (he's the most popular player) but I still don't get it.
Complaining won't do me any good. Let's talk about how I feel about my new bobblehead shall we?
First off, let's deal with the scale of this bobblehead because it's unique in my collection. While it's as tall as a standard sized bobblehead, it's standing on a plinth, which has forced the artist to scale the bobblehead itself down to sort of a three quarters scale model. I don't know that this is necessarily good or bad, it just it what it is.
The plinth has been painted in an attempt to make it resemble marble to match the spirit of Nike's City Edition uniforms which feature a stylized Washington Monument along the side of the uniform to right below the armhole. The plinth also has a Capital One sign (because Capital One sponsored every one of the three giveaways this year), some holes and a button for pressing. We'll come back to that.
Of course, John Wall is sporting the 2018-2019 Wizards City Edition in black with the aforementioned Washington Monument below the armpit and the District of Columbia logo across the chest. As they have with other recent bobbleheads, the Wiz have opted to do with decals for the detailed wordmark, numbers and nameplate on the uniform in lieu of casting these details into the model and relying on the Chinese workers to skillfully execute the paint job. This strategy generally yields a better product, although it loses some of that unskilled paint application free bobblehead appeal.
If you are worried about the last sentence of the previous paragraph, don't be. There's still plenty of spots on this bobblehead for a sloppy paint job, namely the Washington Monument / stripe down the side of the uniform which looks like someone painted the red and white and then aggressively colored with a grey or silver marker which I assume is supposed to simulate the marble veining on the white part of the stripe. They definitely didn't stay within the lines; the red is covered with grey/silver color.
One of the big tests of the value of a bobblehead is whether the head of the thing actually looks like the player. Sometimes I feel that teams just select any old representative black man's head and hope that works. The 2011-2012 season John Wall bobblehead looks like some kind of crazed elf (second from left in the 5 John Walls pic above).
In this case, I'm going with the likeness being pretty good. The smile is a little off and the chin seems oversized, particularly on the left side of John's face. I guess it becomes inherently a little easier with a beard but John's is rendered so minimally here that it doesn't really contribute to making the head look more or less like John's actual face. But the overall effect is one of John Wall. I can buy it. There are definitely bobbleheads out there that are better but its not the worst of the bunch.
So about that plinth...as you may have guessed, the height, holes and button mean one thing: talking bobblehead. This is not the first time the Wizards have issued a bobblehead with a sound system. The one and only team-issued Gilbert Arenas has a custom recorded message from Agent Zero himself. A couple of years later the team gave away a Phil Chenier / Steve Buckhantz featuring a "Dagger!" call from Steve.
So what's this one? Some words of wisdom from John Wall? Nope. Some kind of confidence-laden statement about D.C. being his city? Not that either, although that would be awesome. In fact, there are no words from John at all on the recording. Instead it's the "Welcome to D.C." song that they play at the games. Kind of lame? Sort of but for me, it's not what bobbleheads are about. I don't press the play button on my Arenas or Phil/Buck bobbleheads too often so it doesn't matter to me.
Of course, as all Wiz bobbleheads do these days, this one comes in a box covered with stats. OK, so one half of one side has a few stats. Important to me: franchise leader in assists and steals, 2014 Slam Dunk Contest champion and one each All-NBA and All-Defensive team nods. Interesting to me: All-Star point guard. No number of times. Makes me guess this was decided at the beginning of the year.
Also interesting to me: the accurate representation of the Nike jersey template reflected in the seams on the back of the bobblehead. That shows me how far bobbleheads of come. It used to be that you would struggle to recognize the player. Now the jersey seams are accurate. This is also the first bobblehead with the Geico advertising patch on it which I obviously hate. I find it curious the team had to (I'm assuming they did "have to") put that on the bobblehead but didn't have to (or were forbidden from?) putting the Nike swoosh on it.
Overall, I'm giving this bobblehead a B. This one looks pretty good. It's clearly John Wall and I'm OK having this on my shelf. I just wish it was someone else. And not Bradley Beal either. If there was a reason to mark this down (and I did) it was because the choice of player shows absolutely no imagination whatsoever. Here's hoping next year the Wizards will get things right in the bobblehead department and hand out more than one next year.
Spoiler alert: they won't. Just a hunch.
