Posts in month: January, 2011

John Wall is working hard and continuing to do the right things. He gets sloppy, he loses focus, he lets the defense dictate what he does, at times. But you can see it. You can tell he’s going to be great, consistency is the goal.

On Saturday night, he had a back and fourth battle with Chris Paul, picking up his second foul 2:13 into the game and taking a seat for the rest of the first quarter. Wall bounced back with seven points, six assists and two turnovers in 11 second quarter minutes. He controlled the game and made a statement against the best in the league, giving his Wizards a ten point lead over the Hornets before going to the bench with 55 seconds left. Unfortunately, second quarter statements don’t win games.

Paul came out after the half, yapping and talking up a storm. Along with cohort David West, Paul directed traffic, coerced the referees and found his teammates, mainly Trevor Ariza, who had 13 points in the third. Paul put up four assists and two steals in the quarter, didn’t even score, didn’t need to. Wall was forced into four turnovers to only one assist. Paul had the veteran confidence to dominate Wall, winning the third 26-15 and closing out the game for New Orleans with a 92-81 win. Flip Saunders knew it:

“You see the difference between a veteran point guard and a young one.  John is going through growing pains.  Paul is an established guy that has the ability to dominate a game with maybe not scoring a lot of points, with maybe not being as fast as he has to be, but just controlling the whole tempo of the game.”

Wall said he learned a lot after the game, citing Paul’s patience as lesson learned number one. Looking at the schedule, the next instruction from one of the game’s masters will come on January 17 when Deron Williams and the Utah Jazz come to town. Read more »

{Wall vs. Paul - photo: K. Weidie}

I’ve been a Philadelphia Eagles for over 25 years. I’ve endured ups, downs, mediocrity and everything else associated with loving a team too much. But because I’ve lived in Washington for most of those years, and NFL League Pass is still a relatively new invention, I’ve seen more way more Redskins games than I have Eagles games — which means I saw plenty of Joe Gibbs in his heyday.

One of the staples of the Gibbs era was his ability to make halftime adjustments based on what the other team was or was not doing. Part of this ability was based on his stellar assistant coaching staff, and part of it was that Gibbs often paid attention to even the smallest of details.

New Orleans Hornets coach Monty Williams is from the Washington D.C. area (Oxon Hill, Maryland to be exact), so maybe he was somehow inspired by Gibbs last night, because his team’s second half play was key to the Hornets’ 92-81 victory.

Prior to the game, Williams was asked if he was concerned about his team’s energy level against the Wizards.  Starters David West, Emeka Okafor and Chris Paul had all logged 40 or more minutes against the Boston Celtics, and now they had to turn around and play again the next night, on the road no less. Still, Williams had no concerns, saying: Read more »

Andray Blatche’s play is becoming a thorn in the Wizards’ side. Sure, he puts up numbers here and there. Sure, he’s only whatever young age people keep citing as an excuse. He’s also induced boos from the home crowd on more than one occasion … and for good reason.

I’ve seen grown men, eyes reduced to glowing red from rubbing in despair at his ineptitude on defense (and I wasn’t looking in the mirror). It’s an abomination to the game of basketball, I say. And that’s why I’m here, simply as a concerned person for the game. There will be more to dissect and observe about 7-Day Dray’s defense, but let’s take a look at the equivalent of 4,000 words about his bad help defense on a particular hand-off in Saturday night’s 92-81 Wizards loss to the New Orleans Hornets.

Blatche’s man, David West, is in hand-off mode to Rashard Lewis’ man, Trevor Ariza. Lewis is trying to stick his hand in there to keep this from happening … and maybe Lewis’ own defense got him a bit behind the 8-ball in this situation, but it looks like Blatche will need to help nonetheless.

Yet, Blatche has yet to move his feet in this next shot.

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Hilton Armstrong spent his first three-plus seasons playing with the New Orleans Hornets and Chris Paul. So naturally, his brain would be a good one to pick heading into tonight’s matchup between the Wizards and Hornets. Here are his responses on a couple issues we discussed:

On defending Chris Paul and the pick-and-roll:

“The guard needs to try to stay attached to him, which is obviously very hard to do … because easier said that done. But just try and stay up to him. When the pick comes, jump up, and the big has to be aggressive. You can’t just lay back and wait for him to come for you. You need to shrink the court on him and try to make him uncomfortable, and try and get the ball out of his hands. He likes to control the game, control the ball. If we get the ball out of his hand early and have weakside there stunting on for everybody, and if need be, have a full rotation, or whatever. But as long as the ball is out of his hands, we’ll be pretty good.”

On Paul’s tendencies that they want to keep him from doing:

“He loves to attack the big. Any situation, if there’s a big there, he’s going to try and attack him, try to get the big on his heels. If he’s on the wing, and he likes to come off the screen and cross over to the middle to he can see the full floor. Somebody is going to have to pick him up from there. Once he gets past the big, somebody’s going to have to pick him up, and they’re going to be open … the next man’s going to be open. Whoever’s helping, if they don’t step up, he’s got that little floater or jump shot. He’s a very intelligent point guard. He knows how to break a team down whether it’s passing or shooting.”

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Why yes, this is a Washington Wizards blog. But more importantly, I take an interest in all D.C. sports teams, including the Washington Capitals. As mentioned in a previous post pertaining to past sports memorabilia, I recently moved. And in the process of doing so, a calendar from the early 90s casual male stylings of hockey players in Washington, D.C. came to surface. It had to be shared, for my pleasure and yours. Not enough can be said about the pictures below, pages from a 1993-94 Caps team calendar … if I could sum them up with two words: hair and pleats. But I’ll try to do better than that. Happy New Year.

The girlfriend says… ‘Those jorts are so … jort.’

I say… ‘Why are Al Iafrate’s hands between his legs like that? Also, that posture is doing nothing for his haircut.’

Peter Bondra gets the hockey goal : baseball practice batting cage symbolism in the background, Iafrate gets a phallic symbol in the background.

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