[The DC Council -- After each Wizards game: setting the scene, rating the starters, assessing the bench, providing the analysis, and catching anything that you may have missed. Unlike the real DC Council, everything here is over the table. Game 15 contributors: Rashad Mobley and Adam McGinnis with first-hand coverage, and Kyle Weidie watching from afar.]

Score

Washington Wizards 104 vs. Denver Nuggets 108 [box score]

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At every buzzer, there are key points you can look back on when considering the outcome — a game-changing instance, a slept-on moment, an initial reaction to the final score. Sure, in a contest of ebbs and flows, moments can be subjective, but it doesn’t make it any one less important than others. In a Wizards 108-104 loss against the Denver Nuggets on Friday, these were some of those moments…

[Sam Cassell to John Wall, pregame encouragement.]

 Rashad Mobley:

“He’s maturing. Things are, you can just tell, in disarray, not with the organization, but the players on the court … He’s fighting through it. Eventually he’s going to get some players around him and show exactly how good he is.”
-Ty Lawson on John Wall

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[Ty Lawson - photo: K. Weidie]

The Wizards doubled their win total for the season this week. What’s stopping them from tripling their previous count of one? Why, the Denver Nuggets of course. Tonight’s game will be the only meeting between the Wizards (2-12) and the Nuggets (10-5), the Western Conference foe hoping to remain unbeaten on a five-game road trip. Who’s down for a little 3-on-3? Today, our very own Sam Permutt and John Converse Townsend are joined by Jeremy Wagner of the ESPN TrueHoop Network blog Roundball Mining Co. 

#1)  The ball comes out of the net, and the big man outlets the ball to the point guard to lead the fast break. Do you want that point guard to be 6 ’4″ John Wall who is athletic and fast, but occasionally out of control or Ty Lawson who is allegedly 5’11″, just as fast, not quite as athletic but seemingly more controlled when he leads the break?

PERMUTT: John Wall.  The last two games, Wall has been playing under control and finishing well on the break.  Lawson is so effective in transition not only because of his speed and decision-making, but because he usually has multiple guys running with him.  If Wall can consistently get the same kind of transition options as Lawson gets with the Nuggets (wing players running hard), his decision-making is sure to improve.

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I didn’t catch Friday night’s Wizards-Nuggets game live, but I did DVR it, so I was able to watch the game at my own pace the next afternoon. While I was watching, my wife happened to walk in, and without even looking at the television she asked me, “So how much are they getting killed by this time?”.  I sheepishly answered that they were being “killed” by 24 points, and she just shook her head and left.

That pretty much sums up how it feels to watch and then write about the Wizards these days.  There are instances like this past Wednesday night against the Los Angeles Clippers when the Wizards’ young players seem to put it all together and play competitively, and then there are other nights when flashes of individual brilliance are overtaken by yet another defeat.

Friday night’s 114-94 loss to the Nuggets was no different.  The Wizards dug themselves in a hole with some cold first quarter shooting, they fought hard to close the gap, but in the end, the Nuggets were too experienced and deep for the Wizards.  But if you’re looking for positives, rookie forward Trevor Booker put on a clinic on both ends of the floor during the third quarter. He demonstrated that, even when some veterans get healthy and back on the floor, he needs to still play substantial minutes.

11:34 – 3rd Quarter

Flip Saunders called an isolation play for Booker in the post against the 6’9″ Kenyon Martin. Martin is known for his physical play on both ends of the floor, and this looked to be a challenging post-up for Booker. He faced up like a player of his ability should when attacking the basket, started right, then quickly spun back and executed a perfect jump hook over the outstretched arms of Martin to cut the Nuggets’ lead to 17 points. This prompted Wizards announcer Phil Chenier to say that Booker needs to get more touches down low.

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The names Carmelo Anthony and Chauncey Billups have been in the minds of  Denver Nuggets fans, beat writers and casual observers all season long and with good reason.  Carmelo has been Denver’s franchise player for eight years now, and he has made it known that he wants to take his talents elsewhere — allegedly to the New York Knicks, but Chicago, New Jersey and Denver are “allegedly” under consideration as well.  If he does leave, whether via trade or free-agency, the Nuggets figure to be in rebuilding mode, which will also affect Billups.  Chauncey is 34-years old, he’s won a championship, and although he’s not the same “Mr. Big Shot” as he was during his title run with the Detroit Pistons, he is still an effective player (15.9 points and 5.3 assists per game).  He’s earned the right to be on a contending team, not one in transition — and without Carmelo, or someone of value in return, that’s exactly what the Nuggets would become.

So when Denver visited the Verizon Center to take on the Washington Wizards Tuesday night, I was curious to see how Carmelo and Billups would perform under the weight of all the alleged trades and transition.  Carmelo had 23 points and seven rebounds, Billups had 15 points and six assists, and both players were integral to the Nuggets’ 120-109 victory.  However, I came away from the game with the names of their two teammates in my mind instead:  Ty Lawson and Al Harrington.

Lawson had 17 points and two assists, and did most of his damage in the second quarter when the Nuggets stretched their lead to 12 points (although it got as high as 17 at one point in the period).  The point guard had seven points in the second, and he kept both John Wall and Mustafa Shakur completely off-balance with his ability to change speeds, get to the basket, and knock down the open shot.

Harrington was a non-factor for three quarters, but he came alive in the fourth quarter when he hit five of the six three-pointers he attempted.  He finished with 21 points, and he did so despite being heckled the entire game by courtside Wizards fans who insisted on calling him Othella, instead of Al (Kyle Weidie detailed this exchange in a great post).

After the game I spoke with Lawson about the way he uses his speed with Harrington about the hecklers, among other things. Read more »

Also note: Don’t make fun of Al Harrington for wearing K-Mart brand “Protege” shoes any more … it seems that he’s ditched those for Nikes. Now keep reading…

If you’re local to the DMV area, you’ll remember Othella Harrington. He left the South from Mississippi in 1992 to be the next ‘big’ big for John Thompson in D.C., in line with Ewing, Mutombo and Mourning. But while Othella had a productive four-year career with the Georgetown Hoyas, and a tenured NBA career (709 games over 12 seasons and five teams), a famed basketball big man he was not.

Al Harrington entered the league out of a New Jersey high school in 1999 and has appeared in over 830 NBA games spanning 13 seasons. Different Harringtons to most, a bullet point on the mental cheer sheets of a couple courtside hecklers aided by libations on a Tuesday night at the Verizon Center. As you can gather (and as the title of the post gives away), the most oft-shouted quip by said hecklers was to call Al ‘Othella’ — they really David Letterman’d it, over and over. And over.

Al took exception as soon as that magical zinger was found by the heckler’s inner heckler early in the game. He retorted, “I’m not Othella, you dummy!” to the degree where you wondered if he really thought that they really thought he was Othella.

Harrington didn’t give much reason for them to stay off his case though, especially after he’d already engaged the crowd. Through three quarters, he’d played just 15 minutes and put up six points and three rebounds, no biggie. The Nuggets were up 96-79 heading into the final period, so Al could always just point to the scoreboard as the calls of Othella continued. But he didn’t.

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[A John Wall t-shirt seen at the 2010 Columbia Heights Day Festival.]

There’s a reason the Sports-Reference.com family of sites was named one of Time Magazine’s 50 Best Websites for 2010. They have just about everything you’d want, sports fact and statistically speaking, and their search capabilities are always growing … well, if they only had NBA game logs that pre-dated the 1986-87 season.

Nevertheless, I recently gave an assignment to the staff of Truth About It.net, (Rashad Mobley, John Townsend, Arish Narayen and Adam McGinnis). I asked them to go to the Basketball-Reference.com database search page, come up with a creative query, and write something quick about it. I also came up with some quick example searches myself.

For instance, I went to the “Player Game Finder” and ran a simple search selecting ‘Wizards/Bullets’ as the opponent, ‘did not start’ as the role, and sorted by points. (Click here for the full results.)

Did you know … (from the ’86-87 season to current, the extent of BBR’s game log database), the 37 points Al Harrington scored for the New York Knicks against the Wizards on February 26 of this year was the most points scored on Washington by a player off the opposing team’s bench?

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This Wizards team has gone through a lot of adversity this year, some of it unimaginable. Poor them. People are dying around the world and not by choice. These guys get paid to play basketball. Suck it up.

More and more this team is playing like they just don’t care. It’s not the first time this has happened. Probably won’t be the last. But Wednesday night’s game against the New York Knicks seemed like more of a disgrace than efforts we’ve seen before.

I’ve said that Ernie Grunfeld can’t make drastic change fast enough. The associated anxiousness continues to mount by the day and will continue to do so up until the February 18th trade deadline, unless something happens before then.

When it goes down, how will I find out? Twitter? Text? G-Chat? Will Ric Bucher’s shiny doll hair pop up on my HDTV to tell me that it has all come to an end? Will I wake up one morning to find Marc Stein whispering in my ear, “Caron Butler for Marcus Camby and Antawn Jamison for Zydrunas Ilgauskas, both straight up” followed by him punching me in the mouth?

These are the things that haunt my slumber and twist my stomach. And they all feel plausible.

Ok, back to the Knicks game. Even though they clearly started to lose the game in the third quarter, I was pretty incensed when watching the fourth quarter “melt,” as Flip Saunders called it.

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