[D.C. Council: setting the scene, rating the starters, assessing the subs, providing the analysis, and catching anything that you may have missed. Unlike the real DC Council, everything here is on the table. Game No. 66, Washington Wizards at Charlotte Bobcats; contributors: Conor Dirks, Adam Rubin and Kyle Weidie via television broadcast.]

Faux Pas. [Happy Pappy Michael Jordan finds a smile amidst the glow of his outfit.]

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[Editor's note: This is Mohamed Abdihakim's debut for TAI. Mohamed blogs at TheHoopDoctors.com and is an editor at Hoops-Nation.com. He is currently working toward a multimedia journalism degree from Florida Atlantic University. —Kyle W.]

82games.com has made available a certain simplified metric.

Belying otherwise extensive research, “Simple Rating” (SR) provides a relatively digestible look into a player’s value on the court versus their positional counterpart. The values used in this rating are Production—”a variant of John Hollinger’s PER”—and a plus/minus unit.

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Here to provide the DC Council Opening Statements for Washington’s 11th game of the season against the Bobcats in D.C. are TAI’s Kyle Weidie (@Truth_About_It) and guest Ben Swanson (@CardboardGerald), who writes about the Bobcats for the SB Nation blog Rufus On Fire (@Rufus_On_Fire).

Wizards Starters (0-10):

Shaun Livingston, Jordan Crawford, Bradley Beal, Jan Vesely, Kevin Seraphin
(…assuming Randy Wittman keeps the same starters from last game — we’re still not so sure about Vesely starting, but he matches up against Byron Mullens better than he does against Josh Smith.)

Bobcats Starters (6-5):

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The last time Washington and Detroit faced each other in mid-February, two young centers led the way (JaVale McGee had 22 points and 11 rebounds, Greg Monroe had 27 points and six rebounds), but Washington held Detroit to a season-low 32.6-percent shooting and stole a win on the road, 98-77. McGee is now in Denver and the Wizards will start both Nene and Kevin Seraphin (Trevor Booker is out with knee tendinitis)… Wonder what changes now. To answer you Wizards-Pistons questions, we have Dan Feldman of the ESPN TrueHoop Pistons blog, Piston Powered, along with TAI’s Rashad Mobley and Kyle Weidie. Let’s do it…

#1) Ben Gordon is averaging just 12.6 points per game this year, which is a far cry from 20.6 he averaged in his final year in Chicago, and definitely not what the Pistons had in mind when they signed him to a 5-year, $55 million contract in 2009. Andray Blatche has started only 13 of the 26 games he played, he only averaged 8.5 points and 5.8 rebounds in those games, and he’s currently not playing because of “conditioning” (aka the Dirk Nowitzki system). The Wizards surely did not have this in mind when they gave him a 5-year, $35 million contract extension in 2010. Which team regrets their contract more?

FELDMAN: From a purely basketball standpoint, it has to be the Pistons, just because $55 million is greater than $35 million. But Gordon’s downfall has been due to, I think, never mentally recovering from an injury his first year in Detroit and a surprisingly sudden physical aging. Gordon has continued to act professionally and play hard, and that might make it more palatable to pay him $11 million per year rather than paying Blatche $7 million per year.

MOBLEY: The Wizards regret Blatche’s extension, but I do believe in dark, media-free rooms where Ernie Grunfeld and Ted Leonsis have cliché free discussions, they will admit that re-upping Andray was risky. Blatche’s stretches of excellence were limited, at best, at that time. Ben Gordon was coming off a 2008-09 season that saw him average 20.7 points during the regular season and 24.3 in the Bulls’ tightly-contested playoff lost to the Celtics. Gordon was expected to carry the Detroit franchise, and instead he’s been inconsistent, hesitant and without a playoff appearance.

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There were no NBA games to be watched on Monday night, which meant like everyone else, I had to view that poorly-played NCAA championship game between Butler and Connecticut.  I sat down expecting to see the best from Connecticut’s Kemba Walker, and Butler’s Matt Howard and Shelvin Mack. I expected to see these experienced players lead their respective teams to a well-played, nip-and-tuck affair.  Instead, I saw field-goal percentages that rivaled winter temperatures and turnovers that even the Washington Generals would not make.

Connecticut was able to shake off the poor play just long enough to make a late game run and come out victorious 53-41.  Walker had a game-high 16 points to go with nine rebounds, Connecticut center Alex Oriahki had 11 points, 11 rebounds and four blocks, and in a losing effort, Mack had 13 points and nine rebounds. Howard added seven points and six rebounds for the Bulldogs, but he shot 1-13 and he was a non-factor throughout the game.

Although Walker led the team in scoring and made some timely shots throughout the night, the key to Connecticut’s victory was freshman Jeremy Lamb.  After missing his only two field-goal attempts with no points in the first half, Lamb went 4-6 with 12 points in the second half, giving his Huskies a desperately needed cushion.  When Connecticut faced its largest deficit of 25-19 after Butler’s Chase Stigall hit a three 20 seconds into the second half, Lamb scored 11 of his team’s next 18 points during a 18-3 run that saw UConn take the lead for good at 37-28 with 11 minutes left in the game.

As happy as I was for the freshman, I immediately became concerned that this strong performance in an otherwise mediocre game would inflate his ego — and more importantly, his NBA prospects.  I worried that Lamb would ignore Kemba Walker’s shining example of how a good player leads his team from November to March, and attempt to ride into the NBA on the heels of an OK season and a one very good college game (although, worth noting that Lamb scored 97 points over six NCAA Tournament games, an average of 16.2 points that topped his 11.1 points per game during the season).  At one point I even tweeted that I hoped Lamb had a sub par game, so he would be convinced to stay in college.

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{flickr/bestfor/richard}

When I was in junior high and behaved in a way that my father deemed incorrect or beneath his standards, he would banish me to my room.  He knew how much I loved watching sports (specifically basketball), and that if I were exiled to my television-less room, I’d be crestfallen, dejected and angry — and the first few times it happened, I was all those things and more.

Then one day I discovered the joys of talk radio, and I realized that listening to the Washington Bullets play-by-play was almost as exciting as watching the game on television.   I could create my own mental pictures, I could hear the players’ sneakers squeaking through the sub-standard radio speakers, and the announcers seemed to pay more attention to detail than the TV broadcasters.  I enjoyed the experience so much that even when I wasn’t punished, I’d watch the game on TV with the volume down while listening to the radio broadcast.  In fact, I was so smitten with the radio that I started using that technique to watch football as well.

Somewhere along the way I stopped listening to radio broadcasts during sporting events and just watched them on TV or via the Internet.  But last night, for the second time in two weeks, the Washington Wizards (with No. 1 pick John Wall on their roster) weren’t anywhere to be found on television or by streaming bootleg video on the Web.  To the radio I went …

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A scene from glorious Grand Rapids, MI - {flickr/OZinOH}

Listening to basketball on the radio is hard … damn hard. Hard like drinking warm milk and eating boiled eggs in the hot July sun while getting bit by mosquitoes and suffering from a tequila and red wine hangover.

Ok, well maybe it’s not that bad. Wizards radio guys Glenn Consor and Dave Johnson do a helluva job keeping team faithful updated with developments.

Still, when I hear Consor officially declaring Gilbert Arenas to be “back”, indicating that he hasn’t felt this way about the guard’s preseason cameo appearances up until now, I feel pretty deprived from not being able to see the moving pictures.

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(flickr/coolgates)

There was a mini-spike in Randy Foye news last week. On Monday, after watching a video about Foye on NBA.com, I wondered if he could be ‘the’ difference maker.

On Wednesday, the WaPost’s Michael Lee put together a nice piece on Foye off his notes from a previous meeting. Here, we learned of a potential style conflict between Foye and former T-Wolves head coach, current Wizards assistant, Randy Wittman. Lee also related something Kevin McHale once told Foye before a matchup against Dwyane Wade, “Anything he can do, you can do.” Foye battled and finished with 29 points to Wade’s 31. The game came down to a last second foul call that Foye did not get … Wade probably would have.

Predating Wade-Foye comparisons, looking back into John Hollinger’s vault, we find Foye associated with Vinny Del Negro. Before he was drafted in ’06, ESPN compared Foye to Ben Gordon, while NBADraft.net to Chauncey Billups. But it was DraftExpress FTL … in their ‘best’ case, Randy Foye is Mike James; worst case, Juan Dixon. Yuck.

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