Pictures, commentary, links, more pictures…

WE HAVE HERE: JaVale McGee dunking over Gary Neal at Capital Punishment, but John Wall should also look out below…

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[Blatche celebrates a close win over the Pistons.]

Andray Blatche. Yes, that Andray Blatche … Party All Dray. He’s been a little bit different lately, hasn’t he? Sure has. Averaging 25.6 points and 13.7 rebounds per 36 minutes in the last four games (up from his 17.4 and 8.7 respective averages per 36 for the season), since his return from injury is certainly a strong indication that things could be different for Blatche.

Straight and to the point, he’s been attacking the rim. Living in the paint. Doing the dirty work down low. All the good stuff the team has always needed Andray Blatche to do, but has never quite been satisfied.

Against the Detroit Pistons on Tuesday night, the Wizards’ third win in a row (for the first time since April 2008), Blatche forced in 26 points on 8-18 shooting. Four of his misses came from inside five-feet from the rim (which is a good thing), and he made 7-8 of his field-goal attempts within two-feet.

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On Sunday against the Detroit Pistons JaVale McGee had just two rebounds, both defensive, in over 30 minutes of play. He also contributed 12 points on 5-6 shooting (2-4 from the free-throw line), three blocks, a steal, an assist and a single foul to his stat line.

The rebounding? McGee lacked a lot of energy in the early going and simply wasn’t able to contribute past a couple flailing attempts at the ball. The Detroit big men – Greg Monroe, Chris Wilcox, Jason Maxiell and Charlie Villanueva — also seemed intent (or instructed) to be as physical as possible with McGee at every opportunity. And so goes the scouting report for JaVale: run with him, dissuade his athleticism with physicality, and either pump fake him or go into his body rendering him unable to block a shot. His effort changed in the third quarter, but the Wizards still lost to the Pistons 113-102, and the goal with McGee, as it is with the inexperienced Wizards as a whole, is a complete work of gamesmanship art. NBA players don’t get paid part-time.

McGee’s grinding progress continues to provide frequent repetitive mistakes. It’s no secret how other teams, coaches and players treat him in their preparation (and how that affects his game), and it’s no secret that McGee will sometimes make plenty of his gaffes on his own. Will he learn through continued frustration from fans, teammates and coaches? That’s up to him, but there are two abundant factors working in his favor: his franchise’s presence in rebuilding mode and plenty of playing time chances. Taking advantage, however, seemingly hasn’t always been a prevalent function of McGee’s basketball thought process.

Nonetheless, we plod on. The below video breaks down instances of the 23-year old center against the Pistons on Sunday … The Continued JaVale McGee Learning Experience. As Flip Saunders and the Wizards coaching staff continues to pound the stubborn rock sheltering McGee’s cerebral willingness, the familiarity of the lessons remains consistent.

The Wizards’ loss to the Pistons in Detroit on Sunday was a stinker on a couple levels. I planned to watch at my leisure on DVR delay, so I could chart defense as the game progressed. But at one point late into the evening, and after regulation had ended, I discovered that I hadn’t set it to record for an extended amount of time. In rather anticlimactic fashion, I was resigned to checking the box score to see that the Wizards remained winless on the road on the year at 0-6.

So that was that, never even got to see the overtime. Below, you’ll find a regulation-only defensive chronicle, above that a spreadsheet tallying point responsibilities per possession, and above that, a couple regulation game notes. But first, let’s check Nick Young getting blocked by a 51-year old Tracy McGrady, I wonder if that was special for Nick.

Regulation Notes:

• The manner in which Al Thornton conducts himself on offense lowers confidence that his attempts will actually go through the net.
• A couple times you could hear AND see McGee scream to call out screens, good to witness visual signs of him improving at communication.
• McGee can be unstoppable when very close to the hoop. And he has been showing a bit more patience on offense lately, but when he catches mid-range, he still needs to not panic and throw some crazy junk up when so far away from the rim.
• Give McGee a ton of credit for hustling lately, which in a sense makes up for his traditional lack of substance, but he’s been trying in that regard too.
• A couple of silly turnovers from McGee late in regulation kind of hurt though.
• When the ball is in his hands, Arenas has done a nice job of balancing the offense by drawing attention. He’s been making pretty good decisions. Does Flip Saunders find a way to balance this? Or is it Wall to Wall up and down all day when John returns to the court? Has Wall being hurt somewhat helped to showcase Arenas to other interested teams? Who knows.
• Running downhill on offense, but uphill on defense has become even worse for Andray Blatche, he’s doing it in the half court too. Dray is glad to drive more to the hoop like he should be doing, but he also seems glad to play matador.
• If you want to take a look at Blatche’s bad defense that allowed the game to go into overtime, click here.

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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 …

The first time this happened, the Wizards took on the Cavaliers, and for a good quarter I tried to listen to the game intently.  But unlike when I was junior high, when I listened strictly for pleasure, trying to analyze a game with the intent of writing about it later was just too difficult.  I gave up after a quarter, watched on the gamecast/box score on the Internet, and promptly told my editor that no article (from me at least) would be forthcoming.

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Once, when asked about what his team would look like in the coming season, whether it would be more offensively minded, and how it would keep up the intensity on the defensive end, Flip Saunders said:

Well, defensively, the team always takes the personality of their players. The players we have here … are very defensive oriented. The strength of this team from a defensive aspect – how hard they play and how aggressively they play won’t change. What will change is the changing defenses we’ll use, being able to change the tempo of the game will full-court pressure, half-court traps and defenses. Offensively, like our defense, we will always stay aggressive. I always want my teams to attack, and so we will look to push the ball more and score more out of our fast break.

And on whether he would try to evolve a player into a superstar or continue with the teamwork mentality:

In Minnesota, even though we had a great player in Garnett, the team was built on team play. I look for this team to continue that. This team will move the basketball, become a high-assist, low-turnover team playing a very aggressive style.

This was in the summer of 2005, before Saunders’ Detroit Pistons finished with the best record in the NBA at 64-18, and before they lost to the Miami Heat in the Eastern Conference Finals.

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Remember when this team just had to worry about Antawn Jamison’s injured shoulder and finding themselves in Flip Saunders’ offensive system? Seven wins to 10 losses seems like a pipe dream now. Wizards fans would probably even trade these times for the 2007-08 sans Agent Zero playoff season. At least hope still existed then.

Unforgiving circumstances don’t even begin to describe what has transpired around this basketball team. Saunders must employ assistant coaches just to field a 5-on-5 scouting report. Players have to leave the practice court to give testimony that could land their teammates, their friends in jail. And then to go out and perform under these circumstances? Can’t be easy. Yes, they are paid millions to play a game, but that doesn’t make it any easier to perform under such pressure.

Then again, the basketball court is supposed to be an escape, right? Most of the Wizards act like they’re stuck on Alcatraz with neither vessel nor the ability to swim. Well, with the exception of Jamision, who had 31 points (11-19 FGs) and 10 rebounds in a whopping 45 minutes. The Gentleman has been playing his 33-year old ass off and often is the only Wizard doing do. Flip Saunders feels bad for Jamison. I know because he said so. I feel bad for Jamison too, resigning myself that he, more so than Wizards fans, deserves something better.

When Mike Jones wrote, “The right thing for Wizards to do is move Jamison,” I didn’t want to accept the idea, even if in the back of my mind, I knew it was the honorable thing to do. Now I wholeheartedly agree. I would have liked to see Jamison retire in Washington and I’m sure he imagined himself doing the same. But the situation calls for both him and Wizards fans to swallow a large, bitter pill. Antawn has done as much as he could for this franchise and continues to play with unabashed pride. Of course, such mercy idealism doesn’t take away the unsettling nature of Jamison being an absolute “perfect” fit in Cleveland. Him helping the Cavs win a championship is worse than kissing your sister, it’s damn near the entire Aristocrats act.

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flickr/gerlos

The Wizards still can’t find a way to make things work. And there’s only so much tinkering/adjusting which can be made to a team that plays like they can just fix things in the next game and doesn’t understand the need to play with a sense of urgency in the now.

Is it time to stop searching for a way to make the current situation work and look in a another direction with a significant shake-up? Believers in the constancy of the Arenas/Butler/Jamison Big Three are dwindling faster than Social Security.

Not long ago, Flip Saunders said the time to truly give his team an initial once-over would be after the first twenty games. The Wizards will enter game number twenty on Thursday with a .368 winning percentage in a prime-time national television match against the Eastern Conference co-leading Boston Celtics.

I won’t pull a Jim Zorn and say that things look bleak, but they don’t look promising. With the Redskins talking about being cursed, it’s probably only a matter of time until Tony Kornheiser does a ‘find and replace’ and recycles an old “Curse O’ Les Boulez” column.

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Here I am to finally write a post about Saturday night’s 106-103 loss to the Pistons. Seems a bit tedious to do at this point. But I have a story to tell, so might as well get it out.

I like to think of myself as a pretty  optimist … well, “guarded optimism” was the term I often used prior to the season. Guess I threw that ‘guarded’ part into the wind when I predicted 55 wins. Really? What was I thinking? … but that’s neither here nor there at this juncture. To put it plainly, early in the fourth quarter, when the game had become a back-and-forth battle, I caught myself thinking that the Wizards would find a way to lose. And they did. From predicting 55 wins to the point of reasonable doubt … boy did that escalate quickly.

Flip Saunders used a slightly different term after the game, saying, “It’s like we’re inventing ways to put ourselves in a hole.” This was his response was to a question about DeShawn Stevenson’s ‘away from the play’ foul with 16 seconds left, giving the Pistons a single free-throw and the ball. Ben Gordon, one of the best FT shooters in the league (sixth best percentage among active players), easily sealed the game’s fate, putting Detroit up four with 14.4 seconds left. But Saunders also cited Brendan Haywood’s ‘moment of confusion’ travel at the 2:35 mark of the fourth as another invention of wizardry … among other items of note; 20 Pistons points off 16 Wizards turnovers sounds like it’d fit.

And “inventing” is probably the more apt term to use. “Finding” something can be left completely to chance if you are not looking. You “find” a penny on heads, or rather in the Wizards’ case, a fly in the ointment. An invention is left to your own creation, a self-inflicted device. Sure,  inventions can be accidental, but I guess those would be more like “discoveries.”

The Wizards certainly didn’t mean to commit such game influencing gaffes … or score only one meaningless field goal in the game’s final five minutes. The mental lapses, the game slippage as many coaches like to call it, created an environment conducive to loss-inducing invention. It wasn’t an instance of the Wizards “finding” themselves in a hole, they were handing out shovels to each other for digging.

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In this week’s Dagger Report, Mike Prada of Bullets Forever and I talk about the Wizards’ early season struggles, and how they derive from the sub par play of Gilbert Arenas and Caron Butler, the arrival of Earl Boykins … and of course, injuries.

And since the Wizards play the Detroit Pistons in D.C. tomorrow night, we caught up with Brian Packey of the SB Nation Pistons blog, Motown String Music. Brian, who evidently attended high school with JaVale McGee, drops some Pistons knowledge on us, reveals Epic Vale’s old nickname, and gives us some insight on the Pistons’ coaching situation past and present.

Enjoy.

Episode 3: The Dagger Report – Washington Wizards podcast

Or click here to subscribe via iTunes.

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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.

But the Wizards’ second unit held on late to win 101-98, and Arenas scored 24 points in just under 28 minutes (along with 5 assists to 6 turnovers). This team is getting their ‘LA Looks’ on and starting to gel. And hey, looks like they figured out a way to play some okay defense without Brendan Haywood (Fab Oberto led the Wiz with a plus-13).

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Grunfeld, circa 2000 NBA Playoffs, East 1st Rd. Gm. 5 vs. Indiana

Look at this young gent. Suave, classy … proper descriptors of this Ernie Grunfeld that your grandma could easily roll into one by saying, “He looks like such a nice boy!”

Now the goings-ons ’round the Wizards web

Candid Gil

“…what has surprised me is how open [Gilbert Arenas] is. We’ve had a lot of talks about everything, including his relationships with all the coaches he had from junior high to high school to college to the NBA. I have a better understanding of where he’s coming from.”

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Mike James - flickr/Keith Allison

Last week, I had a chance to interview Mike James over the phone from Houston as he was on his way to the gym. Why Mike James? Well, the guy was nice enough to respond to my email and subsequently agree to chat. Doubt many NBA players would do the same for a ‘blogger’.

In speaking with Mike, I came away with two main impressions; he absolutely loves the game of basketball and he’s very confident — two traits you’ll probably find in every player who sticks around in the best basketball league in the world for more than five seasons.

Acquired from New Orleans in mid-December, James’ presence on the court in a season inevitably filled with mounting losses was the cause of frustration for many Wizards fans who would have rather seen younger players developing on the court.

However, many times James was the only guard willing to penetrate into the paint, or at least try … an aspect of creation so desperately needed by a team simply trying to play together. Either that or James was the only veteran PG available, as young Javaris Crittenton, acquired in the same trade, tried to acclimate himself to his third team in two seasons, or as Juan Dixon fought through injury and the inability to lead an offense.

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[image via Gilbertology]

Tony Kornheiser will turn 61 on July 13th. Fully entrenched into his sixth decade, we can only hope that Tony has been given a shingles vaccine, the CDC recommends it.

Kornheiser shares a birthday with Spud Webb, boxer Michael Spinks, Harrison Ford (who is six years older, but about 6o years better looking than Tony — self deprecating joke that TK would make alert), was born on the exact same day as Aunt Viv from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air (the second one, after the first one left due to difficulties with Will Smith), and fittingly, shares a b-day with some fella from Queens named Dick Bunt, who played for both Kornheiser’s Knicks and Baltimore’s Bullets.

Life expectancy has increased in recent years. If it were 1935, Tony would be reaching the age where he would be expected to pass. Not so these days. That’s why some are proclaiming that 60 is the new 40.

So hey Tony, turning 61 is not all that bad, just as long as you’re following MSN’s 12 steps you must take at age 60. Although, according to Kornheiser’s On The DL Podcast with Dan Levy, he’s not closing in on a retirement date, he’s looking for another job.

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“Taste of Eleven”

Looking for a way to celebrate a Wizards draft lottery victory (or fail)? On Wednesday, Wizards Care will be hosting their 2nd annual “Taste of Eleven” luncheon at the Verizon Center in Chinatown, DC.

Basically, $11 buys you a ticket where you can select six lunch items from a selection provided by a ton of local restaurants. Proceeds from the event will benefit the Capital Area Food Bank.

The event is scheduled to run from 12:00-2:00 pm and tickets will be available to purchase at the door. If you are in the neighborhood, like me, might as well eat some good food while supporting a good cause.

My Pick Six: Cafe Atlantico, Matchbox Vintage Pizza Bistro, Morton’s Steakhouse, Zaytinya, Zengo and Zola.

Email Bag

email #1

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