Big Bad John Wall wants to know. Beckley Mason, Rashad Mobley, John Converse Townsend and Kyle Weidie ask and answer hot topic questions about the Washington Wizards.

MOBLEY: Do we hold Ernie Grunfeld, Flip Saunders and the Wizards to any expectations during this abbreviated season, or do we just assume no significant strides will be made until next year?

MASON: My expectations for this team aren’t altered a bit. The summer is a time when, from a basketball standpoint, players need to be spending their own dime to work out with the best trainers possible. The lockout shouldn’t have affected that reality. Flip probably wishes he had more time with his newest players, but an extra week of training camp wasn’t going to solve the problems with McGee and Blatche, or help the Wizards to land a major free agent.

MOBLEY: John Wall has raised expectations for the Wizards with his play this summer, so it is entirely fair to hold Grunfeld and Flip to the same standard. But given that Grunfeld  hinted that he plans on using the amnesty clause next year, he may have bought both he and Flip an extra year.  However, if the Wizards win 25 games or less, a new coach/GM combo should reap the amnesty benefits.

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Critique of the NBA often surrounds the narrative of one player dribbling around then shooting. But when you have a 20-year old athlete whose combination of speed and size is already superior to most at his position, you take advantage of his one-on-one skills. And when that player loves to pass and relishes in the assist while always being a threat to score, it’s called basketball. Flip Saunders is a basketball coach and he often knows exactly what to do with John Wall.

Spread sets usually seem reserved for late-clock situations, and mostly true for the instances in the video below. Still, with Wall they can be implemented at just about any point of the game, depending on his surrounding personnel and the defensive match-ups the Wizards might want to exploit, of course. This clip of four plays all occurred in two games against the Golden State Warriors and Utah Jazz on the Wizards’ late March west coast road trip, and all came with around 70 seconds or less left in a period. Let’s watch…

Earl Watson, Stephen Curry and Monta Ellis… Sure, intimidating defenders they are not. But also, this is the NBA. Not many rookies can make these moves look so easy — an attack of the rim through trees, finding Yi Jianlian for a bounce pass in the paint, throwing the perfect lob to JaVale McGee, getting to the rim through a big man, making the basket, drawing a foul, and finishing with a muscle flex.

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Mustafa Shakur, Othyus Jeffers, Hamady N’diaye, Kevin Seraphin and Cartier Martin.

Those were all of the players available for the Wizards off the bench last night in Utah. Shakur didn’t play (coach’s decision being the given reason), and N’diaye tallied just three minutes in the box score, nothing else. Jeffers, Seraphin and Martin combined for 18 points on 6-14 from the field and 17 rebounds, five offensive thanks to the bruising workmanship of Jeffers. The numbers of the bench squad with the most unique set of names ever weren’t astounding, but the Wizards made it work in their somewhat shocking 100-95 overtime win over the Utah Jazz on Monday night.

Sure, Utah was missing Devin Harris and Andrei Kirilenko from their starting lineup, instead putting out a unit of Earl Watson, C.J. Miles, Raja Bell, Paul Millsap and Al Jefferson. But a Wizards starting five of John Wall, Jordan Crawford, Mo Evans, Yi Jianlian and JaVale McGee didn’t have a chance of feeling sorry for the Jazz, or themselves.

Jazz fans, however, may be feeling sorry for themselves … enough to boo their team at intermittent times throughout the game as Washington fought to gain control early, and then tried their best to relinquish it late, despite Utah’s best effort to not take advantage. It was odd to hear the Wizards television team of Steve Buckhantz and Phil Chenier recount just how far the Utah franchise has fallen in the year 2011. The Jazz were 27-13 when they made an east coast trip in mid-January, beginning with a game in Washington on the 17th.

Jerry Sloan’s team proceeded to lose to the Wizards on Martin Luther King Day, and then they lost five more in a row. Barely a month later, Sloan resigned after a 23-year run with the team and star point guard Deron Williams was traded to New Jersey. Now the Jazz are left in a vastly uncertain rebuilding mode with Tyrone Corbin as their coach, a six game losing streak (including last night’s take down by the Wizards), and a 36-39 record that looks to keep them out of the playoffs for just the fifth time in the last 28 years (also the fifth time in the last eight years, to be fair).

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{K. Weidie}

John Wall has shown signs that he’s starting to hit that dreaded rookie wall.  He’s been struggling to fight off injuries, and as a result, his aggressiveness, his explosiveness and his ability to defend opposing point guards has suffered. I’ve been watching basketball long enough to know that all rookies go through this type adversity at some point, let alone rookies who are assigned the arduous task of running a team and saving a franchise. With the Utah Jazz in town to face the Wizards on Martin Luther King afternoon, I knew I would have the opportunity to get some point guard perspective from three different members of that model franchise.

Jazz head coach Jerry Sloan instructed Hall of Fame point guard John Stockton for 15 seasons, and he’s coached All-Star Deron Williams for six. Williams is in the ‘best point guard in the league’ discussion along with Chris Paul, Derrick Rose and Rajon Rondo. His backup, Earl Watson, was coached by former Sonics great point guard Nate McMillan and mentored by a future Hall of Famer Gary Payton.

Among those three men, I was sure I could learn the traits of a good point guard, what Wall might be going through right now and get a good assessment of how he’s progressing almost halfway through the season.

Before the game, Sloan talked about how little the Wall/Williams match-up meant to him, and how important intelligence is to playing point guard:

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NOTE: I’ll be chatting about tonight’s Wizards-Clippers game on www.CSNWashington.com at 10:15 pm. Come by and hang out if you’re up … and by “up” I mean both awake and down to watch the Wiz.

I’m doing this post for a couple reasons: I can’t escape the carnage of Saturday night, and in his post-game interview, Brendan Haywood mentioned some repeated, successful plays run between Earl Watson and Tyler Hansbrough. I wanted to investigate further.

“We didn’t make defensive plays at the end of that game. They ran the same play with Earl Watson and Hansbrough three, four times in a row … didn’t make an adjustment, no help on the weak side, nothing was done.” -Brendan Haywood

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