The Washington Wizards are not a soap opera, therefore outside noise and rumors have nothing to do with who they are, but rather a distraction to their goals this season.
Thursday at 3 p.m. is the 2018 NBA trade deadline. Whether or not the Washington Wizards makes any moves remains to be seen. Also, Washington had a five-game winning streak before losing to the Sixers on Tuesday.
I don’t watch soap operas. Therefore any trades and how the Wizards are doing on the court are the stories that I like to report.
I stayed away from the soapy drama that’s surrounding Washington because that’s a distraction. It doesn’t bring the team any closer to their preseason goal of reaching the Eastern Conference Finals.
I didn’t believe an article needed to be written about any off-court drama. That was until I got an early morning text from a brother back home in Massachusetts, who I converted from a Celtics to Wizards fan, asking me are the Wizards better without John Wall?
All that twitter noise and what’s being reported in news outlets didn’t matter to me.
Everybody Eats
All-Star guard Bradley Beal made that statement, “everybody eats” after their win over the Raptors.
In my opinion, it just meant that every player did well to pull out that win. Because the Wizards were getting crushed in the first half with the Raptors’ three-point shooting.
Everybody had to share the ball (meal) to get the W against Toronto. That game came down to the wire with 2.6 seconds left in the game. It took everyone playing their best and not falling apart in the final minutes for Washington to escape the jaws of defeat from the Raptors.
If you want to relive those final minutes, you can read it here.
I was busy writing the recap right after the game, and didn’t watch Beal’s postgame interview. However, the next day, there were heated discussions on Twitter about his choice of words. I read them, and it didn’t even make a blimp on my radar.
Beal using that terminology, “everybody eats”, reminded me of the dinner scene in The Godfather, the meeting of the five families where they’re dividing up territories so every family eats.
However, Beal taught the uninitiated that it’s a line from the movie Paid in Full. Either way, how those words translated to a shot at Wall didn’t make sense.
Some media and fans made a story out of it, but I didn’t see anything there, so I didn’t write about it.
Great “Team” victory
Again, I didn’t even know about Marcin Gortat‘s tweet, until the Twittersphere made an uproar about it. I looked at Gortat’s tweet and the first thing I thought–he’s a writer now.
After a Wizards’ game, win or lose, Coach Scott Brooks would say the outcome was due to the Wizards playing/not playing “team” ball. When they won after the game he would usually say, it was a great team win.
https://twitter.com/MGortat/status/959286793123250177
If I watched Brooks postgame conference, and decided to add it to my articles, I would put what he said in quotes. So when I saw Gortat’s quote, it looked on its face that he was just quoting his coach. Nothing more nothing less.
If there’s anything else going on in the locker room, that doesn’t concern me. If inside the locker room affects on-court play, then the team would address it inside the locker room.
Wizards are better without Wall
“The Wizards better without John Wall” argument was something else I didn’t need to write about. It’s as if someone said, the “earth is flat”. It isn’t, so there’s no need to even discuss or argue the point.
One would look at that statement, “the earth is flat”, and turn your attention to read something else. So whenever I saw the “Wizards are better without Wall”, I didn’t read even bother reading any articles or arguments pertaining to it.
First of all Wall doesn’t believe in rest. According to him, if he sat out a game that maybe the only time a fan had a chance to see him play.
The Wizards really lost Game 7 of the Boston Series during the first game of the regular season. Because Washington did not have a reliable backup for Wall. Therefore, even if he did believe in rest, he could not.
Forget about sitting out games, so he would be fresh in the postseason. He couldn’t even sit a few extra minutes in regular season games, because he had no backup. Someone who wouldn’t cause the Wizards to lose the game.
Wall is better if he’s not overworked
If Wall did get the rest he needed last season, then the Wizards may not have even reached the playoffs. However, because Wall didn’t get rest during the season the Wizards lost the playoffs.
His tiredness in Boston game 7 stemmed from an entire season of not getting rest. Who was giving him rest last season? Tomas Satoransky? Brandon Jennings?
The payoff of Wall playing through pain last season were the playoffs. Maybe Wall would have sat down a few extra minutes, if he thought the backups wouldn’t cost the game. But neither he nor the Wizards had the luxury of him sitting a few extra minutes and forget about a whole game.
Now the Wizards won some games without Wall. That’s what they’re supposed to do. They’re not doing anything extraordinary. They’re doing their job.
Had the backups did their job last season, then we would have been talking about the ECF not Game 7. Wall lost his legs in that third quarter. Whose fault was that?
Whose fault was it that for 80 plus games that he couldn’t sit down for a breather?
Wall carried the Wizards on his knees last season, and he’s paying for it this season. The only good thing about Wall having the knee scope is that he’s finally getting rest.
The Wizards are better without Wall? There would be no Wizards without Wall.