Brendan Haywood said yesterday that not trusting each other has a trickle down effect on defense overall.
So does losing, and right now there is some snippiness-creep going on at Verizon Center.
Yesterday after practice, we grabbed Caron Butler, who’s been bolting out of the locker room after games like a guy trying to beat the HOV restrictions on 395 at 3:30 on a weekday afternoon. His take on Friday’s loss?
“Bad night at the office. You’ve had bad days at work, right? That’s all it was… It happens. You have bad nights, and that’s exactly what it was. I don’t look no farther into it. It was a bad night.”
A short time ago during Flip Saunders’ pregame chat, my attempt at trying to find something positive out of Miami game pretty much blew up in my face.
Me: Any positives from Friday at all? How about Andray Blatche?
Saunders: “No. No positives. When you get beat by 25, there’s no positives,” which heralded a media scrum that lasted barely two minutes, when normally it goes 5-10 with ease.
Things clearly ain’t happy in the Wizards locker room.
Flip had answered a couple other questions and praised Chris Kaman as a potential All-Star.
“Just aggressiveness,” was how Saunders described Friday night one more time. “I thought that we really did not match Miami’s aggressiveness when they hit us early in the game, that we gave into their aggression and thought maybe it was going to be a little bit too hard that night and just didn’t push back.”
He was also asked whether he holds off on calling timeouts: “We tried to do that early in the year, and they didn’t do very well. My timeouts have been about two, three minutes into every half it seems right now. As I told our guys, we gave them some rope to let them make decisions, they made poor decisions, bad shots so we decided that if we have to call three timeouts in four minutes, we’ll call three timeouts so they understand what is a good shot, what is a good plan and what isn’t.”
What should we take into today’s game? Well, Miami came in here and put the beatown on Washington two nights after losing by 39. The Clippers are coming of a 20-point loss at Denver, but shouldn’t the Wizards have more motivation since they lost to the Heat by 24?
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