Dionne Warwick was at Verizon Center last night, prompting plenty of reporters to wonder if she knew something everybody else didn’t, except that we did know the Los Angeles Lakers would beat a Wizards team that would play with heart and effort but ultimately come up short.
It might have been the most predictable game of the season, even the part where Caron Butler fouled Kobe Bryant, his former teammate, to prevent a morale-sucking slam dunk.
“I’m not going to let him dunk,” said Butler. “If he got a clean lane, and I knew he did because I heard the crowd all ready in anticipation for the dunk. He’s a superstart He’s a super duper star. He’s one of the best players ever to play the game, top five. When a guy like that come into the arena, you know people are going to be excited, you only get a chance to see him once, and you want to see him do something special out there, even if it’s against your home team. That’s my boy, but I wasn’t going to let him get that dunk.”
But that play didn’t make the game any less disappointing — and Shannon Brown took care of the showtime dunks — especially since it was the fourth straight loss which also ended a six-game homestand for Washington that had started so brightly with two victories.
“If we had played as hard in our last few games as we did tonight, we would have had a good homestand,” said Wizards head coach Flip Saunders. “The Miami and Clippers were two games that we didn’t come out with energy. I think that a lot of things have happened that caught up to our guys. We were playing so many games, with five games in seven days, we were almost on an adrenaline rush, then we had a couple days off and kind of came down from that rush and we didn’t have that same energy, but tonight we had energy. We’ll take tomorrow off and come back on Thursday, and hopefully we’ll have energy to go against New Jersey.”
“I totally agree,” said Antawn Jamison, who played despite a sprained right foot that he suffered on Sunday. It had swollen up on Monday night but he said he felt fine yesterday. “We knew what we were in store for tonight. But the thing about it, you gotta bring that same type of energy, that same type of aggressiveness every night. For some reason, as a team, we can’t find a way to do. It’s frustrating because we show signs of being able to compete and bringing it but you just can’t do it against the great teams. You got to do it every night, and that’s what we’re where we’re at. We got to find a way to be focused enough, be professional enough to do it night in and night out.”
“I can’t fault our effort, but at times in the second quarter I think we didn’t compete around the basket. Sometimes when you play a team like that you have to show some physicality around the rim, and we didn’t do that. I think they got a little comfortable at that point,” said Saunders of the game-clinching second period, in which Washington was outscored, 30-15. They bested the Lakers over the other three quarters by three points. The Wizards also shot a very respectable 51 percent, outrebounding L.A., 41-28 (13 offensive), had 19 assists to 13 turnovers. But the Lakers shot 59 percent, had 23 assists and just nine turnovers — kind of like you’d expect from a NBA championship team.
“I just think it’s something that we have to learn from as a team,” said Randy Foye. “I think we just have to look at this and say, we can do better. We got some games now that we can really come out and enforce our will, and I think we’re going to have to do that early on, let the other team know what we’re coming in there to do, just try to get the victory.”
One reporter predicted that Washington would go undefeated in its next road trip — a one-game jaunt to 3-40 New Jersey.
“This is something that we’re not going to get accustomed to, losing games and feeling like this after every game,” said Butler. “This is something that has to turn around.”
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