The best blurb from the pregame notes ahead of tonight’s clash between slumping Celtics – yeah, right – and the nearly-surging Wizards – yeah, right – is this: “Washington’s starting lineup of Randy Foye, Mike Miller, Caron Butler, Antawn Jamison and Brendan Haywood is now 3-2 (.600). That lineup is Washington’s most successful of its 17 lineups this season.”
Good times.
During Flip Saunders’ pregame chat, he was asked about today’s Washington Post op-ed by Gilbert Arenas: “I think he understands the seriousness of what he did, and with his situation now, he wants to try and let people know, kids especially, that he had done something wrong and try to take something that was really negative and somehow try to have a positive impact… I think he says what his heart feels, and I think that if he wants to get active in this community and try to help out kids, then he probably needed to say something. But that’s something that he’s got to go with what he feels in his heart.”
Okay, back to the Saunders talking pregame, including the Wizards’ chance to jump on the fatigued Celts, who lost a heartbreaker yesterday to the Lakers: “More than anything else, you have to play at the pace that you think is going to be successful,” said Flip. “For us to play against them, an upper paced game would be more advantageous because they are such a good halfcourt lockdown defensive team. You’d like to attack them as much as you can in transition. Now, saying that, you can’t take frivolous one-pass shots. You still want to get up, you want ball movement and player movement even out of an earlier offense and try to attack in those situations.”
On all-star point guard Rajon Rondo: “He’s got an unbelievable amount of speed, and what’s happened is that even though eh doesn’t shoot it well, people have a tendency to lay off him and it’s almost like trying to guard when a running back is coming at a defensive back on a sweep. He’s coming at you one-on-one full boar, and you’re just standing there. You have to impact him at the point of attack to try to slow him down, otherwise he’s too quick coming at you. He has too much speed.”
On what, among numerous things, is frustrating about Rasheed Wallace: “The thing that gets everyone frustrated is that he’s such a good post-up player, When he wants to post up, he’s one of the top post-up players in the league. But as I told Antawn when I had him in Detroit, there’s only one team I knew he was going to post up against, and that’s when he played Antawn. Whether it’s a North Carolina thing or whatever, he’ll shoot his threes but he’ll try to get in the post a lot more than usual.”
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