It wasn’t going well for the Wizards at practice on Monday morning. Two days after a second straight loss dropped them to a 1-4 record for the young season, players were slow, not sharp, and increasingly complaining every time a coach blew a whistle against them as they scrimmaged.
Wizards head coach Flip Saunders had enough.
He called the players over to him and asked, “Everybody on this team wants to get better? If you want to get better, then come back at 4.”
With that, Saunders walked off the Verizon Center court, leaving a stunned team that started to follow right behind him until Hilton Armstrong gathered them together, telling them that they had to stop complaining and realize that the coaches were trying to help. The players agreed to come back at 3 p.m.
“Y’all better wake up,” said Josh Howard.
The abrupt halting of practice and a team that really wasn’t sure who to turn to after it was illustrates exactly where the Wizards are two weeks into the season: facing a grim reality based on their early performances and lacking clear team leadership to get them through it.
Howard, who said he participated in some of practice, had the harshest words afterward.
“Like I told some of the guys, we gettin’ ready to get a paycheck on the 15th, you know what I’m sayin’,” he said. “For right now, I think they gettin’ a paycheck for nothing, and I can honestly say that. I don’t think guys are really buying into this. [Expletive], if anything, we need to work for this paycheck, work every month to get a paycheck. That’s the approach I think our guys gotta start taking into this.”
“After you lose a couple games, you hope to come with a sense of urgency,” said Saunders. “I was excited about coming here. I actually was here today at 7 a.m., getting ready for practice and everything else. We didn’t come with that same urgency as a team. We’re not going to beg guys to play hard. If they don’t want to play hard, we’ll get another time or we’ll get people who do play hard. That’s the one thing as coaches, you can’t coach effort. We’ll find guys that are going to do it, and we’ll do it in the right environment.”
As Gilbert Arenas walked by the assembled reporters outside the Wizards locker room, he said, “Y’all need to come back at 4, too,” but the second practice of the day was closed to the media.
“What’s our record?” asked Andray Blatche. “Patience is running out, people are getting frustrated. I don’t have a problem with it. A two-a-day, training camp in November. Cool by me. We need it. We losing so that’s what happens when you lose, you gotta put in extra time, that’s all.”
Armstrong wasn’t sure exactly what possessed him to speak up.
“There was no reason, really, I just know we need it,” he said. “Everybody just walked off the court. It just seemed too easy for me, personally. Nobody said anything so I just felt somebody needed to say something, get everybody’s head into it. I’m pretty sure everybody was thinking it, but just to come from somebody else’s mouth may be different, may spark somebody to pick it up before later on so it won’t happen again.”
Saunders said it wasn’t the first time he’d ever stormed out of practice. While it may have been for some of the players in the NBA, it wasn’t for Armstrong in his full career, given that he played for Jim Calhoun at Connecticut.
“[Did it happen] in college?” said Armstrong. “Yeah, a couple of times.”
With that, he was off to figure out how to spend a few hours, probably too little time to get home back, but too many to spend sitting around the locker room. He left Verizon Center in search of something to eat.
