Early deficits have been too much to overcome
Nick Young thought it might’ve been his shoes. It’s as good a suggestion as any.
“The first ones I started off with were bad luck,” said the Wizards guard, who switched out his all-blue Nike Zoom Kobe IV’s for silver ones at halftime against Toronto on Friday. “DeShawn [Stevenson] told me to change my shoes ‘to the ones that were making you get 20 points a game.’ A certain person told me to wear them. I start off 0 for [4], and we were losing by 20 almost, so I have to throw those away.”
Whatever the reason, the Wizards (7-11) have developed a bad habit of digging themselves into early holes. The cost may not seem substantial in December — Washington has lost five of its last six games in which it’s trailed after the first quarter — but the troubling sign doesn’t portend well for a potential playoff contender.
“When you play, and you rely on the three-point shot line, and you’re a 32 percent team [from three], you’re going to win 32 percent of your games, basically,” said Wizards head coach Flip Saunders. “That is not a major part of what we do.”
Saunders was furious with the 109-107 defeat to the Raptors because his team missed 14 of its first 15 shots and was down by 17 points less than seven minutes into the game.
“I’ve always said, what you establish early in a game you can go back to late because they have to adjust to stop what you were doing early,” said Saunders. “Well, we never established anything [against Toronto] so it’s like we were playing catch-up the whole night, even when we got up. We were playing out of rhythm.”
Saunders has tried to get his first five to be sharp early — adjusting the time of the pregame shootaround, not having shootaround at all — but nothing seems to work.
“It’s something with our first unit,” said starting point guard Gilbert Arenas, who had a season-high 34 points against Toronto but missed his four of his first five shots. “We’ve got to play. I don’t know if we’re warming up good enough. I don’t know what it is, but we’re not starting off the game the way we should be.”
“Hopefully that won’t be the case in Detroit,” said Caron Butler. “I’m almost positive it won’t be.”
