You’d have to assume that most assistant coaches always have their eye on the leading job. But Wizards assistant Randy Wittman isn’t thinking about career aspirations tonight, filling in for Flip Saunders while he attends to his ailing mother in Cleveland.
“Trust me, I don’t want to be standing here talking to you guys,” said Wittman in his pregame media session. “Family is first, and our prayers are with Flip and his family through this trying time with his mother being ill, and hopefully, things will go well there for him and his family. Obviously, our thoughts and players are with Flip as he goes home to take care of business.”
Wittman’s keys to the game: preventing turnovers; pushing the tempo against Golden State, a team that behind guards Monta Ellis (24.7 ppg, 5.4 apg) and Stephen Curry (18.5 ppg, 5.8 apg) likes to run itself; and effort, something he emphasized at the end of practice on Tuesday, singling out Nick Young and Andray Blatche as guys he didn’t want to see loafing from baseline to baseline when something doesn’t go their way.
“It’s got to be better, obviously,” said Wittman. “We talked about Miami and Dallas, how you played there, and it can’t fluctuate. That’s kind of our message going yesterday: we got 23 games, and to win in this league, to be a winner in this league, you can’t have fluctuations in your energy, effort, desire playing. Chicago kind of took that out of us. That’s not to say we didn’t have it coming out early, but they took the will to win away from us. That can’t happen no matter how the game starts. That’s got to be a point of emphasis for our guys moving forward here to the end of the year.”
While the Wizards have dropped six in a row and 15 of their last 17 games, the Warriors have dropped four in a row.
