Let’s just get it out of the way: Derrick Rose was the difference in the Wizards’ 98-88 loss to the Bulls. It starts, ends, and never gets away from the reigning NBA MVP’s influence on the contest.
But it was the Wizards’ shortcomings defensively on Rose’s teammates that might’ve been the difference between being competitive – which is a step forward for a team that scored a franchise-low 64 points the last time they played the Bulls – to actually having the chance at a victory.
This is the Wizards rebuilding, though, correct?
Still, it could’ve been more than that a moral victory or a step in the right direction if the Wizards had done a better job sticking with Kyle Korver instead of mystifyingly leaving him open to provide help defense in the first half. Nick Young might want to check into this aspect of his game over pleading with the media to offer him up as an entrant for the 3-point contest.
“Just a little discipline,” Wizards coach Randy Wittman said. “We lost a little discipline of who that guy was in the corner. Now, you’ve got to distinguish against who’s shooters and who’s not shooters and how far you get in, and we lost him. In the second half, it was much better. He has one basket in the second half.”
But as Wittman pointed out, Korver already had 14 points in the first half.
Meanwhile, in the final quarter, the Wizards started to show the kind of plucky, pesky defense that Wittman has begun to coax out of his players, with some combination of Washington’s guards and Trevor Booker, whose knees were wrapped in massive ice packs afterward.
“It was tough,” Booker said. “But that’s something that they want me to do, but I’m going to continue to do it. It was tiring. Anything to get the job done.”
The problem was while Booker and John Wall were creating havoc up top and forcing the ball out of Rose’s hands, JaVale McGee wasn’t providing the anchor at the bottom once it ended up in Joakim Noah’s hands.
Noah, unguarded, took off down the lane, where McGee would close on him just enough to allow easy layups for Carlos Boozer instead of hanging back underneath the basket.
“JaVale, there’s a little technique, being the last man standing back there, of what you have to do,” Wittman said. “He didn’t know. We haven’t been able to work on it. He came away from the basket a little too much, a couple drop offs to Boozer where you’ve got to make Noah, a 7-foot center, make plays driving down the middle of the floor. They’re unaccustomed to making those plays, and waiting at the rim, JaVale’s got a great opportunity because he’s got shot blocking ability, standing at the rim and make a play of blocking Noah if he’s going to try to lay it in. But he takes away that little dropoff pass that they got a couple times.”
Boozer’s back-to-back buckets on exactly that play kept the Wizards from getting any closer than eight points, just as Korver’s open jumpers kept them from keeping the game closer in the first half.
Again, that’s the Wizards rebuilding.
