Will this finally be the night when the Wizards (6-17) snap their ridiculous 0-12 run on the road and five game slide overall? The New Jersey Nets (6-18), who have lost eight in a row themselves, would seem a ripe target, eh, Flip Saunders?
“I tell our guys, there aren’t bad players. There are bad teams,” said the Wizards head coach on Wednesday. “When you go to play anybody, you’ve got to respect those guys, knowing that they can go out and play. I’m sure that they’re saying the same thing we’re saying, ‘We got a chance right now, this is a team coming in, they’re hurt, they’ve got a lot of guys who are banged. We gotta jump on these guys right away.’”
Oh, right, the injuries, which have put the onus on rookies Trevor Booker and Kevin Seraphin to grow up and grow into their roles quicker than they might have expected. Lineup shuffling due to injuries – and lots of other reasons – has been one of Saunders’ calling cards since he arrived in D.C.
As for the rest of Flip’s scouting report: “[Brook] Lopez is a very good post, one of the better low-block scorers in the league, and [Devin] Harris is a great pick and roll guard so we’ve got to defend those. Our concern is we just don’t have our horses and so we’re asking Gil [Arenas], we’re asking Kirk [Hinrich] and those guys, they almost have to play perfect-type games for us to be able to win.”
It’s not exactly encouraging, then, that Arenas is 9-for-41 (22.0 percent) from three-point range in December. Hinrich, meanwhile, has done better this season against lesser opponents. Out of the 12 times he’s scored in double figures this season, at Orlando (12 points in the season opener) and at Boston (10 points), both blowout losses, were the only games in which he reached that threshold against a team with a winning record, or in the Magic’s case at the time, a .500 record (0-0).
The Nets backcourt saw the reunion yesterday of former Lakers Jordan Farmar and Sasha Vujacic, the latter who didn’t even know he’d been traded when he was in Washington on Tuesday. The Nets don’t yet have Carmelo Anthony, though their maneuvering to get Vujacic was part of the master plan to help them. Instead of Anthony, New Jersey has at starting small forward former Wizard Quinton Ross, who moved to Newark last summer as part of the trade that sent Yi Jianlian to Washington. The Chinese big man will miss his only chance this year to face the Nets in New Jersey.
