It’s really difficult to find positives out of the Wizards’ 110-92 loss to Orlando, their seventh loss in a row and ninth in their last ten games, and we’ll get to the return of Gilbert Arenas, too. But there’s one nice story that sticks out, so let’s start there and hope for the best:
Trevor Booker came off the bench to deliver 6 points, 6 rebounds, a career-high 6 blocks and one earth-shattering slam on Earl Clark in the fourth quarter.
“That’s what I’ve been waiting for,” said Booker of the dunk. The problem was, he shouldn’t have been waiting to get into the game. After starting Washington’s last four games in place of JaVale McGee, Booker moved back to the bench, but McGee gave little reason to prove that he’s a better choice, opening his night with a missed dunk, a poor jump shot and standstill defense as Dwight Howard rounded him like a parking cone for the first of his seven dunks on the night. That wasn’t even the worst of it for McGee, who finished with 2 points, one rebound and one block in 17 minutes of playing time and straps on a pair of blinders every time he touches the ball, whether its two feet or 62 feet from the rim.
“Everyone in the arena doesn’t like that he takes the ball at three-quarter court and thinks he’s a 6-2 guard,” said Wizards head coach Flip Saunders of McGee’s flailing attempt to run his own fast break in the first quarter, one that ended with the ball bouncing out of bounds off his leg.
As for Booker, when asked if he’d ever had that many blocks, he immediately recalled a game against North Carolina as a freshman Clemson when he had eight. Kevin Seraphin – who was playfully pretending to be a reporter along with Hamady Ndiaye as Booker talked – jokingly said, “You lie!” Good times, if ever so brief.
Here’s what was no lie: Howard’s dominant 22 points and 15 reboounds. The all-star center helped the Magic build a 14-point lead in the first quarter with an endless string of easy alley oops, and then he similarly put the visitors ahead for good late in the third quarter with two dunks in a row that gave him enough confidence to knock down a midrange jumper to improve to 10 for 10 from the field at the time.
“I could see it in both of Jameer [Nelson’s] eyes every time he was getting ready to throw it, even one time he threw when I was on Dwight,” said Wizards forward Rashard Lewis after facing his former team for the first time. “There was nothing I could really do about it, he just turned around and dunked it. That spin out lob is something that they just have chemistry doing.”
“We had a lot of misfocused plays,” said Andray Blatche of the Wizards’ defense. “We wasn’t keyed in. We didn’t do what coaches drew up for us to do. We made [Howard’s] job too easy for him.”
The 10-point lead that Howard helped the Magic build by the end of the third quarter was enough to hold off the Wizards in the fourth. The fact that Orlando pulled away by going 7-for-9 from three in final period just added insult to injury.
Arenas’s return wasn’t much different than how he’d played before the trade. The reception he received when he checked into the game late in the first quarter was quite remarkable, with a substantial amount of boos – almost as if the crowd was doing to Arenas what Arenas sadistically hoped they would – but Arenas also received a standing ovation from an even larger contingent among the crowd of 18,940, a sort of thank you for the great times that he’d brought to D.C.
On the court, he had an underwhelming 10 points on 4-for-12 shooting with 6 assists. He got rejected by Booker, he went 0 for 4 from three-point range, and he was -14 on the floor in the first half as the Wizards erased all of the Magic’s early lead.
“He still has the talent, but I don’t think he has the kind of explosiveness that he used to before he got injured and all that,” said Wall. “But he’s still a weapon in this league that can shoot the ball and does a great job of getting his teammates involved.”
Arenas’s biggest achievement was his unusual but not unexpected focus on defense to rattle Nick Young, who needed 20 shots to get 17 points of his own.
“It was tough out there for me,” said Young, who tried to say Arenas’s usual trash talking didn’t affect him, even though it did. “I had a couple of shots that looked great, but it wasn’t falling for me and I just couldn’t quite get into it. I played kind of poorly tonight.”
Lewis (14 points) was a solid 6-for-10 from the field and Blatche (10 points) was 4-for-7, but Young has started to turn into a player who has to get his points, and it’s affected his rhythm. He’s shot 39 percent or worse from the field in four of Washington’s last five games.
John Wall (14 points, 5 rebounds, 5 assists) got his first NBA ejection after picking up two technical fouls in a span of 1 minute, 42 seconds in the fourth quarter. He been on the wrong end of a number of calls throughout the game, including a foul on Jason Richardson he was convinced was a block, and the first tech came after he tangled with Howard for a rebound but lost and got called for a foul. The second came at the next timeout, with 2:56 remaining in the game. For what? Wall wouldn’t say.
“I really don’t know,” said Wall. “I was walking away and I said something to [the referee]. I guess he gave me a tech. I didn’t know until Coach Whitman came over to the huddle and told me I was ejected.”
Wall left the court and chucked his jersey into the crowd. His teammates could’ve done the same thing at that point. If there’s a way to start forgetting about a loss before it’s even over, tonight would be a good time – the equally scary Atlanta Hawks await tomorrow.
