The Wizards are not a basketball team. At least they are impossible to take seriously as such. Watching them play is less like Hoisers and more like Private School. With enough time, Gilbert will post a full scale description of him and DeShawn's panty raid of the Mystics locker room.
Agent Zero's style seems to have permeated the team's on-court persona as well. They play basketball like the team I created for NBA Live 2003 (I think) where Rasit Bilgin was 7'6'' and played center. They hoist up ridiculous shots at the last minute, and sometimes they go in. They never seem to run plays. They appear to be having a great time. They play paintball on the lawns of their mansions.
However, in the year that seems to mark (at least partial) salvation for the East, can we afford to ignore the Wizards? This was a team that won like two thirds of their games when their three stars were healthy last season. And they are healthy again. While another year will certainly slow down Antawn Jamison, Gil and Caron Butler are poised to have seriously awesome outings. Etan Thomas is out for the long hall, but this may open the door for Andray Blatche to show how he is
awesome at basketball.As much as we may not want to WATCH the wizards (a struggle that I have been faced with over the past several years) we certainly want to pay attention to them. I know how great it would be for the Atlanta Undersized Forwards to finally pull together a winning season, but with the Heat relying on Ricky Davis for a couple of months, the Wizards will win. A lot. More than anyone expects. They will win more games than any other team in their geographic sixth of the United States. And no one will pay attention to them when they win, because they are not a paradigm shift, a train wreck, a second coming, a final chance, a shot at redemption, or any of the other favorite sports cliches which get you games on ABC. They are a bunch of goofballs, sprinkled with a little dysfunction, who play ugly basketball as a job.
