Open thread: Regular season game 24

wiz should win tonight.

But for some reason, I'm not totally confident about it. Not sure why.

Oh, and how updated are the scores for over/under, etc. on the main page? I have no idea what my record is at this.

See you at the game...

Wiz
Under

Wiz, under.

But only if Skiles continues his crazy sub patterns.

I'm worried too.  Bulls are bound to wake up at some point, and that's often what the Wiz are good for.

What worries me is the thought of all those 3-balls raining down from the skies. Deng goes for 40....

Is looking like the next member of the nameless-faceless-career-game-against-the-Wiz Club.

Greatest passes from Caron, at least.

Is asking for some quality time riding the bench.

Awful, awful second quarter

i wasn't able to pay close attention to the game tonight but it looked like the wiz missed a bunch of open shots from the first quarter on. looked like they couldn't throw it in the ocean. meanwhile every time i looked up tyrus thomas was draining a 15 footer? and aaron gray looked to be outplaying haywood? what's that about?

i don't know. like i said i didn't see too much of the game. what happened?

Tonight was the first game I have really been able to watch completely due to finals/not being in the DC area.  An ex gf got me tickets and this game really showed me why we need gil and how the team is not better off without Arenas.  Our jump shots were cold tonight and we really struggled getting easy baskets.  It would be interesting to see the points in the paint comparison between the two sides (and even in general over the past few weeks w/out gilbert).  Along with that, we only shot 13 free throws tonight as opposed to the Bulls 21.  We struggled getting inside the paint which meant a whole lot of contested jumpers.  Arenas would have been able to keep us from scoring 13 in the 2nd quarter which changed the momentum of the game.

I thought our defense wasn't terrible tonight but EJ needed to play Haywood and Blatche on the floor together more.  The one bull who KILLED us tonight was suprisingly Ty Thomas.  He scored tough points, blocked shots and grabbed rebounds which he should not have gotten.  Part of the problem was that songaila guarded him for a the good parts of two quarters and thomas' athleticism killed us.  I would have liked to have seen Blatche guard Thomas and Haywood guarding Gray/Noah because he was fairly effective vs. both.  Blatche though did show signs of greatness tonight.

Nick Young's problem is confidence.  He had a few early jumpers rim out and you could tell by the look on his face and his body language that he was frustrated.  He made a few poor defensive decisions and missed several more shots because of this. I am going to blame that on him being a rookie and he still is crazy athletic and should be a solid contributor in the near future.

We were best when Butler handled the ball because he could find Jamison streaking for easy lay-ups.  Other that that we were unable to create much inside the lane which really doomed us in the end.  I was pleasantly suprised with Mason and thought that Stevenson played well.  We lost because we shot poorly tonight and could not generate easy points to prevent long scoring droughts.  This is the main reason why we miss Gilbert.  He is able to penetrate and get lay-ups, create easy buckets for teammates or get the the free throw line...all things that we were unable to do successfully tonight.  

It sucks that we had our winning streak snapped at home by a sub-.500 team, but I think most folks know that the Bulls really are a solid team, and the Wiz were pretty much due for a letdown. It'd be nice to bank some wins against the softer teams we have coming up, like Atlanta and Indy, but this game really exposed the Wizards' weakness.

In addition to the missed shooting, our lack of a lead ballhandler was painfully obvious. DeShawn, Mason, and Caron are decent options at SG, but they really are not primary ballhandlers, and the Chicago pressure really took the Wiz out of sync. The Bulls' pressure slowed down our offense in general, and  really disrupted the flow. I can recall at least four or five instances in which Wiz passes sailed out of bounds untouched as a guy who was expected to cut a certain way either didn't cut or went another way. For a team that makes a living off offensive execution, the turnovers really hurt when we were trying to make our comeback.

I generally try to avoid complaints about officiating, since it's pointless, and I'm obviously partisan, so my judgment is suspect. But there were at least three or four calls (or non-calls) that went against the Wiz in the fourth quarter that really hurt us, and that I thought were obvious. Haywood got called for a foul on a Thomas drive when he obviously made a clean block, DeShawn got bumped on the break and lost the ball to Hinrich as we were trying to tie the game, and the drive by Jamison that he got stripped on and complained about. As I said, there's nothing positive that comes from whining about the refs (unless you're Mark Cuban, I guess, and you send the league office a carefully edited video to influence Stern), but each of those calls hampered the Wiz comeback effort at a crucial moment. Very hard to overcome stuff like that.

Finally, we lose again when Caron records a triple-double. I know we lost a New Jersey game when he got one earlier this year, but I can't think of a game that he got one and we won. How jacked up is that? Your best player performs out of his mind, and you lose every time. Very odd.

Well, I'm hopeful about this weekend, and if we can make it to Christmas at 15-11, I'll be stoked.