Andray Blatche is back in Washington D.C., and he was out at a charity event at the First Baptist Church of Glenarden in Landover, Md. on Saturday.  Thanks to a couple people, I was able to get a chance to sit down one-on-one with Blatche to discuss his summer, his charity work, his foot injury last year and his expectations for the new season.

The full interview follows below the jump.  A couple notes:

• We talked a lot about Blatche's charity mission to Jamaica in late June.  Blatche went with a crew of mostly NFL players that include Raheem Brock of the Seattle Seahawks, Shaun Smith of the Tennessee Titans and former Bengals running back Rudi Johnson.  It's his second trip back there.  Blatche has been working on donating money to build a field for a university in Kingston, and he also spoke at a bunch of youth camps.  The Wizards cheerleaders came with him on this trip. 
  
• Blatche also has an initiative through his foundation to plant trees in a garden in Florida.  He's been handing out special children's coloring books that have the kids color in scenes where Blatche recommends they eat right and such.  I'll give you some scenes from these later.
• The trainer he worked with this summer is Ed Downs, who used to do some work with the Heat.  He's worked with Jamal Mashburn and Alonzo Mourning in the past.
• In Michael Lee's interview with Blatche, he mentioned that he's trying to bring players down to work out this week.  Maybe that's still happening - I don't know.  He seemed to indicate to me, though, that was put on hold for a couple reasons.  One is that the Impact Basketball League begins Monday, and six Wizards are playing in that.  Also, my understanding is many of the players were having issues flying in to D.C. because of the heightened terrorism alert.  Nick Young was supposed to be at this event on Saturday, for example, but his plane was postponed.
• There was a lot of background noise at the beginning, so the transcript may not be exact for the first few answers.  The long ones at the end are definitely 100 percent accurate.

 Anyway, without further ado, here's the interview.

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When your team has the number 1 overall pick in the NBA Draft, it is natural for that selection to receive the bulk of the media attention.  However, out of the Wizards three first round selections, the least is known about the team's second first round pick (17th overall), Kevin Seraphin.  This is partly due to Kevin playing internationally, but it is also because Kevin's first language is French - although he is rapidly learning English.

So with the hope of learning more about Kevin Seraphin, we enlisted the help of friend and colleague Jerome Knoepffler of BasketUSA.com.  I supplied Jerome with a series of questions and he interviewed Kevin Seraphin in his most comfortable language, French.  Below you will find both the questions and Kevin's responses.

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Ok, so today's practice had a lot of "meat" to it so it will broken up into parts. The first part, which I know you are all slavering for will address Gilbert Arenas, and the other part will JaVale McGee, Nick Young and some of the notes that I took during a very long practice session at the Verizon Center.

So ... Gilbert Arenas.

The long and the short of it is that Gilbert Arenas was not injured and lied to Flip Saunders about his knee in order to get Nick Young some playing time last night. I can confirm that Arenas is definitely not injured, as he was practicing  at full speed today and was tasked with guarding Nick Young and John Wall. I also saw the entire team run wind sprints, and Arenas was one of the fastest guys down the floor each time. So I think we can put to rest any scuttlebutt about Arenas being actually injured.

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Earlier today, Jerome Knoepffler published an interview with Kevin Seraphin for the French-language basketball site, USA Basketball Basket USA.  With the help of machine translation, I am bringing you the key pieces of his interview.  Feel free to translate and read the full Knoepffler interview of Seraphin for yourself.  (Note: I am staying away from direct quotes based on the imperfect nature of machine translation.)

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Mike Harris has been around the block.  After a stellar career at Rice University, Harris has played in the NBA (briefly, for the Houston Rockets in 2008 and again this season), Kuwait, Ukraine, China, Indonesia and, of course, the NBA Developmental League.  Prior to being called up, Harris was averaged over 26 points a game for the Rio Grande Valley Vipers, dominating the D-League.

I know all that because I looked it up on the Internet.  But if you hadn't looked all that up, you could still tell that Harris has been around the block from the expressions on his face.  He's soft-spoken, trailing off in his answers at times, but you can tell he's forever grateful that he's finally received another opportunity to make it on the NBA level.  The shy smiles, the long answers and his facial expressions give that away.  

He admitted that, had he not gotten this opportunity, he probably would have gone back overseas.  Instead, he's here as the Wizards' first D-League callup since I've started blogging. 

After last night's game, I, along with a couple other bloggers, talked to Harris about his reaction to being called up, his life overseas and in the D-League and his impressions of the city, team and organization after just a few days.  Below the jump is a transcript of that interview:

Note: This was also posted on Ridiculous Upside.

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Few players in the league understand Gilbert Arenas like Knicks guard Larry Hughes.  Hughes and Arenas were best buddies as members of the Wizards before Hughes signed with Cleveland, and Hughes still talks to Arenas regularly.  In fact, Hughes is wearing #0 this year since he got to New York in honor of Arenas (before you ask, this was a decision he made at the beginning of the season, not after Arenas' incident with Javaris Crittenton.

Before tonight's game, Hughes held court with a number of writers (both DC and New York) and talked about his friend Arenas.  A transcript of that interview follows below the jump:

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After most of the scrum left Flip Saunders, I was able to get a couple quick questions in with him one-on-one about the roles of his assistant coaches and how his staff charts different plays.  A transcript is below the jump.

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Long time readers are well aware of my mancrush for Brendan Haywood's game.  He's the perfect Moneyball player; a guy who doesn't put up great counting stats, but does the little things to help his team win.  Defending shots.  Hedging pick and rolls even though it's not the best way to use his length.  Defending top post options one on one.  Making the box out to allow someone else to grab the rebound.  Working on his free throw shooting extensively when it was costing him points.  It was needless for Eddie Jordan to pick on Haywood.  Haywood may have been a bit of a whiner earlier in his career, but did a lot of the little things to help teams win.  You need guys like that, particularly when your core is all offense-first players. 

Haywood was sitting courtside for yesterday's Timberwolves-Wizards Summer League game and I chatted with him for a few minutes about his offseason, the differences he's noticed between Flip Saunders and Eddie Jordan and (mostly) the progression of JaVale McGee.  Unfortunately, my recorder didn't pick up a lot of the direct quotes because of the noise, so I'll try to summarize our discussion below. 

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