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Mike Wise: "They cannot win without injured Arenas forever, and they and their teammates aren't going to fill the building up without a showman like Gil the Thrill consistently in the near future. Make no mistake, the game sold out because of who was in town -- not who plays here."
Michael Lee: Reason for hope from yesterday's game.
Highest Plus/Minus: Andray Blatche and Oleksiy Pecherov (+10)
Lowest Plus/Minus: Caron Butler (-25)
I'm not even sure I know what to say after a game like that but I'll give it a shot. Kobe Bryant single-handedly won the game in about six and a half minutes. In that short time span he scored 10 points and got Stevenson to commit 3 fouls. As bad as it sounds, I don't really know if DeShawn could've done anything differently, the effort was there but Kobe was hitting everything in sight. Once he took out the best defender the game was basically in hand, he played around with Nick Young and a rusty Caron for a while and then he just let the Triangle do its work. As Prada noted, the Wizards have had problems with guarding set offenses all year long, so even once Kobe chose to ease off on the scoring binge (He could've gone for 50 easily), the offense didn't miss a beat.
When you have Kobe going off like he did and you group it with Caron's rust from the hip injury and Brendan's rust from...whatever made him rusty, it gives you all the ingredients for a blowout. Thankfully, the bench had a good 4th quarter and they managed to do some cosmetic work on the final score, but that's about the only positive that can be taken from today's game. This is just one of those games that you just have to forget even happened. There's not really anything that can be taken from it, so just move ahead and get ready for Philly.
Finally out of curiosity, can someone explain why the Lakers were wearing their purple jerseys yesterday? I thought the Lakers wore yellow for their home games.