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Starting To Get Healthy

By Gregg Kanner | April 9th, 2008

If the Wizards can actually keep all of their players on the floor, we may have a very interesting playoffs to watch in a couple weeks.

Playing with a full deck for only the 2nd time in the past 4 months, the Wizards beat the Celtics at home to beat the NBA’s best team for the 3rd time this season. They won the season series 3-1 and it should give the team a lot of confidence if they end up facing the Celtics in the playoffs.

The Wizards are a different team with Gilbert Arenas involved. Anyone who says differently is nuts. This team rarely ran with Arenas hurt. Now, they are coming up with steals and scoring easier baskets which is so very important to a team that sometimes will settle for jump shots for long periods of time. They still slack off on defense and leave guys open, but the way they were able to answer Boston’s 2nd quarter run was impressive. Often this year, they would have blown that game, but with the role players now playing with more confidence, this team is showing just how deep it is. That’s actually something good that came out of the injuries.

Deshawn Stevenson’s long distance shooting is huge. Roger Mason can come off the bench with instant offense and Darius Songaila shrugged off a rough first half of the season to become a tough rebounder, defender and scorer. The Wizards need a ‘dirty work’ guy and he has done a good job at that in recent games. Now comes the consistency issue. If they can stay healthy for once, the final 4 games could be just what they need to get going. Hopefully the first round is another matchup with Cleveland. I think they have a legitimate shot to beat them this time as long as they have everyone in the lineup.

This is a huge weekend. A win over Detroit is definitely possible since they just lost big on back to back nights to the Knicks and 76ers and they don’t seem too interested in any games until the playoffs start. Then it’s the matchup against Philly that could decide the 5th or 6th seed. With Arenas probably only playing one of those two games, I say have him sit against Detroit so he can be there for the more important game against Philly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Les Bullez. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.