WAS @ GSW 12/18/09: PostThoughts

1) JEFF VAN GUNDY! Just a delightful announcer. Mark Jackson and Not Mike Breen were excellent, too.

2) GILBERT ARENAS! I still love the guy and I don't care who knows it. If someone's going to humiliate us in Oakland, it may as well be him.

3) STEPH CURRY! The guy he covered scored 45 (on 25 shots) and had 13 assists... you'd be hard-pressed to say he had an overall successful game. Still, Curry finally showed some real scoring aggression, and it was a welcome sight. This was easily his best offensive performance of the season. He will never be the ten-assists-a-night guy that some still dream of, but if he scores as skillfully and willingly as he did last night, he can be a big asset all the same. Loved the 26-footer. Loved it.

4) ANTHONY RANDOLPH! A cartoonishly Randolphian performance. Between the dribble on an inbound, the ugly first-half bricks, a couple freeze-tag-style failures on defense and a double-bounce pass to Corey Maggette's shoes, he had lowlights like you wouldn't believe. It would be hard to find a game by an NBA player, ever, with ten moments as bad as Randolph's ten worst moments last night. And yet: 15 points on 13 shots, nine rebounds, a block and a steal, and five assists out of his role as point center. Five turnovers takes the shine off of all of that a good bit; this was one of his weaker games lately. (In fact, this was the first game in almost a month in which he had more than one turnover.) But if you get 15, 9 and 5 from a guy on a bad night, you've got yourself somebody. Keep those minutes coming, extremely stupid basketball team!

5) COREY MAGGETTE! In his last four games, he has scored 91 points on 41 shots. He's posting the best rebound rate of his career. He's playing very hard on the defensive end. He's passing willingly, if not skillfully. Is his game pretty? No, but if you want pretty, go see "New Moon" or whatever the fuck... this is effective basketball. Corey Maggette is currently the best player on the Golden State Warriors. Keep reading that sentence until you understand it to be true.

6) VLADIMIR RADMANOVIC! He was just fine in his sixteen minutes. That wouldn't normally merit a guy the all-caps/italicized treatment, but he's had a rough go of things lately. Good job, Vlad.

7) Nobody else looked good. If Hunter had sunk one of his open jumpers, we might've seen more of him, and he may well have been useful later on... still, he didn't contribute much. CJ had one of his weirdly low-profile offensive games. Morrow is still spooked, and still scaring the bejeezus out of me. And Monta had the type of overwrought, high-turnover performance we've seen far too often lately. It doesn't help us in the slightest when he plays like this, and it'd be nice if somebody in the organization realized that.

8) Losing at home to a team that's dropped six straight is never going to make you feel all warm and fuzzy. Watching Caron Butler slice up CJ in the post wasn't pretty, and given the murderizin' Brendan Haywood was doing down low, I sure would've given Hunter another look or two. This was not what you'd call a "good" coaching performance. But I can't muster up much anger towards Don Nelson for last night's loss. Randolph and Maggette got heavy minutes, Vlad didn't, and though we were obviously undersized, we quite never reached that deepest circle of smallball hell... these are the sensible changes we've been looking for. And while asking a reed-thin 20-year-old spaz to play point center is a tall order, it did pay off in open shots for Curry. Sucks that we lost, but if you're small and you commit a lot of bloopers, a team like the Wizards is savvy enough to capitalize... coaching was not the main culprit here. We'll give the (much less) big man a one-night reprieve.