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.

WAS @ GSW 12/18/09: PreThoughts

1) The Wizards enter tonight's game on the heels of a brutal six game losing streak during which their average margin of loss has been just 2.3 points. The Wiz are a dysfunctional team that doesn't really do anything well, but does many things middlingly or poorly, including defending and shooting threes. Want a cheap and lazy indication of how cosmically bad things are in Washington? It's been almost two years since the Wizards have been able to master the Magic.

2) Washington does, however, have size, and they know how to use it. They're paying Fabricio Oberto two million dollars just to hulk and glower from the bench in between hard fouls. Each Wizard starter has at least an inch on his corresponding Warrior.

3) Gilbert Arenas and Monta Ellis are curious casts of each other: generally inefficient but sublimely entertaining combo guards plucked from the second round by the Warriors. Arenas is a better passer, but Ellis offers better, though still not great, shot selection. I'm pegging the turnover/under for this game at 12.5. Get ready to get haggard.

4) Où êtes-vous allé, Morro? Every once in a while, when the sky gets dark and the birds fall silent, Morrow appears to me in a vision as a 38% three-point shooter; a fringe NBA player; a poor man's Eddie House (Eddy Flophouse?). I dismiss these thoughts after a nice tall glass of cucumber water and a hard look at the numbers, but there's no denying that this last week has been a rough one for The Other Anthony, and that tonight is a rich opportunity for him to get back in rhythm.

5) In spite of the Wizards' recent spate of close games, I don't see this one coming down to the wire. There's just too much volatility in each team, too much coequally awry, for any stable parity. Each team should make large runs on the strength of their complementary size advantages, but eventually things will precess out of control, probably precipitated by some combination of Warrior three-pointers and Washington foul trouble. This is a very big game for both teams on...national television? What?

Warriors Player to Watch: Anthony Randolph, who probably occupies this spot by default for the rest of the season, and who simply must be on the floor for over thirty minutes tonight, for his rebounding and his surprisingly excellent free throw shooting.

Wizards Player to Watch: Andray Blatche (yuck) has given us fits before, but Brendan Haywood is blocking shots and hitting the glass hard in a contract year, so he's got to be excited for tonight.