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Eastern Conference Stretch Run Battle Between Wizards And Hawks
Eastern Conference Stretch Run Battle Between Wizards And HawksThe NBA’s marketing slogan of ‘where amazing happens’ could be put to the test in this matchup between teams with little to play for in the final games of the regular season. The Atlanta Hawks are going to the playoffs, but have the #5 position locked down—they can’t catch 4th place Orlando but 6th place New York can’t run them down either. The Washington Wizards finally unloaded locker room cancer Gilbert Arenas but that hasn’t helped the team on the floor where they’ve been one of the league’s worst. John Wall is an exciting young talent, but he’s a long way from being able to provide the leadership that this team so desperately needs.


More so than perhaps any other professional sport, the trick to handicapping NBA basketball is understanding the impact of scheduling, fatigue and motivation on the teams involved. Hockey players go hard every night, baseball by definition is a long grind in which teams don’t experience the same emotional ‘ups and downs’, and NFL football has a short season. NBA basketball is therefore unique in its length and tendency for ‘ebb and flow’ in terms of performance. In the right situation, a ‘doormat’ may be a good play while in the wrong spot the best teams in the league are ‘go againsts’.

That concept makes this a very difficult game to handicap. To put it bluntly, these are a couple of the biggest ‘head case’ teams in the NBA. The Wizards’ rookie phenom Wall is a good kid and a superstar of the future but, again, has yet to earn the ‘juice’ to lead the team on the floor and in the locker room. Of course the Wizards’ psychological makeup looks like Bill Russell’s Boston Celtics by comparison to the Atlanta Hawks. The Hawks have a ton of talent and when they come to play can compete with any team in the league. Unfortunately there are countless nights they look like they could really care less about the outcome of the game.

Washington has also had a number of injuries this season, though Wall has avoided any significant loss of playing time and has done a very nice job not hitting ‘the wall’ that all rookies seem to run up against. The Wizards have had Wall playing the point since day one which might pay off big in the long run but now is a liability in many ways. He’s got all the talent in the world, but he’s still a 20 year old kid with one year of college experience trying to run the offense of an NBA team.

Statistically speaking, this is a game the Hawks’ should win and Wall’s sometime careless playmaking in theory plays right into Atlanta’s strengths. We just can’t get past the negligible motivation the Hawks have at this point—and particularly in light of how poorly they’ve played down the stretch when they could have improved their playoff seeding. Wizards are a respectable 18-21 at home and we’ll look for them to pull the outright upset here.



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