John Wall: Cavs-Wizards is the biggest regular-season game of my career
The Washington Wizards have been on fire of late, winning seven straight and 11 of 12 to rocket up the Eastern Conference standings. Over the last three weeks, only one team (the league-leading Golden State Warriors) has boasted a more explosive offense than Scott Brooks’ Wizards, and only three (the likewise surging Miami Heat, the Dubs and the forever crushing San Antonio Spurs) have fielded a stingier defense.
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After a frustrating and postseason-free 2015-16 campaign, and a false start to this year that saw Washington open up 2-8 and stay under .500 through Christmas, the Wizards have hit their stride, vaulting themselves into the group of teams in the East’s second tier hoping to dethrone LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers. They’ll get their chance to measure up against the defending NBA champions on Monday, in a nationally televised matchup that All-Star point guard John Wall — whose tremendous recent play has earned him consideration as the conference’s best non-LeBron player — views as a gigantic test of his squad’s mettle.
From Candace Buckner of the Washington Post:
Since Washington, on a seven-game winning streak, desires to play meaningful games in the postseason, there should be no better test than competing against Cleveland on the Monday night featured game on TNT.
“I’ve been in some big (regular season) games before,” Wall said Saturday night after the 105-91 win over the New Orleans Pelicans, “but I don’t think one is bigger than this one.” […]
The Cavaliers are “a team that’s been playing okay, but they’re the defending champs,” Wall said. “We know which team we have to chase in the East. We’ve got a great home streak going on … It’s going to be a packed crowd. A lot of people here. It’s on TV. It’s going to be an important game for us.”
On one hand, pegging an early February game as the most important one of a seven-year career sounds a little off. On the other … I mean, consider the context of Wall’s career to date.
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Drafted with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2010 NBA draft, Wall didn’t see the bright side of .500 until Feb. 3, 2014. You could argue that he didn’t really have a “big game” at the NBA level until that April, when the Wiz clinched their first playoff berth since 2008. (The next year, they weren’t even playing when they clinched.)
From a national-profile perspective, maybe the Christmas Day 2014 matchup with the New York Knicks rates, but dismantling a galactically bad Knicks team 30 games into a season at noon on a Thursday only moves the needle so much. There were those “KD2DC” meetings with the Oklahoma City Thunder, but the extent to which those were “Big Games” had precious little to do with what was actually happening on the court on those particular nights, and national TV showcases have otherwise been few and far between for Wall and the Wizards in recent years.
Since Wall came to D.C., this is the latest in a season that the Wizards have been comfortably over .500, within hailing distance of the top seed (the 2014-15 squad was 10 games back of the on-fire Atlanta Hawks by Feb. 5) and with a chance to show the world that they really might be playing for something more than a coin-flip shot at the second round of the playoffs. No wonder he feels like it’s the biggest pre-April game he’s played in since he was at Kentucky.
And no wonder Wall’s eager for the test. The first time Cleveland and Washington locked horns this season, the Cavs breezed to a 105-94 win at Verizon Center behind 27 points, 10 rebounds and five assists from James, and a game-high 29 points and six dimes from Kyrie Irving, Wall’s opposite number, who will start this month’s 2017 NBA All-Star Game in the Eastern Conference backcourt while Wall comes off the bench with the reserves. A lot has changed since that game, though.
For one thing, Washington didn’t have Bradley Beal that night, as he sat out to rest a tight hamstring. He came back six nights later and has been damn near lights out since, averaging just under 23 points, four assists, three rebounds and a steal in nearly 35 minutes per game while shooting 48.1 percent from the field and 40 percent from 3-point range on more than seven attempts a night.
“We’re climbing in the rankings and we’re going to keep climbing. They’re a great team. They’re a targeted team with a big red X on their back and we’re coming after them too,” Beal told Buckner. “We’re excited. We’re amped up about it. I’m definitely excited because I didn’t play the first game, so I’m looking forward to it.”
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Veteran Marcus Thornton started in Beal’s stead that night, playing 21 decidedly nondescript minutes as part of a two-month run where he profiled as one of the worst rotation players in the NBA, a flashing neon sign highlighting the fact that the Wizards had one of the worst benches in the league. He hasn’t gotten into a game in more than a month, as Brooks has tightened up his rotation to go eight-deep most nights — nine when he feels like giving European vet/NBA rookie Tomas Satoransky a look — and leaned on young swingman Kelly Oubre Jr. to bring energy, scoring and shooting as his primary wing off the pine.
Shortening the bench has meant relying much more heavily on the starters. The lineup of Wall, Beal, ascendant forward Otto Porter Jr. and veteran big men Markieff Morris and Marcin Gortat stands as the NBA’s most-used five-man unit for the season as a whole, and has played 103 more minutes than the next-most-used lineup since Jan. 1.
So far, though, the first five have proven equal to the task of carrying the team. Only the similarly top-heavy Wolves have gotten fewer points per game from their bench than Washington, but the Wizards’ starters have dominated opponents by nearly 11 points per 100 possessions this season — only Golden State has boasted a better efficiency differential over the course of the full season — and that’s gone up to 13.2 points-per-100 in 2017, neck-and-neck line with the defending champs’ starting five.
The Wizards enter Monday having won 17 straight in their gym, and this time, the Cavs will be the ones without their starting shooting guard, as J.R. Smith continues to work his way back from thumb surgery. This time, Cleveland is the team dealing with some adversity, having lost seven of its last 13 games, with LeBron waging wars of words with his front office and certain televised critics, and looking for help in pretty strange places.
And this time, rather than entering the game off the high of being the last NBA team to visit the White House under President Barack Obama, they’ll just be coming to play another game, while the Wiz are as geeked up as they’ve been since Wall got booped.
Basically, Monday night’s game is this scene from “Street Fighter: The Movie,” and John Wall is Ming-Na Wen as Chun-Li, and the Cavs are Raul Julia as M. Bison. How meaningful something looks all depends on where you’re standing; for Cleveland, this is little more than a chance to get a third straight win for the first time in a month, but for Washington, and for Wall, it’s a chance to prove they belong.
“One thing I’ve learned, you don’t get respect or notice unless you’re winning in this league,” Wall told ESPN.com’s Brian Windhorst. For the most part, that means winning in the playoffs. But for now, and for these Wizards, beating the defending champs on national TV would be a hell of a start.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
