The Washington Wizards have not been a very good basketball team for the majority of this season, as they were a season-high 15 games under .500 on April 5th. Flash forward a little over three weeks later, they are now only six games under, as they’ve won 11 of their last 13 games.
“We had a bad season, but if we finish strong and make the playoffs, people are going to remember the end of the season,” Alex Len said.
Because of their recent winning ways, they were able to earn a nationally televised home game against the Los Angeles Lakers on ESPN.
“We earned that with what we’ve done,” head coach Scott Brooks said. “We’ve got two really high high-level players, but our other guys are coming along.”
Russell Westbrook, who has put up triple-doubles in eight of those wins prior to Wednesday night’s 116-107 win over the Lakers, finished with yet another one, finishing with 18 points, 18 rebounds and 14 assists.
“There is not a teammate, a coach, anybody that can say I’m a bad teammate, bad guy, bad person,” Westbrook said. “I am a person that wants to see others do well and that’s simply it. I wanna see my teammates do well. I wanna see coaches do well. I wanna see everybody do well.”
Westbrook has shown continued belief in his teammates throughout the course of the entire season for the Wizards, and that’s a big reason why they’ve been able to turn their season around at the right time.
Aside from Bradley Beal‘s game-high 28 points, multiple other Wizards players got into the act. Len, who Brooks thought won them the game with his minutes, contributed 18 points, nine rebounds and two blocks. Rui Hachimura and Ish Smith, who both finished with a nice dunk in this one, both chipped in with 12 points apiece.
The Wizards currently hold a two-game lead for 10th place in the Eastern Conference, which would earn them a spot in the play-in tournament. Their schedule the rest of the way contains many winnable games, so if they make good with that opportunity, then we may even be able to see them sneak into the 8th seed in the East by season’s end.
