The Wizards 25-57 record in the 2003-2004 season was poor enough to earn the team the number five pick in the 2004 draft. With the fifth pick, the team drafted Devin Harris out of the University of Wisconsin, but Harris never played for the Wizards. Instead, the team sent him along with Jerry Stackhouse and Christian Laettner to the Dallas Mavericks for reigning Sixth Man of the Year Antawn Jamison. It was the second major trade with the Mavericks in the last four years, but unlike the 2001 in-season trade which was essentially a salary dump, the acquisition of Jamison was designed to make the team substantially better. And it did.
That year, the combination of Jamison at the power forward spot with Gilbert Arenas and Larry Hughes in the backcourt were just spectacular. Arenas and Jamison were voted by the NBA coaches to the Eastern Conference All Star squad and Hughes might have joined them, had he not broken his wrist in the January 15 victory over the Phoenix Suns, a team at that time as hot as any other. After the season, Arenas was voted to the All-NBA Third Team and Hughes was voted to the All-NBA Defensive First Team but it was the team success, and not the individual honors, that made that season so special.
The team posted a 45-37 record, the best mark for the franchise since the 1978-1979 season, good for fifth in the Eastern Conference and a return trip to the playoffs for the first time since 1997. The team clinched their playoff berth on April 13 after a home victory against the Chicago Bulls and a loss the same night by the New Jersey Nets to the Indiana Pacers, which we watched on the scoreboard screen from our seats in Section 402 of the MCI Center after the Wizards took care of the Bulls. It would be the first of four consecutive playoff appearances, the longest streak since the Bullets made the postseason five years in a row from 1984 through 1988. Brendan Haywood, who had been my favorite player since his rookie year in 2001, and Jared Jeffries rounded out what would become a solid starting five. The bench on paper was a concern, with Juan Dixon, Jarvis Hayes, Etan Thomas and Michael Ruffin being the top reserves, but the team won. They beat the teams they were supposed to beat, posting a 26-9 record against teams that ended the season with losing records, and they were clutch in close games, going 20-10 in games decided by five points or less.
The first round playoff opponent that year was the Chicago Bulls, a team that had won two more games during the regular season than the Wizards. The Bulls took the first two games in Chicago before the Wizards evened it up at 2-2 with two victories at the MCI Center. The fifth game was tight and the Wizards would end up with the final possession of regulation in a game tied at 110. Then, with time winding down, Gilbert Arenas let fly a step back jumper over the outstretched arm of the Bulls' Kirk Heinrich with 0.3 seconds remaining. The shot hit the bottom of the net and the Wizards took the game and came home up three games to two. The photograph of that shot is awesome. I have a copy signed by Arenas and I pull it out and look at it sometimes when I'm longing for better times. I like to study the faces of the crowd; there is almost every emotion you can possibly experience at a sporting event on the faces of the Chicago fans. I'm sure their faces looked a lot different 0.3 seconds later. When Hinrich was traded to the Wizards before the 2010-2011 season, I thought about asking him to sign the photograph too, but I decided to not be that cruel.
The Wizards took game six and the series at home after being down big early, going ahead for good when Jared Jeffries stole the inbounds pass off the back of Chris Duhon and ran the length of the court for the slam. The crowd was going absolutely crazy; I can't wait for the now-Verizon Center to be like that again. In the second round of the playoffs, the team laid down and lost in four straight to the Dwayne Wade, Shaquille O'Neal and the rest of the Miami Heat, a team we had not beaten in seemingly forever. Despite the second round performance, the 2004-2005 season was memorable in so many ways and gave us something to build on and look forward to. The Arenas game five winner (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcajwfVHTYI) and Jeffries' steal in game six (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_seuj1YRJT4) are still fun to watch. I just hope those aren't the best moments I'll have as a Wizards fan.
In the 2005 offseason, the Cleveland Cavaliers decided Larry Hughes was the guy they needed to pair with LeBron James to make the team into a winner and offered him a five year, $70 million dollar deal. Ernie Grunfeld and the Wizards decided not to match. Good decision. Despite the team's success in the 2004-2005 season, Boogie had a history of nagging injuries like the broken wrist he sustained that year and $14 million a year was just too much to pay, something the Cavaliers would find out during the next two and a half seasons, before they elected to ship Larry to Chicago in a mid-season deal. To replace Larry, Grunfeld sent Kwame Brown along with Laron Profit to the Los Angeles Lakers for Caron Butler and Chucky Atkins in a deal that still defies common sense. Brown was almost a certified bust and Butler was an up and coming small forward in the last year of his rookie deal. I guess the Lakers felt it was worth taking a chance on Brown or maybe they knew that they wouldn't be able to retain Butler at the end of the season. Whatever the reason, the Wizards immediately inked Butler to a contract extension. Another good decision.
The 2005-2006 season was successful, but just a little bit less successful than the previous season. The team again made the playoffs, finishing the season with a record of 42-40, good for the fifth best record in the conference for the second year in a row. Individual success also continued: Gilbert Arenas was selected to the Eastern Conference All Star team and the All-NBA Third team for the second year in a row.
In the first round of the playoffs, the team drew Larry Hughes, LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers. The two teams split the first four games, each team winning once at home and once on the other's floor. In game five in Cleveland, the Cavaliers edged out the Wizards by a single point in overtime, meaning we had to hold home court in game six in Washington or be done for the season. Game six also went to overtime. Toward the end of the extra session, Gilbert Arenas got fouled and stepped to the free throw line for two shots which, if he had made both, would have given the Wizards a three point lead. Then the first notable incident between Lebron James and the Wizards franchise happened. Rather than allow Gilbert to shoot the free throws unimpeded, LeBron decided to step to the charity stripe with Gilbert and talk some trash, telling him that if he missed the two free throws, the series was over. It should be noted that this sort of act is now an automatic technical foul, but the officials in that game six decided what LeBron did would not draw an infraction of any sort. Of course, Gilbert missed them both and on the ensuing possession with a few seconds left, Damon Jones hit a jumper to seal the game for Cleveland and our season was over.
The Wizards re-loaded in the 2006 offseason, signing free agents DeShawn Stevenson and Darius Songaila. The team started slow in November, going 4-9, but caught fire in December and January, posting a 22-9 mark through those two months. But it wasn't just that they were winning; the team was hot and Gilbert Arenas for those two months was arguably the best player in the NBA. He scored a franchise record 60 points in an overtime game against the Lakers in LA on December 17 and followed that with a 56 point effort in another overtime game in Phoenix less than a week later. Both those games were big road wins for the team, which doesn't always happen when a superstar fills it up. Then the team came back to Washington and Gilbert continued to impress, this time with game winning buzzer beating shots against the Milwaukee Bucks on January 3rd and then again against the Utah Jazz in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day matinee. I remember watching the Milwaukee game from our seats in Section 109. Gilbert let that shot go and turned around and headed for the locker room before it hit the bottom of the net. He just knew it was going in. And two weeks later he knew the Jazz had no chance at the end of the game with the ball in his hands and he was right again. At the All Star break, the team had the best record in the conference and Eddie Jordan would be named the Eastern Conference All Star coach, where he was joined by Gilbert in his third consecutive All Star appearance and Caron Butler in his first.
Then the wheels came off. On January 30, Antawn Jamison had injured his knee, and it showed in the team's February performance. Jamison would return, but a month and a half later, Butler went down, also with a knee injury, only to return and then fracture his hand on April Fools' Day in Milwaukee. But the biggest blow came on April 4 in a home game against the Charlotte Bobcats. Late in the first quarter, Gerald Wallace of the Bobcats fell into Gilbert Arenas' leg; the way Wallace fell twisted Gilbert's leg in a way it was not supposed to bend and Gilbert tore the meniscus in his knee. He would never be the same player again.
The Wizards ended that season with a 2-8 record in the final ten games and limped into the playoffs without Arenas or Butler as the seventh seed in the Eastern Conference with a 41-41 overall record. The team again drew LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in the first round of the playoffs and this year went down in four straight. With a second playoff elimination in two years at the hands of the Cavaliers, Wizards fans were starting to really dislike both the Cavaliers and James, who often whined and cried his way through games and was routinely booed in Washington. I guess we were trendsetters in that regard. If there was a season in the last 12 years of being a Wizards season ticketholder that I could truly look back on with regret, it would be the 2006-2007 season. It all went wrong so fast.
Despite the 2006-2007 season collapse, the franchise still felt it had a winner in the Arenas-Butler-Jamison led team and made no major changes in the offseason. Arenas had major knee surgery to repair his torn meniscus and it appeared our Big Three were healthy going into the season and poised to take a run at an Eastern Conference championship. They weren't. Gilbert's knee wasn't right and the team shut him down after only eight games, with the team owning a 3-5 record. But the team gelled around Jamison and Butler, who both made return trips to the All Star game that year, and the team finished with a 43-39 record, an improvement of two games over the prior season.
For the third year in a row, the Wizards drew the Cleveland Cavaliers in the first round of the playoffs, this time as the four-five matchup with Cleveland owning the better record and home court advantage. The series was highly anticipated due to the two teams facing each other in the playoffs the prior two years, but DeShawn Stevenson amped up the rivalry a little after the Wizards March 13 victory over the Cavaliers at Verizon Center. In a post game interview, Stevenson called LeBron James "overrated" and when asked to respond a few days later, James said "With DeShawn Stevenson, it is kind of funny. It's almost like Jay-Z saying something bad about Soulja Boy. There's no comparison. Enough said."
The 2008 playoff series between the Wizards and Cavaliers seemingly featured drama of every sort. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd believe that the NBA fixed this series to allow the Cavaliers to win. Realistically, it's silly to think that the series was fixed; I mean, who would fix a first round playoff series? But there were just too many things that either the officials or the league did or didn't do to handicap our chances for victory so I allow myself to think that we were doomed to lose that series sometimes.
It started in a close game one. In that game, a seven point loss, the Wizards would have benefited from the couple of free throws and possession from LeBron James' flagrant foul elbow thrown to the head of Andray Blatche. The foul was in retaliation for an earlier foul on James after which he writhed on the court in agony for a few minutes in a way only LeBron James can. Only the elbow wasn't called, either as a flagrant foul or as a personal foul. It was missed entirely by the officials. The league quietly handed down a flagrant foul after the fact, not that it did us any good. We were down 1-0 but there was plenty of time to recover.
Game two was a blowout 30 point victory for the Cavaliers, the largest margin of victory in a playoff game in that franchise's history. The game turned in the decisive third period, when Brendan Haywood picked up a flagrant two foul for a shove on James, after which James told referee Danny Crawford that the Wizards were trying to hurt him. Apparently Crawford believed him because he threw Haywood out of the game and the Wizards just couldn't recover after that. 2-0. Now it looked like we were maybe headed for another sweep like the previous year.
Back at Verizon Center, the Wizards took game three by 36 and made it a 2-1 series in a game that featured Soulja Boy in the front row dressed in a DeShawn Stevenson jersey. That game may have been the most entertaining Wizards playoff game ever as Soulja Boy rapped and we serenaded James with chants of "o-ver-rated" and just relished the blowout. But the Cavaliers rebounded to win game four in a game which DeShawn Stevenson received a flagrant foul for knocking off LeBron's headband during the game and the NBA piled on with a $25,000 fine after the game for what they described as a "menacing gesture" made by D-Steve in the first quarter.
So the Cavaliers headed back to Cleveland up 3-1 with a chance to close out the series in the next game. But they couldn't. Caron Butler made sure of that when he hit the game winning layup with 3.9 seconds to give the Wizards a one point victory. It was back to DC for game six and a chance to even the series at three games each.
But then the league intervened again. In the first quarter of game five, LeBron James became entangled with Darius Songaila on the baseline and in the process of getting untangled, Darius' hand hit James' face. LeBron acted as if he had been cold-cocked, snapping his head back and drawing a technical foul, continuing a sequence of over reactions and flops that he had been engaged in for the entire series. A day passed before the NBA handed a one game suspension down to Songaila late in the morning of game six. Despite our efforts, the team lost and went down to the Cavaliers for the third straight year.
After the series, DeShawn Stevenson summed it up perfectly, declaring "It just shows you he gets any call he wants." Even Papa John's, a corporate sponsor of both the Wizards and Cavaliers, understood James' fake histrionics, handing out t-shirts at Verizon Center with the number "23" and "Crybaby" on the back. In the end (and it was unfortunately really the end), the Wizards had been beaten three straight by the Cavaliers. I'll never root for that franchise or LeBron for the way he beat us those three years.
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