Wow! It's A Winning Streak!

Wizards with John Wall > Wizards without John Wall. 8-0 in his last eight games.

After winning only four games in their first 32 tries this season, the Wizards have managed to win in each of their past three tries and have their first winning streak of the season. This winning streak is legitimate. It's not like last year's season ending six game winning streak against teams resting their starters for the playoffs and the hapless Charlotte Bobcats. This streak is against good competition. OK, maybe not Monday night's win against the Orlando Magic but when you own the worst record in the league, every team is good competition from a certain point of view. The result of the last three games is the Wizards' longest in season winning streak since April of 2011. It certainly feels better than losing.

I guess I'd like to say I saw this coming but I didn't exactly. Not in these three games even though things didn't really look as bad as the win-loss record suggested. Despite having a 7-28 record, the Wizards have been competitive in most games. 19 of our 28 losses have been by single digits. Five of our 35 games went to either single or double overtime. Unfortunately, all those overtime games were losses, including a game where we led Brooklyn by eight at home in overtime with less than 90 seconds to go. This past week, John Wall finally returned to the lineup against Atlanta and Nenê had recently moved into the starting lineup. Even with all those positive signs, there was still the fact that we had just failed to finish a number of games we could have won and even though we had a full complement of players for practice for a day or two, injuries to Cartier Martin and leading scorer Jordan Crawford seemed to balance what could have been seen as a glass half full situation.

Nene > Josh Smith last Saturday night.

We had already come close to beating Atlanta a couple of times this season and had notched a win against the Orlando Magic so the notion of being able to topple one of those two teams in the current three game stretch wasn't completely implausible. But beating the defending Western Conference Champion and pretty-much-best-team-in-the-league Oklahoma City Thunder seemed very improbable. Add the news that we had only nine healthy players, two of whom were playing for the first time in several weeks, and it seemed downright hilarious that we even could remain competitive. But our guys came out strong, shared the ball and competed, just like they did against the defending NBA Champion Miami Heat the month before. And at the end of regulation, after a fortunate bounce off an ill-advised A. J. Price shot got us the ball back, Bradley Beal managed to hit the game winner with 0.3 seconds on the clock to send us home winners and make us two for two in games against last season's NBA finalists.

After the euphoria of the big win over the Thunder and a season long four whole days off, the Atlanta Hawks arrived in town for the final game of four against the Wizards (the first three all Hawks wins). Our team was buoyed by the return of franchise player John Wall in that game but how he fared in his first game back was better than I expected. John looked both sharp and rusty: he was clearly faster than most guys on the court despite an almost three month absence from game play but his jumper showed signs of getting back into the groove. We seemed to be ahead almost the entire game. The lead ebbed and flowed from about three points to nine points behind a good team effort and a domination of Hawks' star Josh Smith by Nenê. Nenê is just obviously way smarter than Smith and he killed him on the offensive and defensive ends. The result was our first double digit victory of the year. Oh, and I continued to chip away at my Wizards 15 minutes of fame with about a two second appearance on TV. Adding that appearance to my stints in Las Vegas and Indiana I think gets me up to about a minute and half.

And then Monday night the struggling Orlando Magic came to town. After a surprising start to the season following the blockbuster Dwight Howard trade, the Magic have fallen back to Earth hard. Our team jumped on the Magic early, riding a spectacular first half from Emeka Okafor (I know...who knew?) to a 19 point lead with a few minutes to go. But then the whole thing seemed to collapse. In a stunning turnover filled run, including a failed walking the dog attempt by John Wall (never seen that fail before by the way), Orlando cut the lead to six at the break. I was stunned for the entire halftime, wondering if we had blown our chance at three in a row. Turns out I didn't really have anything to worry about because we turned it on in the second half behind spectacular plays from Wall including an insane dribble misdirection that literally floored the Magic's Ish Smith and an alley oop to Bradley Beal for a vicious slam. Jan Vesely showed his best overall performance and the team rolled, winning going away by 29. We even had our first good garbage time of the year when forgotten man Chris Singleton closed out the game.

Now that was more like it! I'm thinking this is what I signed up for when I bought into owner Ted Leonsis' rebuilding plan. Now we just need to keep it up on the road, where we have managed only a single victory this year. The team left DC yesterday for what could be a brutal west coast swing, although I think there are a couple of winnable games in there.

Up tonight: the Sacramento Kings. Despite the 10 p.m. Eastern start, I think I'm staying up to watch it. Hopefully my hopes aren't too high.