Stocking Stuffers

First of all, Happy New Year to everyone. Let's see if the new year does anything to cure the Wizards of this malaise they seem to have been in for this entire season. Spoiler alert: it likely won't. This will continue to go on for another month or more despite Markieff Morris' confident assertion that good things are coming and all will be well soon.

I took that last couple of weeks of 2017 off from this blog for some R&R and while I was (virtually) away, there were a handful of Wizards fan mini-events that happened around the holiday week that are worth probably discussing as a group but not necessarily worthy of their own posts. Yes, I'll touch on the continuing underperforming vs. teams with losing records but I'm pretty much glossing over that issue, much like the Wizards gloss over how to play hoops vs. inferior teams and then come up with excuses after those same losses. To tackle that issue in a blog post right will be too painful so I'm sort of skipping it. Let's go chronologically shall we?

Winter Solstice (December 21)

For the second straight year, the Wizards were good enough to host a holiday party / happy hour for season ticket holders in the Etihad Lounge on the floor level of Capital One Arena. Before you non-season ticket holders get too jealous, don't.

Yep, there were games and prizes and free holiday cocktails and free food. But the prizes were sort of left over surplus (I played trivia and came away with a shooting sleeve and a Wizards plastic bracelet; no idea what I do with those) and the grub didn't measure up to the usual Etihad Lounge fare which is typically pretty good. Notably bad were the fairly stale cupcakes with the wizard jumping over the crescent moon/basketball logo (maybe they were the same vintage as the now-retired logo?).

The couple of free holiday cocktails were a nice gesture but I could have done without the $11 price tag on the 16 oz. Budweisers. I'm complaining about something I didn't have to go to, I realize. This stuff's all part and parcel with the cost of tickets. Free or $5 beers would have been appreciated. Maybe next year?

Christmas Eve Eve Eve (December 22)

Just ten days after losing in Brooklyn to the miserable Nets, the Wizards made a return trip to New York to avenge their mid-December loss. Except that they didn't. Avenge it, that is. They were down 40 at one point in this game! 40!!!! To the Nets!!! Bradley Beal claimed after the game that teams were targeting the Wizards because the Wiz are an Eastern Conference contender or some such nonsense. You don't get down 40 to a team as bad as the Nets because of some onslaught of desire to topple one of the better teams in the league. The Wiz aren't serious and Beal's post-game narrative is a complete cop out. We need more locker room accountability.

But...I said I wasn't going to go into the Wizards' hopelessnesses against bottom feeders. Nope, what I want to talk about here is our hometown television coverage.

During each Wizards TV broadcast, announcers Steve Buckhantz and Kara Lawson highlight some plays during the game that become sponsored by NBC Sports Washington's advertising partners. These are ideal times for the folks that pay advertising dollars to the station to have their products mentioned alongside a Wizards highlight from the game. The issue I have here is that the highlights for the Honda Drive of the Game and the Campbell's Chunky Maxx Performer that night weren't of Wizards players doing good stuff but were instead of Nets players taking it to the hoop for a bucket (uncontested I might add).

What's up with that? I realize I'm picking about the most devoid of Wizards highlights game of the season but there were some highlights that were equal to Joe Harris (top photo of this post) or Spencer Dinwiddie (photo immediately above) scoring at will. I'm also not in favor of homer-ism to the max (or Maxx if you are Campbell's) but the TV station that covers the team ought to be able to have a policy of assigning these advertising moments to actual Wizards highlights, shouldn't they? I'm disappointed in NBC Sports Washington here.

By the way, is Marcin Gortat really pushing Otto Porter into Dinwiddie in the pic above? Or is it just a caught in the moment glitch? I mean he's shoving him with two hands, right?

Christmas Eve Eve

One night after the Wizards got drubbed by the lowly Nets, they headed home to take on the similarly bad Orlando Magic. After an embarrassing loss, the Wiz were up for this game and cruised to a 20 plus point victory. It was routine and it should have been.

The excitement I expected this game was the Wizards' unveiling of their fourth jersey or what Nike is referring to as the "City Edition". Based on the schedule on the Nike website (clip shown above), the jersey design, which was somehow leaked for every team on the NBA 2K18 videogame the previous week, was supposed to be released that night. Instead of getting a look at a maybe motivated but just equally as likely unmotivated Wizards team in their new kit, we got a look at the blue unis one more time (still missing the stripe that would make these threads killer). The conspiracy theory I started working on in my head about the players hating the City Edition turned out to be a fabrication. Turns out the "Jersey Dates Subject To Change" warning on the Nike site was true.

Christmas Day

About a month ago, I wrote a blog post summing up my thoughts on the first quarter of the season. One of my peeves about the first 20.5 games was the emergence of the Celtics as a legit Eastern Conference contender after turning over basically 3/4 of their roster while the Wizards stood pat / maintained consistency (depending on your point of view) and were struggling at a little better than .500.

So of course the underperforming Wizards went up to Boston on Christmas Day and knocked off the Celtics, the first time in more than three years (including four losses in the playoffs last year) that they have accomplished that in Beantown. Go figure. It was one of the finest performances in the season to date in a series of quality road wins. Surely this would be the turning point, right? Right? Right?

But that's not the important part of Christmas Day. I deliberately did not ask Santa for any Wizards stuff this year considering the state of play so far. I got one Wiz gift anyway and it's pretty much the best Wizards gift ever. Yep, it's a John Wall Funko Pop figurine. I love these things (we may have Jon Snow and Ghost figures at home already...OK, we do) so it's awesome to see the NBA partnering with Funko to get some of these made for fans like me. I love it. Not much more to say here other than he's not wearing the Nike uni. The Easter egg on the bottom of the shorts is intact. See here for more on that.

The Day After Boxing Day (December 27)

I'm  not very good at conspiracy theories. The day after a quiet (NBA-wise) Boxing Day saw the official release of the Nike City Edition jerseys. The Wizards' entry? A white on white offering sporting "The District of Columbia" where the "Washington" and "Wizards" appears on their other three jerseys.

It's not the worst thing in the world. Like a lot of folks out there on Twitter I'm not thrilled with the "of Columbia" part of the jersey but also agree with a lot (maybe the same lot) of folks who have made the point that people don't refer to D.C. as just "The District" much. It's generally in keeping with the theme of the Wizards' other jerseys (unlike some other team's City Editions) which I love. I'm not crazy about the marble-esque pattern on the sides of the jerseys but it's not going to keep me up at night.

I do LOVE the D.C. flag on the "belt buckle" of the shorts. This is one of the truly great flags in the world. If I ever get a tattoo (I know...I'm almost 50), 80% chance it's a variant of that flag. I think we got away with a good design here. I'm going to hate the Wiz wearing these things at home because deep down inside I believe teams should wear home unis with the team nickname on them, not the team city. But since Nike's blown that whole thing up with the abandonment of home / away threads, I'm going to let it go.

As an aside here, New Era (one of the NBA's official hat partners) has released a series of hats to mirror the City Edition unis. I hate the faux marble veining on the hat and I object to white hats in general (they show dirt although marbling will admittedly counter that) but I'm seriously thinking about one of these.

So that's my essay on the holiday season 2017, Wizards style. Back in action Wednesday against the Knicks. We have to win that one, don't we. A little more confidence at this point after the Bulls win.

Wizards Christmas Ornaments

A few years ago, in my quest to Wizards-ify every aspect of my life (a quest that continues today), I decided I'd try to pick up a few Wizards Christmas ornaments to hang on the family tree around the holidays. I thought this would be a pretty simple task. I'd just sign on to the NBA Store website and buy some. Turns out I was wrong. Unbeknownst to me when I thought of this idea was that they just don't make Wizards Christmas tree ornaments. Presumably because nobody wants to buy them.

Don't believe me? Sign on to the NBA Store website and type the word "ornament". When I did it earlier this month, it yielded 203 results. Want to festoon your tree with 16 different San Antonio Spurs ornaments? You can do that by going on a deluxe online shopping spree. How about satisfying your lifelong dream to own a Dwyane Wade elf ornament or a Los Angeles Lakers s'mores ornament or a Golden State Warriors soda cooler ornament? Yep they got all those on the NBA Store site too. Brookyn Nets star ornament? Philadelphia 76ers LED light up ball ornament? Boston Celtics stadium chair ornament? Absolutely, for sure and yes! But a single Washington Wizards ornament? No. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

But where there's a will, there's a way. And thank God for eBay. One man's trash is another man's treasure. And oh boy did I get some treasure.

The simple glass ball ornaments were pretty easy to find. I picked up a garish original Wizards bronze blue and black vintage motif ball (God that logo looks terrible now) and the rebranded version with the oh-so-sophisticated red, white and blue color scheme on the slightly rotated wizard that fools nobody into thinking it was an actual rebrand. I got both of those for less than $15 combined including shipping. You can go ahead and say that's a total waste of less than $15. I don't care. I like these things.

But my ornament quest required some deeper mining to find some real gold and that came from a company called The Memory Company, which has produced some pretty funky NBA ornaments over the last few years. I can't imagine there's ever been much of a market for these sorts of things in general but for sure I appreciate it because I can pick up some classic swag for very little. 

Last year I found a Santa Claus with that awful old blue color robe (instead of red...clever, right?).  I featured that ornament on my Christmas post last year, which I swear is not intended to be an actual thing but I've admittedly blogged Christmas week the last two Decembers before this year. At Santa's feet is an NBA basketball and he's holding a wreath with the old Wizards logo at the center behind some kind of plastic cover which has faded to yellow in a very non family heirloom way. 

This year I hit the daily double with The Memory Company and found a nutcracker ornament with the almost current Wizards logo on his hat. He's holding some kind of instrument ready to fire up the crowd I guess. Too bad we don't play this Christmas Day. This is about as non-Wizards an ornament as you can find. It actually looks like a traditional nutcracker ornament. You really have to squint to identify the branding.

I haven't asked my mom how she feels about this quartet of ornaments on her tree that is covered with decorations that in many ways mark our family's history. Maybe next year she'll make me move them to the back side of the tree like the metallic blue steamboat ornament that my grandma got us about 45 years ago.

Enjoy the NBA action this Christmas, Wizards fans. There's no pressure this year because we ain't playing. And I dare anyone to top my collection of Wizards ornaments. Happy holidays and go Wizards!!!

Merry Wizards-less Christmas!

When the NBA schedule was released this past August, it seemed like an affront to human decency that the Washington Wizards weren't granted a Christmas Day game. After all, the team got a spot on December 25 last year and is coming off two consecutive seasons in the second round of the NBA playoffs, one of only two such teams (along with the Los Angeles Clippers, of all teams) to make it past the first round each of the last two years. Surely this was a team on the rise and the NBA featuring the team on a national holiday would boost support among fans not already committed to the team (read: fair weather fans). Guess not!

To make matters worse for the Wizards faithful, three teams that didn't even make it to the postseason last year (the Miami Heat, the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Los Angeles Lakers) will appear on television tomorrow. What the heck is going on over at the NBA's front office up there in New York. Why the total disrespect for the Wizards? I get that the Thunder and Heat expect to return to postseason play this year with the return of injured players from last year (Chris Bosh for Miami and Kevin Durant for OKC), but the LAKERS?!?!?! This year's incarnation of the Lakers may actually end up doing worse than last year's historically bad Lakers team. The whole thing seemed like an outrage.

Well, as it turns out, two months into the regular season Wizards fans don't really have that much to be upset about. At least not in terms of not playing on Christmas, anyway. The league is not showing disrespect to the Wizards because I'm not sure they've shown they deserve any respect this year. Instead of the ascendancy of the Wiz to the top of the Southeast Division and one of the top spots in the Eastern Conference, pretty much the exact opposite has happened. The Wiz are mired in last place in the division (Miami, Atlanta, Charlotte and Orlando are battling it out for the top spot) and waaaaay down in the Conference behind a series of injuries, lackadaisical play and an abrupt backpedal on their commitment to defense. They aren't even in the playoff picture right now. It's a little bit of a disaster.

Now, lest you think I'm giving the league some credit for being right about the Wizards not being all that good through the season's first 30 games or so, think again. This is really all an accident. Sure the league put the Lakers on TV tomorrow because of Kobe Bryant and not how good they expected the team he's on to be, but I'm sure they expected the Houston Rockets to build on their Western Conference Finals appearance last season and tear up the league to start the 2015-2016 season. I'm also confident they wanted to feature a New Orleans Pelicans team on the rise fresh off their first postseason appearance as a re-named franchise behind future best player in the league Anthony Davis. Wrong on both counts. The Pels are the second worst team in the West (with a worse record even than the underperforming Wizards) and the Rockets launch this season didn't go as planned for the team or already departed head coach Kevin McHale. This stuff's all a crap shoot. 

I'm still annoyed about the Wizards not playing today, but I'm laughing at the league about the Rockets, Pelicans and of course the Lakers. I won't be glued to the screen tomorrow. I'll be able to help my mom make Christmas dinner and I won't be forced to look at those ugly ugly Christmas Day unis the league concocted this year. Although I'm still confused as to why there's a Wizards one (below) even though we aren't playing. This league will make anything as long as it stands a chance of selling and making a couple of bucks, I guess.

But I will be thankful that in an ironic twist, the league is giving LeBron James what he asked for two seasons ago: the Miami Heat playing at home on Christmas. Yep, a couple of years ago, LeBron complained about the Heat having to play on the road on December 25. It was LeBron's fourth (and as it turned out final) year in Miami and he'd played three of the four seasons there on the road on Christmas Day and he didn't feel that was right for a team that had made it to the NBA Finals the previous three years. 

So last year, the league made sure the Heat stayed home for the holidays. To make it even better, they were even so good as to make sure LeBron was in Miami when they sent his Cavaliers team down there that day. And in the continued spirit of giving, the NBA has let the Heat stay in south Florida this year for what has become an annual holiday game for that team. And LeBron, well he's on the road again. After all, who wants to be in Cleveland on Christmas. Be careful what you wish for. The Miami players are thanking you, I'm sure.

Merry Christmas, Wizards fans. The new year better bring better things for this team. Brooklyn up next on Boxing Day. Back home at VC for the Clips on Monday.

Merry Christmas

It's December 25, 2014 and for the first time since 2008, the Washington Wizards are playing a game on Christmas Day. This is kind of a big deal. It's only the second time in the 15 years I have been a Wizards season ticket holder that the team has had a game scheduled on Santa day, which is typically reserved for the best or most popular teams in the league. And I can attest based on the spotty attendance at Verizon Center during the first two months of the season that the Wizards are more "best" than they are "popular" right now.

The last time I watched the Wizards play on this day definitely made Christmas worse rather than better. The game was in Cleveland against the hated Cleveland Cavaliers who had just eliminated the Wizards from the playoffs during the previous three seasons. The two teams loathed each other. It was perhaps the fiercest rivalry in the NBA at that time and the 2008-2009 season was supposed to be a year in which both teams contended for the NBA crown or at least the Eastern Conference title.

Unfortunately, things never seem to work out for the Wizards the way we fans think they are destined to. Our hope that year was that Gilbert Arenas would return from his major knee injury in the spring of 2007 at full strength after being limited to a handful of games the previous season and that his return, along with a mix of veterans and younger draft picks would yield a Wizards squad better than the team which had made the playoffs the prior four years. It didn't work out that way. Gilbert, as it turned out, was no longer Agent Zero and we lost Brendan Haywood, one of the only Wizards inclined to play any defense, during the preseason for the entire year. On Christmas morning, the Wizards were 4-22. The Cavaliers were 24-4.

That year the Wizards put up a pretty good fight after getting behind early, but ultimately fell to the Cavs 93-89. I'm hoping this year's game, set for a noon tip-off against the mostly hapless New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden, will go the same way our last Christmas game went, with the team with the better record prevailing once again. The Wizards are prone to lapses in concentration and this is an ideal trap game early in the day against a seemingly easy opponent. Just for the record, the Cavaliers didn't win the Eastern Conference in 2009 either. The Orlando Magic knocked them off in the Conference Finals.

Regardless of the outcome of the game, this Christmas is incredibly special for our family because my niece is two and half or so years old and at this point in her life understands what presents are. She may not understand why they are here or how they got here but she knows there may be something new and exciting beneath the brightly colored wrapping paper that might distract her for a few minutes, an hour or so, or the better part of the next year or two. We'll see how that goes when she gets here in a couple of hours and the tearing open of presents begins, likely accompanied by a lot of shrieking and looks of wonderment. This will likely outweigh any sort of joy from a Wizards victory. Those are not words I write lightly.

For my part, I'm hoping Santa brings me some Wizards loot and a Wizards victory to help my turkey and everything else I plan to eat as part of my minimum three platefuls of food go down a little smoother. I'm making my family wait about a half an hour longer to eat today and I appreciate that just as much as I appreciate the NBA scheduling this as a road game; I know there's no way my mom lets me go to a game on Christmas Day. For everyone else that reads this, including the dozen or so people who read this blog semi-regularly, I hope the rest of Wizards fans out there have a happy Christmas day. Go Wizards!