The Best Laid Plans

Flying over the snow covered fields somewhere over Minnesota.

During the 2008-2009 NBA season, I managed to make it to every home game the Wizards played. It was the first and only time I have been at Verizon Center for all 41 home games and at the end of the season that year I felt like I had done my part as a fan to do right by the team. It would have been nice if the team had reciprocated and did its part to win more than they lost but that didn’t happen. For my dedicated fan efforts that year, I was rewarded with a team that finished with only 19 wins against 63 losses, tying the fewest wins in a season the team has had since I have been a season ticket holder in 2000.

Every year since then (and some before then), I have made perfect attendance a goal for the season and each year I have every intention of following through on that promise. I usually come awfully close. Last year I missed two games: one so I could spend the Christmas holiday with my family and one at end of the year against the Miami Heat when the allure of selling our tickets to make a couple of bucks overwhelmed the need to see part of what ended up being a season ending six game Wizards losing streak. I came super close two years ago, making it to the first 40 before skipping the final game for something that I deemed more important at the time. Stupid life…always getting in the way.

This year looked to be a slam dunk (pun intended). The Wizards were essentially on vacation courtesy of the NBA’s schedule makers around the Christmas holiday, which is the one true annual threat to me making it to every game. All I had to seemingly do was avoid getting deathly ill on the day of a home game and I’d fulfill my goal. I’m generally a pretty healthy guy plus I’d go downtown if I were a little under the weather in a second to watch hoops. The only real risk I saw came on December 14 when I squeezed in a quick trip to Iceland between home games that month. Eight hours before tipoff against the Clippers, I was sitting in the Reykjavik airport but I did manage to make it to Verizon Center for the end of the third quarter to watch the final stanza of the thumping the Clips gave us that night.

Target Center, home of the Minnesota Timberwolves.

But despite my best efforts and the sure thing it seemed, I am not going to make it to every home game this year. I managed to let my employer send me to Minneapolis yesterday and so I missed tonight’s Wizards-Celtics game that saw the Wizards fail to crack the .500 barrier for the fourth time this year at home against a Celtics team without their two starting guards and their top backcourt reserve. Pathetic. This was the Wizards’ fourth try at a winning record this season and they still couldn't get over the hump; the previous three tries ended in home losses to Milwaukee (not a typo), Dallas and Detroit. The next seven games feature contests against five of the top six teams in the Western Conference. I have a feeling we’re not going to get over .500 anytime soon.

 

I don’t mind traveling to Minnesota once in a while, although I’d rather not do it January (the temperature was minus 11 when I landed yesterday morning) and if I can manage to get sent here during a Timberwolves homestand, I’d love to take in another game at the Target Center. My company and the Wolves’ road schedule did me no favors this time.

 

But despite being far from home, I thought I had found a silver lining in the "this week only" free trial of NBA League Pass which allowed me to hunker down against the cold in my hotel room and watch the Wizards’ game tonight on my laptop. If only the Wizards could have taken this game seriously from the start instead of spotting the Cs an 18 point lead in the first half. I love technology, but maybe not tonight when the Wizards are losing to a clearly inferior team. Back in D.C. Thursday. Too bad the Wiz are on the road.

Doubletree Hotel Room 506, Minneapolis, MN

Traveling

Minneapolis: Camera phones in 2007 just weren't what they are today.

When the television broadcast schedule was announced for the 2006-2007 NBA season, it appeared to me that I would have to miss the February 25, 2007 game at Minnesota because it just didn't look like it would be on TV. It was a Sunday afternoon game and ABC, who owned the national TV contract with the NBA that year, had the broadcast rights. That usually works out fine because the game would be shown on national TV, but this particular Sunday, ABC had the rights to several other games in that same time slot and would only be showing one based on the perceived popularity of the teams playing. Reviewing the schedule that day, it didn't look to me that the Wizards-Timberwolves game would be the one shown by ABC. When the NBA's national TV network owns the rights to a game, they prohibit the same game being shown on local cable television to eliminate competition. So on Sunday, February 25, our local cable network, Comcast SportsNet, had no plans to show the game.

Instead of resigning myself to missing the game, I decided to go to the game in person. I looked for airline tickets and it appeared we could leave Washington in the morning, see the game, and fly back the same day. My friend Mike checked for tickets on Ticketmaster and incredibly found two tickets in the second row at center court. Sold! We were going to Minnesota for the day to see the Wizards.

Sunday morning, February 25, came and it was snowing. Our flight out of National Airport was delayed. That was ok, we had some time for our connection in Chicago. As long as the flight wasn't too late, we'd be alright. And we were. We landed in Minnesota about an hour before tip-off, got off the plane with no luggage (we were just going for the day, after all), took a cab directly to the Target Center in downtown Minneapolis and walked to our second row seats wearing our gold Arenas and Butler road jerseys. Other than the loss, the game was great. We had great seats, had beverage service because we were essentially courtside, and the game was close. The Target Center is dark and quiet and the fact that the crowd is almost completely racially homogenous is strangely unnerving but everything went according to plan. After the game, we hopped in a cab back to the airport for our trip home. We would just make our flight and be back home in DC that night. Except that last part didn't happen.

After we left Washington, it had continued to snow and as it turned out, National Airport had closed. So had Dulles and BWI, so we were stuck in Minneapolis for the night and would have to miss work the next day. It was snowing in Minneapolis too; worse, in fact, than in DC, but they are equipped to deal with more than a few inches of snow. Washington  sometimes has difficulty with rain, let alone snow. I still struggle with this concept after nine years in upstate New York, by the way, but it is what it is. Fortunately, we were able to get a hotel downtown and found a bar with a friendly bartender and talked for a few hours about what it was like living in Minnesota. The next morning, we got up, put on the same clothes we had worn the previous day and went to the airport. We got lucky and managed to get a direct flight home, albeit to a different airport than we had flown out of. My trip home that day involved light rail from downtown Minneapolis to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport; a flight from Minneapolis to Dulles airport in northern Virginia; a bus from Dulles to the West Falls Church metro station; a metro ride to National Airport; and finally a trip home from National in my car. Still, it was worth the trip and we got home safe.

After that game in Minnesota, my dad said he recalled seeing an interview with Gilbert Arenas where Gilbert talked about the growing popularity of the Wizards and pointed to the fact that there were two fans in gold Wizards jerseys in the second row at the Target Center when the Wizards played the Timberwolves that year. I've never found that interview but it would be ironic if it were true.

Front row seat behind the Wizards bench in Atlanta. I LOVED these seats. The Wizards soonafter abandoned the gold names on the jerseys in favor of gold trimmed with white.

Despite the unplanned overnight stay, the missed day of work and the trip home, I was determined to take more Wizards road trips, perhaps even make it an annual event. I just resolved to make sure I didn't pick a game in a cold weather city in the dead of winter. So when the 2007-2008 season schedule was released, I looked for the next opportunity. That year, as it turned out, all the Wizards road games were on our local cable TV channel so the decision as to where to go see was not driven by anything other than personal preference. I decided on an early season game against the Atlanta Hawks and decided the trip should include an overnight stay and a little bit of an exploration of the city, rather than just going to see the game and leaving. I'd never been to Atlanta and had always wanted to see the High Museum of Art so it seemed like a good idea. That blueprint has formed the basis of all my road trips since.

The trip to Atlanta was notable from a basketball standpoint for a couple of reasons. First, the team won despite being 0-5 at the time and it got a winning streak of six straight started that got our season on track. It's the only time in four road trips that the Wizards have won a road game I have attended. Second, we managed to get some seats right behind the Wizards bench from a seller on StubHub. I have never sat courtside and I am sure my opinion will change if I ever do, but watching a game from right behind the team bench is definitely the way to go. Basketball is a game which changes as you get closer to the action. You can't see plays develop quite as well as you can from a seat in the upper deck of an arena, but you see and hear nuances of the game which are just not evident until you get up close. From our seats immediately behind the bench, we could hear pretty much everything that was being said by the players on the bench and by the coaches in the team huddles. It gave an insight into the game that we couldn't have had from anywhere else in the building.

Since it worked so well on the Atlanta trip, we sat in the same spot in 2009 at the Conseco Fieldhouse in Indiana, a gorgeous facility which that November night hosted a terrible showing by the Wizards in what was supposed to be (but wasn't) a season when we made some serious noise in the playoffs. On that trip, we managed to talk to Wizards play by play announcer Steve Buckhantz and we were actually featured in the broadcast. I got an incredulous text message from my friend Chris during the game saying that the camera had just focused on me and Mike, they had mentioned us by name and talked about some of the trips we had taken. It was almost as if Chris couldn't figure out how Steve knew all this about us. To his credit, Chris captured it and you can see us on the broadcast here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgscnNbJ4GY. If I actually get 15 minutes of fame in my life, this is surely and sadly 1:03 of those 15 minutes. Yes, I am wearing an Andray Blatche jersey and no, that doesn't necessarily make me a loser. I was just misguided by Andray's enthusiasm at the beginning of that season. 

Caron Butler staring me down in Indianapolis. He's probably trying to figure out why I would spend money on the authentic Andray Blatche jersey I was wearing.

One of the great things about traveling is the people you meet, like our bartender in Minneapolis. For those who know me well, this may actually come as a surprise, but it's true. In our road trips, I have met some interesting people whose lives are nothing like mine but in some ways are connected. It's encouraging to me when those connections come from basketball, which sometimes they do. On our way to the United Center in Chicago in 2010, I got into an animated exchange with our cab driver about the Knicks-Bulls 1990s rivalry. Turns out he hated John Starks and I certainly hated Michael Jordan so we had a lot to discuss during our debate about the best dunk from that rivalry. I didn't convince him of my position, but Starks' dunk over Jordan was way better than Jordan's dunk on Patrick Ewing. Just hands down, it is.

So far, I've been to four NBA cities to see the Wizards play on the road. I'd better pick up the pace if I intend to make it to all 29 like we told Phil Chenier in Indianapolis. I wonder where the schedule will take me this year.