Wizards fall on wrong end of another one-point game vs. Hawks originally appeared on NBC Sports Washington
Over the last five weeks, the Wizards have played their best basketball of the season and surged into the playoff picture as a result.
And anyone who has been around since then might need a pacemaker.
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Absent Bradley Beal, the Wizards fell 125-124 to the Hawks on Monday at State Farm Arena in Atlanta on a night when Russell Westbrook set the all-time mark for triple-doubles. But for the Wizards as a whole, it was yet another disappointing loss that has come in a massively positive stretch.
More accurately, it was only disappointing because of how well they've played over the last few weeks, and how close they were to adding another notch to their win total.
“We’ve got a competitive spirit,” coach Scott Brooks said. “We’re missing one of the best players in basketball but we didn’t let that hold us back. I thought we played pretty good, it’s hard to overcome 26-11, whether we didn’t get any calls or we did get calls or whatever.”
Since April 5 the Wizards are 15-6, which has been by far their best stretch of the 2021 season. And it doesn’t take much imagination to think of the Wizards with a different record.
The Wizards dropped to 17-32 on the night five weeks ago when Gary Trent hit a 3-pointer at the buzzer to lift the Raptors to a 103-101 win. Including that night, the Wizards’ six losses since then have been by: 2, 28, 3 (OT), 1, 1 and 1.
Four games in that stretch have gone to overtime, including two of the last three. All but one have been wins.
But while it seems the Wizards either win or lose it in the final moments, it’s not hard to draw a line to where the improvement needs to come.
“I think it was big for us not to hang our head too much when we got down,” Robin Lopez said. “We had a lot of guys, they showed a lot of resolve on the defensive end. We came short in the end, but I think we’re telling ourselves right now, ‘It’s not the end of the game where we came up short, it was prior to that.’ So we know we can’t have quite so many lapses that we had tonight.”
The Wizards still have to wait to clinch their play-in tournament spot, and with three games left, there’s still work to be done so those type of late-game situations aren’t possible.
Against the Hawks, the Wizards trailed by as many as 19 in the fourth quarter to pull for a shot at the win. A Westbrook 3-pointer was no good as time ran out, which would’ve given the Wizards another heart-stopping win. Oftentimes throughout the 21 game stretch, the Wizards would fall behind and rally, or allow another team to get back in the game before a wildly entertaining finish.
In a year that’s been up-and-down since the beginning, there’s hope that the late-game situations will prepare the Wizards for what’s inevitable come the postseason. And if the Wizards do their jobs, the final stretch of games will be far less stressful.
“I think it’s preparing us, I hope it’s preparing us,” Lopez said. “Playoffs are a different atmosphere, playoffs are a different beast. But you need all the preparation you can get. We’ve been pretty good executing down the stretch, luck is a factor sometimes, in fact that’s the NBA. We just have to be better, in this game, we have to be better earlier on.”
