The Washington Wizards fell to the Boston Celtics in seven games in the Eastern Conference semifinals. Wizards shooting guard Bradley Beal, who scored 38 points in the Wizards’ game 7 loss in Boston, believes that the Cleveland Cavaliers are lucky that it wasn’t Washington that advanced. From CSN Mid-Atlantic:
“Cleveland didn’t want to see us. I always said that. I felt like that’s the reason they didn’t play us in the second round. They didn’t want to see us in the second round,” he said. “If they were going to go down, they were going to go down in the conference finals. They didn’t want to go down in the second round.”
What Beal (presumably) means when he says “that’s the reason they didn’t play us in the second round” is that had the Cavs not struggled late in the regular season, they could have entered the postseason the no. 1 seed, and would have run into the Wizards, while the Celtics played the Raptors.
The confidence is nice to see, but Beal is almost certainly wrong. Sure, Cleveland would have as much (probably more) difficulty containing John Wall and Bradley Beal as Boston did. However, the Wizards’ Achilles heel is their depth, and if they were too thin to overcome the Celtics, they wouldn’t stand a chance against the Cavs.
