Things are not going well for the Washington Wizards. Billed as one of a few Eastern Conference contenders outside of Cleveland before the season began, they have been far from that.
In the midst of a race to get one of the final playoff spots in the East, the Wizards have crumbled, losing crucial games to bad teams. That came to an ultimatum on Wednesday when Washington lost to the Sacramento Kings, placing 2.5 games behind the eighth seed and all but eliminating them from playoff contention.
After the game, shooting guard Bradley Beal had harsh criticisms for the team, claiming that some players did not play hard enough.
Following transcribed by HoopDistrict.net:
“We don’t have any sense of urgency, To me, it felt like we just gave up. If guys don’t want to play, they need to sit down. We just do dumb mental lapses and just mess up the game, and it ends up hurting us in the long run. Everybody’s a grown-ass man, either you want to play, or you don’t.”
Beal’s comments show the tension in the Wizards’ locker room after what has been a disappointing season. But while frustrations are to be expected, the reaction from a notable teammate of Beal’s is not.
Hoop District ran a poll on Twitter asking their users whether the shooting guard was right to publicly call out the team and center Marcin Gortat had a simple and blunt answer:
Gortat has since deleted the tweet and in other instances claimed that the situation is not a big problem.
He is probably right. The team knows that the chances of making the playoffs are immensely low and tension is to be expected. However, that two of the better players on the team cannot agree on either the reason for their struggles or the method of speaking about them may speak to a larger issue.
Beal may be right about the circumstances leading to the Wizards’ collapse but speaking about them publicly rarely leads to anything good coming out. At this time, all the Wizards can do is to play hard and win games and hope they get a lot of help so that they can sneak into the playoffs. Unfortunately, that seems highly improbable.
