Magic at Wizards
The Washington Wizards were feeling good about themselves while ripping off a four-game winning streak despite being shorthanded, but the last two games have brought them back down to earth. The Wizards will try to avoid a three-game slide when they open the new year by hosting the Orlando Magic on Friday.
Washington averaged 108.3 points during its winning streak but was held to 91 in each of the last two contests, and fell into a hole it could not find a way out of in Wednesday’s 94-91 loss at Toronto. “That’s not what our identity is,” Wizards coach Randy Wittman told reporters of his team struggling to recover from a 12-point deficit. “Our identity when we play like that, we’re crap. We’re not a very good team. That’s been proven. That’s not a maybe.” The Magic crawled out of a halftime deficit against Brooklyn on Wednesday to pick up their seventh win in the last nine games. “For 40-something minutes we couldn’t get anything going and there was a lot of mistakes on both ends of the floor, but at the end we were able to get something going with a couple of nice plays,” Orlando center Nikola Vucevic told reporters of an eight-point surge over the last 45 seconds that got the team a 100-93 victory.
TV: 7 p.m. ET, FSN Florida (Orlando), CSN Mid-Atlantic (Washington)
ABOUT THE MAGIC (19-13): Orlando will head into January six games over .500 after going 13-22 through December last season, and new coach Scott Skiles is getting a lot of the credit. “I think we’re starting to believe in ourselves and we’re getting confidence that we know that the system works and the coaching staff is really pointing us in the right direction, power forward Jason Smith told reporters. “I’ve said that since Day One that this coaching staff has done a great job really giving us a great sense of direction and a plan to go and get wins.” Smith was part of a 43-point effort from the reserves on Wednesday.
ABOUT THE WIZARDS (14-16): Otto Porter Jr. returned to the starting lineup with 20 points on Wednesday but the team is still missing Bradley Beal and key frontcourt reserves Nene and Drew Gooden. “We can say we were shorthanded, but that’s an excuse,” Wittman told reporters. “We have to do a better job of being the aggressor for 48 (minutes). (Wednesday), we weren’t.” Beal (stress reaction in leg) could be ready for limited minutes in the next week.
BUZZER BEATERS
1. Wizards PG John Wall averaged 22.6 points and 11.7 assists in December.
2. Vucevic has scored 20 or more points in each of the last seven games.
3. Washington took the first two meetings this season, including a 108-99 home win on Nov. 14.