Eastern Conference Semis - Game 6
Wizards 92
Celtics 91
May 13, 2017 - Verizon Center, DC
Have you caught your breath yet? No? That’s ok, I don’t think I have either. This was just how intense the final 100 seconds of that game was. It did not have the length of craziness as the Wizards-Cavaliers overtime thriller, but the magnitude was much higher. For the faint of heart, this was not the game for you, but Washington is one game away from the Eastern Conference Finals following a 92-91 victory at home.
*Stephen A. Smith voice* John Wall is a baaaaad man.
For the first time in his career, John Wall made a game-winning three-pointer, in the regular season or playoffs, with under 10 seconds to play. Let that sink in for a moment. Wall had a game-winner earlier in the year against Chicago but that was a midrange jumper from the corner. After a 1 of 12 start, Wall went on to make 8 of his next 13 and lead his team to victory. Clearly, the ball started acting right and stopped being stubborn. “He put us on his back, and that's why he's a superstar," Markieff Morris said.
“We had our best on-ball defender [Avery Bradley] on their All-Star,” Brad Stevens said. “We’re going to guard it as hard as we can and shake his hand and move on.”
“John, I think he’s only had two games in this series – I think one game he was 0-9 and the other he was 1-9 and he ended up 8-16 in the halves,” Brooks recollected. “Not too many guys can do that. When I played, if I missed two shots, I didn’t think I was going to make the next shot. But he’s a winner [and] he plays to win. He’s not worried about his stats, he’s worried about winning the game.”
After Washington missed 14 straight field goals between 4:10 left in the second quarter and 8:51 left in the third quarter, a whopping 7:19 span in which Boston went on a 18-3 run, “superstar” mode was activated as Markieff Morris put it. In a 64 second span, Wall scored 7 points with three straight buckets: a lay-up, a jumper, and a three-pointer. In the second half, Wall scored 23 points and assisted on another 4 to account for over half of the Wizards 51 points post-intermission.
“He did blow it up,” Scott Brooks admitted about Marcus Smart who was guarding Bradley Beal on Wall’s game-winning three-pointer. “They make it tough to move, so we have to do a better job with that. But John [Wall] stepped up and made a big shot. Sometimes in playoff basketball you have to give the defense credit. You can’t stop playing, you have to look for the next opportunity. John came and got the ball and spaced out the floor and he had a good look on a three. We had a couple of possessions before that – I think it was with two minutes we called a timeout – Brad [Beal] got a great look. We were tied up and would have been up three. They came down and we had two mistakes on Isaiah’s [Thomas] three and switched with Keef [Markieff Morris]. We didn’t give in, we didn’t give up. We didn’t give in, we just felt like at the timeout we talked, ‘Hey, we have plenty of time, we just need to make plays.’ That’s when we trapped, got the steal and Brad hit the three. That put us in. We got another stop when John got the two free throws. A lot of winning plays by both guys [and] both teams. I thought our guys made one last play. Now we have the deciding game.”
“The last play was really for me to get to the corner and Brad [Beal] come open,” Wall put in his own words. “He [Beal] didn’t get the opportunity to get open and I didn’t want to get a five-second violation. So I came and got the ball from Otto [Porter Jr.] and looked the defender in the eye and took a shot I work on and it went in.”
Boston dressed up for their own funeral (and did not even have the cojones to eat it).
By now, you know. The Boston Celtics took a page out of the Washington Wizards play book by arriving at Verizon Center before the game with every player wearing all black. Well, mostly considering Al Horford was wearing a gray shirt underneath, but that’s another story.
A member of the Wizards told me before the game, “they going down at their own funeral?” Another said, “I didn’t like that shit.” A third simply put it as “ridiculous.” After the game, John Wall told ESPN’s Lisa Salters, “don’t come here wearing all black to my city.”
“I didn’t know they wore all black today,” Beal said. “That doesn’t faze us. It is what it is. They came in and played hard. I don’t want to take anything away from them. They did a good job of competing but we had a will to win. We did whatever it took. We stayed the course of the game with the last two, three minutes we stayed locked in. Regardless of up five or down seven, down five or whatever how much we were down, we did a good job of just locking in. We both made some big plays down the stretch, that is something we wanted to get past this point for some time. We didn’t want to go home on our floor. We wanted to give ourselves another chance, so we have to take full advantage of it.”
This was clearly deliberate and do not let anyone else tell you otherwise because that is a lie. What else would be the odds that the Celtics, who flew in during the day on Thursday, all would happen to have packed a black shirt and pants and shoes? Isaiah Thomas even tried to blatantly deny the accusation of the team colluding in their pregame attire.
“Seconds thoughts, no,” Thomas responded when asked if he or the team had second thoughts on the pregame dress code. “I wear black all the time. I’m the first one in this gym, too, so I didn’t see nobody else wearing black.”
Probably the best part (as he usually is postgame) was Markieff Morris who quietly had 16 points and 11 rebounds including a late three-pointer that seemingly opened up the flood gates. “They just trying to be like us,” Morris said. “Man, they want to be us. There is only one Death Row DC, they can’t do it like we can do it.”
Coming up large when it matters most.
The Washington Wizards, in 11 playoff games that I feel serve as a large enough sample size, were shooting 94 of 291, 32.3 percent, from beyond the arc in the postseason coming into tonight. That is nearly 5 percentage points fewer than their season average, which is a four-point difference each game.
Tonight, Markieff Morris made Washington’s first shot attempt from the game, a three. So, I thought to myself, “ok, regression to the mean time.” Wrong. The Wizards would go on to miss 1 of their next 19 three, many of which were good looks. Just as he began, Markieff Morris instinctively put his nuts on the line, as he infamously stated after beating Golden State, and drained a corner three with 3:45 to play to give the home team a two-point lead.
Then Bradley Beal came and hit a run up three, his first and only of the game after starting 0 of 7. Then of course Wall hit arguably the biggest shot in 38 years, a three, as Washington made three of their last four from deep after a miserable stretch.
“A couple things down the stretch: Brad [Beal] hits the big three,” Brooks recaps, “– hits the pull-up, John [Wall] attacks the free throw line after we get a block and a steal [and] hits the big three. A lot of guys made a lot of plays, but I think naturally you gravitate to those four or five plays. Keef’s [Markieff Morris] minutes were tremendous all game long. He’s been nursing an ankle injury, but never, not once, has he made an excuse. I’m proud of that.”
“We were going to blitz them, period,” Beal summarized Washington’s defensive strategy. “He [Isaiah Thomas] just made two big shots, so we had to get the ball out of his hand one way or another. We have some tall, athletic guys. Coach said blitz him, he can’t see over our guys. We forced a turnover, Marcin [Gortat] came up with it. In transition guys are trying to match up, guys are scrambling, the clock is running down. It’s a little bit panic mode, so I just took advantage of it. Guys were falling back, rose up and knocked it down.”
Bradley Beal deserves more than the fourth takeaway, but that is how crazy this game was.
If you are reading this by chance Brad, I really wish I could move you up in importance because you were indeed the game’s leading scorer. With 33 points, Beal joins a list of just nine others to score 33+ in the playoffs with 1 or fewer made three-pointers. Wall actually did it a few weeks ago against Atlanta. The others include LMA, Giannis, Butler, DeRozan, LeBron, Kawhi, and even the current enemy Isaiah Thomas.
Wall called Beal his brother after the game and thanked him for keeping the team afloat in the first half with 14 points on an efficient 6 of 9 shooting. Beal is now shooting 59 percent from inside the arc, 86 of 146, despite just 26 percent, 24 of 91, from deep. Brooks praised Beal for being more than just a shooter but a “ball player” or as Morris would put it, “big time players make big time plays.”
“One of the things with Brad [Beal] going into this season and meeting with him throughout the summer is to become a complete player,” Brooks said. “He has done that right in front of our eyes. As a 23-year old, he’s one of the best two-way players in the league. He was 0-8, I think, or 0-7 at that time from three before he hit that shot. Just being who he is, he just sticks with it. He’s not a shooter, he’s a ball-player and he plays both ends of the floor. He attacks the basket [and] he had five assists tonight and did a great job defensively. For him to make that shot after being 0-7 just says [a lot] about his toughness because he’s a mentally tough player. We love what he brings to our team. The two-way mentality is a big part of our success.”
What does it all mean? Does it mean anything yet?
For the first time this postseason, a home team has won when facing elimination after the 10 previous occurrences resulted in elimination. Washington breaks a personal team streak of seven straight loses at home when facing elimination going back to 1997 at the hands of Michael Jordan. The Wizards are the farthest in the postseason since losing in the Finals in 1979 the year after winning the city’s lone NBA title. Washington is 6-3 in team history when going to Game 7.
Do not get too excited because Wall said the season would essentially be a waste if they lost Game Six reiterated the same should they not close Boston out in Game Seven, the best two words in basketball according to Scott Brooks. The Eastern Conference Finals was the goal last season and this season. We will see what happens on Monday.
All attention turns to the first Game Seven of the 2017 NBA Playoffs and Morris previews what Washington needs to do. "Just like tonight, we have to have the will to win. Knowing that we're on the road we have to play great. We have to be on call for everything. We can't let plays go by, every possession is going to count."