NBA games of the week: Wizards enter the gauntlet

Wednesday, Feb. 28: Golden State at Washington, 8:00 p.m. ET

Let’s just get this out of the way. I can’t definitively say Zaza Pachulia landed on Russell Westbrook’s legs intentionally. We’ll never know for sure.

But it certainly looks like he did. In real time, I wasn’t 100 percent sure. There was a pile up and the microphones around the basket picked up someone screaming. Then I saw the replay and for everything that happened, it doesn’t look like it was some accident. At about 0:12, we see Pachulia fall, though it looks like he went from falling to his knees, to extending forward, which just so happened to land him on Westbrook’s legs. Other angles show that Nick Young’s foot hooked the back of Pachulia’s knee, but it still doesn’t explain Pachulia’s falling angle. He fell more like Austin Powers when he was trying to seduce Vanessa:

As for the game on Wednesday, it’s hard enough for the Wizards to play the best team I’ve seen in my lifetime — I’m a little young for all the Bulls fans screaming about about the 1995-96 team — but they have to do it on a back-to-back after a road game. The two teams haven’t seen each other since the fifth game of the season, when both Draymond Green and Beal were ejected at the end of the first half. 

It was the one of the first instances of the Wiz’s struggles in the fourth quarter. They’re currently ranked 23rd in net rating in the fourth quarter this season. But they’ve been better over the last 11 games, climbing to as high as 13th.

Over those same 11 games the Wizards have played their best basketball, the Dubs are still Dubbing. They still have a ridiculous plus-10.5 net rating, despite being 7-4 over that stretch. But, as we saw on Saturday, they’re still so prone to getting destroyed on the glass. Washington isn’t Oklahoma City getting 14 offensive rebounds, but they’re ninth in offensive rebounding rate.

But, as the Warriors showed for the 200th time on Saturday, they’ll blow any game open.