Bullets news round-up

The Bullets are injured. A lot. That’s not news to you. It’s not news to you that Deshawn Stevenson is a 27-year-old pro athlete walking with a cane. But he is. ‘Cause he’s on the Bullets and the Bullets are injured. A lot. But you already knew that.
Against all reasonable expectations and the best predictions of Nostradamus and Big Blue, the IMB chess computer, the Philadelphia 76ers are playing well and now trail the Bullets by only one game. They lost last night to the Boston Celtics, but they’ve won 12 of their last 16 games at a time when the Bullets have been struggling due to…well, see the paragraph above this one. Louis Williams is going to be a serious NBA player, Andre Iguodala hashis nights, and Andre Miller — a pretty good point guard to begin with — is having a career year. The Bullets must keep the 6th playoff spot at all costs, since it is the difference between playing a tough Orlando team and an impossible Detroit team. Always pick tough over impossible. Tough isn’t impossible.*
Washington plays Milwaukee at the Phone Booth tonight and with the 76ers breathing down their necks, a win at home against a lousy Wisconsin basketball team would be a pretty good idea. The Bullets will have to play better defense than they did against Charlotte, when allowing 35 points in the first quarter [the most the Bullets have given up in the 1st quarter all season] put the team in a hole they could never quite dig out of. The Bullets looked tired in that game, having just come off an overtime win the night before in Toronto. That’d better not happen again, warns Eddie Jordan:

“We need to be aggressive right from the beginning,” Jordan said. “We’re going to see changing defenses, and I don’t want to get to a bad place where we’re turning the ball over and are confused and disorganized offensively. That leads to a lot of breakouts and that sort of thing at the other end. We have to be organized offensively and we have to lock some people down.”

Milwaukee has lost 5 of its last 6 — including a 119-97 loss to Philly — and generally sucks. However, the Bullets have split two games with the Bucks this year and star shooting guard Michael Redd didn’t play in either one of them. He should play tonight.
In a 105-102 overtime loss to Milwaukee on January 27, Caron Butler suffered the injury that still has him out of the lineup. It’s been mostly bad news for Washington since then. The team got a bit of good news yesterday, though, when Caron Butler, as scheduled, practiced with the team.

“It felt real good and now we’ll see how the body responds [Tuesday],” Butler said. “But I was able to move around with no pain. At the end, probably the last five minutes of practice, I decided to pull out and get a little ice. Because of overcompensation, I had a little tightness in my groin area but that was it. Overall, I felt good.”
…
Coach Eddie Jordan was encouraged by what he saw out of Butler during a practice that included high-energy five-on-five full-court scrimmaging, something the Wizards have not been able to do much this season because of injuries.
“He looked great today,” Jordan said. “A lot of speed and explosion and great passing and just running up and down the floor. He looked really good. A lot better than I thought. He went through 95 percent of practice.”
…
Butler appeared to pass an important test yesterday when he ran, cut and even threw down a handful of dunks.
” I played a lot,” Butler said. “We got right into it. I scrimmaged, got a lot of contact. Coach just put me right in the fire. He just said: ‘go.’ I felt really good and had a good rhythm. My teammates were looking for me because they wanted me to get a feel for everything so overall I felt good until the last five minutes when I felt a little tightness [in the groin] and just pulled myself out.”

Great news, obviously, but let’s not drop the confetti just yet. It was a February 18 practice where Butler re-aggravated his labrum injury and went back to the shelf. We need to see a few good practices before we can allow ourselves to hope. Butler won’t play against Milwaukee tonight, but he’ll practice again on Thursday. If that goes well, who knows?
* My 3 years at a top law school were not wasted!