Wizards are focused on staying level-headed during roller-coaster season

Wizards are focused on staying level-headed during roller-coaster season originally appeared on NBC Sports Washington

Don’t mention any kind of moral victory to the Wizards following a five-game winning streak. They don’t care about any of that. 

Time and time again, even as the wins piled up, a common phrase you heard out of this team was, “We have more work to do.” And they weren’t wrong. The Wizards did get out to a 6-17 start in a season where they’re hoping to make the playoffs.

There are ups and downs to every season and this team doesn’t have an interest in riding that roller coaster. This applies especially to Moe Wagner, who apparently couldn’t care less about his team’s most recent streak that came to an end Tuesday night. 

“Honestly, I don’t care about streaks,” Wagner said. “That’s some media stuff. It sounds good, but to me that’s superficial because it’s not getting me in the playoffs. We gotta find a way to be consistently good and find a way to bounce back from losses and I think everyone knows that. I think we’re experienced enough to understand that and not get down on ourselves with a loss. I think that’s what we did in the first half of the season a little bit and it cost us.”

If there was a team who’d be allowed to relish a bit in their success over the last week-plus, it’d be the Wizards. This is a team that was sidelined for 11 days due to a coronavirus outbreak and then struggled to put wins together because half their roster was in health and safety protocols. 

Now that they’re fully healthy and have their conditioning in a good place, they’re proving they can compete with anyone. Still, after their best stretch of basketball in probably three years, the whole team appears focused on something bigger. 

“Give our guys a lot of credit,” Brooks said. “They’ve got thrown a lot of stuff at them and you would think a lot of them wouldn’t be experienced enough to handle all of it, but they’ve got punched a few times but we keep just fighting back. We won five games in a row up until tonight and in our meeting today I didn’t see a happy team that ‘we’re just going to go out and there and just win games.’ We were focused on what we do and I like that about our group, they’re pretty level-headed.”

The Wizards will need all the focus they can get heading into their next game, as they’ll travel to Denver to take on Nikola Jokic and the Nuggets in a rematch of Washington’s win from a week ago. 

Tune in to NBC Sports Washington at 8 p.m. on Thursday for full coverage of Wizards vs. Nuggets