Monday NBA Roundup: Wizards Turning Corner in Complicated Eastern Conference

Earning the split in a back-to-back series with the Milwaukee Bucks wouldn’t normally qualify as a turning point, but the Washington Wizards’ 107-102 win on Monday kind of felt like one anyway.

The Wiz used a 20-4 fourth-quarter comeback surge to avenge Friday’s 123-96 loss in Milwaukee and have now won seven of their last 10 games.

Yes, these are the 14-16 Wizards we’re talking about. The ones with a negative point differential on the year. The ones whose defensive focus shares the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it quality of a John Wall push in transition.

This is a wildly imperfect team whose recent history includes lots of flirting with .500, but not much deal-sealing. So invest hope or interest at your own risk.

Still, in this recent 7-3 stretch, the Wizards’ plus-2.9 net rating ranks behind only the Cleveland Cavaliers and Toronto Raptors among Eastern Conference teams. And they fought hard on Monday.

Head coach Scott Brooks must not have liked what he saw early, as the Bucks got whatever they wanted inside against a lazy Wizards defense. Duck-ins, drives and cuts all seemed to yield easy looks at close range.

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This, after Brooks laid into his team for surrendering 66 points in the paint during that Friday meeting, telling reporters: “We can’t do that, we can’t expect to win on the road and give an athletic team easy buckets around the paint. That is what they do. We didn’t make them pay for their weaknesses at all.”

To be fair, there’s not a lot you can do about plays like this:

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Washington still allowed plenty of point-blank scoring, surrendering 52 paint points. But John Wall’s 16 assists and Otto Porter’s 32 points overshadowed the shoddy D. And if the Wizards are really going to turn this season around, they’ll have to do it with ugly, fight-back wins like this one.

Ball-sharing and better team play helps, too.

Porter, who hit that critical three to give Washington a four-point lead with 49 seconds left, may be turning a corner of his own, according to this dynamite stat from Kyle Weidie of Truth About It:

Brooks said he thought Beal’s extra pass to Porter for the corner three was “the play of the game.”

— Candace Buckner (@CandaceDBuckner) December 27, 2016

The Wizards are two games under the break-even mark with two very winnable home contests against the Indiana Pacers and Brooklyn nets left on the 2016 schedule. The new year could bring a .500 record and a fresh start.

From there, Washington’s forecast is hazier.

Only the Cavs, Raptors and Boston Celtics have established themselves as surefire postseason participants in the East. And though it’s beyond far-fetched to imagine the Wizards ever joining that upper tier, are they really so much worse than the Charlotte Hornets (who suffered a cripplingly disappointing loss on Monday), New York Knicks, Atlanta Hawks or any of the conference’s vast and jumbled middle class?

Think of it in these …

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