🏀️ Farewell to Wizards

The last Wizards home game our family attended back in April was a disaster. We forgot to bring noise canceling earmuffs for the baby and spent most of the night in the dreary concession stand hallway. Guest Services were only able to provide foam plugs; not good for a five-month-old. This would not have been devastating if what was to be the highlight of the night — and at a Wizards game the highlight is not the game of basketball you can see on the court but rather the overpriced chicken tenders they sell to people who should know better, as the Capital One Arena is the only venue where our kids are permitted to eat junk — if that highlight was any good on our last night at the Arena. Alas, they came out 15 minutes late and still half-frozen, a breaded chicken sashimi. Oh, and after an embarrassing loss to the Miami Heat the Wizards sealed their status as the worst team of the worst conference of a league that has seen better days.

I am not saying that the Washington Wizards were the main reason we are leaving D.C. [Note: A fellow Serbian expat immigrant in DC told me that people back home thought that saying ‘DC’ is taken as being too high-falutin’ since everyone over there calls it Washington. Of course, over here Washington means the Hill and the Swamp and whatever you would call that thing on Pennsylvania Ave and 16th St, so I’ll stick to D.C. ] for Denver, but you know, it is also not not one of the reasons.

So I am happy to report that my last contact with the team was not that ill-fated last home game, but rather their draft party — free popcorn, cash bar — to celebrate the number one pick and choose the next season’s roster of Wizards Dancers.

Watching and voting for the dancers was delightful, particularly a few days after throwing out my back and not being able to even dream of doing one hundredth of the things they did on stage. The Wizards’ audience engagement is so much better than the actual game of basketball that it’s really not fair to these professionals that they earn a few orders of magnitude less money per year than the likes of Alex Sarr, the 2024 number 2 pick who gets north of $12M to get bullied under his own basket.

And then there was the pick. It was fine, I think, not being particularly invested in the outcome any more. I thought the front office made a very good move by trading for two injured low A-tier players (Trae Young, Anthony Davis) for next to nothing and expected the said office to trade them away once they recovered. Alas, no, they in fact intend to keep Trae Young and in that light the number 1 pick does not seem like the right choice as another suffering Wizards fan noted earlier today.

But you know what? It doesn’t matter. There will always be a built-in audience for NBA games in DC, fair weather or no, making the Arena stands green when Celtics are in town and purple-gold when the Lakers are in. The dancers will be consistently good as the city seems to attract an unlimited supply of talent. Heck, the senior dancers — delightfully named Wizdom — go above and beyond and are wonderful to watch. Them I will miss. Those overpaid court clowns, not so much.

Infinite Regress is not a professional outlet yet even this here half-brained bozo knows better than to mix fonts in a single word. They should have shaved off the “ć” to a “c” if their house headline typeface didn’t have the right diacritic, but then why doesn’t it?

And hey, congrats to Denver!

🏀 Scenes from the last Wizards home game. Appropriate ending to an ignominious season.

🏀 This will not last.

🏒 After being 3 goals behind, the Capitals win with an overtime tie-breaker from Sourdiff. The last time we were there he had a hat trick. Glad do witness both of his big days.

🏀 A rare Wizards home W, against the Portland Trail Blazers. Even a horrible organization can give its fans something to be happy about once every few months.

But we’re not renewing.

🏒 A high-scoring game from the Caps last night, yet again! Alex Ovechkin added two to his record, Justin Sourdif had a hat trick. Plus two penalty shots and more than a few brawls to make it the prototypical (if not typical) game of hockey.

🏀 It took 17 games and a 14-game losing streak for the Washington Wizards to win their first home game, but what a night for CJ McCollum: 46 points, 10/13 behind the 3-point line. They should give away pajama pants more often.

🏒 Fun to see a winning team at this venue, for once, and with a massive amount of goals. Will come back.

🏀 Cursed, yet again (and again).

The only team who managed to lose to the Wizards so far this season just booted their GM.