Wizards stun Nets with wild sequence in the final seconds

By Ava Wallace,

For the first time since Jan. 11, Scott Brooks had something worth celebrating.

The Washington Wizards’ coach took his time Sunday making it to his postgame teleconference. The reason, he joked, was that he was busy cracking a celebratory beverage in honor of his team’s first win since it restarted its season following a coronavirus outbreak — a 149-146 last-minute thriller against the Brooklyn Nets at Capital One Arena.

“First game all year I had a White Claw. I wanted to enjoy it,” Brooks said with a laugh. “No — hey, this is a good feeling. . . . We fought; we fought hard. You know, we had nothing right going for us. Nothing. Zero. Nothing going for us in that first quarter other than, we’re just going to keep competing. We’ve done it all year, and the basketball gods gave us a break tonight.”

Brooks wasn’t exaggerating in his post-win haze. In the Wizards’ first game with a mostly full roster since before the outbreak, they played dead in the first quarter, falling into an 18-point hole before their bench rescued the game from becoming a blowout. Russell Westbrook and Bradley Beal snatched the win at the very end, putting together a dramatic 8-0 run in the final 8.1 seconds.

If the bench kept Washington afloat, it was Westbrook who spurred the Wizards not to settle for a respectable loss. The starting point guard, seemingly fully recovered from his left quadriceps injury, was the team’s galvanizing force all night and set a new season high for the second straight game with 41 points. He added 10 rebounds and eight assists for good measure.

“They made big plays after big plays,” Brooks said of his two all-stars. “Russell willed this game. This is what he does, and he can do it — he can do it every night. He doesn’t take nights off. He doesn’t shoot the ball well every night, but he doesn’t take nights off.”

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Beal turned in a late-blooming, 37-point performance and had 22 points in the fourth quarter after not attempting a field goal in the first quarter.

After a layup from Westbrook tied the score at 141 with under a minute to play, Brooklyn went on a 5-0 run that Beal stopped with a pull-up three-pointer from 30 feet out at the top of the key with 8.1 seconds left. With the Wizards suddenly down two, guard Garrison Mathews nabbed a bad inbounds pass from Brooklyn’s Joe Harris and dumped the ball off to Westbrook in the corner, and the point guard hit a three to put the Wizards up for good with 4.3 seconds to play.

The win put Washington in the rarest of air: According to ESPN Stats and Info, NBA teams are 9-23,498 in the past 25 seasons when trailing by five points or more in the final 10 seconds of a game.

“It was a crazy game. I’ve been in some crazy games, but this is definitely up there, with the finish,” Westbrook said afterward. “. . . Well, I saw the time, score, just tried to get a quick steal . . . go for the win. This time, we didn’t have anything to lose. It’s win or go home, and we need this win very bad.”

Sunday’s game felt almost cathartic for the Wizards (4-12), who had their normal contributors back aside from backup point guard Raul Neto, who is nursing a groin injury, and center Thomas Bryant, who is lost for the year with a partially torn ACL. Starting forward Deni Avdija and backup point guard Ish Smith returned to the lineup after finally getting out of the NBA’s coronavirus protocols.

Not only did the Wizards have almost their full roster available for the first time in nearly three weeks, their offense also clicked for the first time in five games. Washington was on a four-game losing streak before Sunday in large part because players were still working back into shape and the team had no one to support Beal.

But against Brooklyn (13-9), which was without star guard James Harden because of a leg injury, Smith and backup center Moritz Wagner gave the Wizards the jolt they needed. Brooks called three timeouts in the first quarter to try to ignite some sort of spark after the Wizards fell behind by 18, and the second unit finally pulled even in the second quarter with Nets stars Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant off the court.

“It was a collective effort. It just felt good to get a win,” Beal said. “It’s not a big, altering change — ‘Oh, man, we’re right back’ — we’ve still got a lot of work to do. We’ve still got to get better. We still have to get back in the gym. But this is a good team we beat tonight. So we definitely feel good about it.”

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Wagner added 17 points on 7-for-8 shooting from the field in 20 minutes, and Smith had 13 points on 6-for-9 shooting.

Durant had 37 points, and Joe Harris finished with 30. Sunday was no defensive showcase — Brooklyn shot 57 percent from the field and 53 percent from three-point range, while Washington shot 52 percent from the field.

Wizards forward Davis Bertans had yet another disappointing shooting night, going 3 for 12 from three-point range, but he scored a critical 11 points. Starting center Ropin Lopez had 10 points on a night when every bucket mattered.

Avdija had just two points playing on a minutes restriction in his first game back, and Rui Hachimura, in his second game back, had nine points.

“This was one of the craziest games, if not the craziest, I’ve ever been around,” Brooks said. “I mean, look what happened at the start. We couldn’t stop them at all. . . . For us to come back to cut it to, I think, 10, that was almost a win in itself. We fought, we battled, we clawed, we gave ourselves a chance, and hopefully this is the start of something that we’re going to be proud of once we get through all of what we’ve been through. I’m looking forward to the next 16 games, one game at a time.”

Source: WP