Disappearing Wizards a cautionary tale of sorts for the Bulls

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Nobody can do a disappearing act like the Washington Wizards, not even a team trying to improve lottery positioning as the Wizards are desperately aiming to avoid the Cleveland Cavaliers in a first-round playoff matchup.

But even when agendas are aligned, the Wizards’ should-be motto rears its familiar head: “Why try to beat us when you can just wait on us to not show up?”

And that’s what happened on Easter Sunday as the Wizards added the Bulls to the ledger of teams that will likely send the perpetually underachieving group to the scrap heap after the first-round this spring.

The Bulls were without head coach Fred Hoiberg for the first time this season, as he left the United Center some time before the game started with an upper respiratory infection.

Associate head coach Jim Boylen filled in for the first time in the first chair and helped the Bulls to a 113-94 win—one that ranks as unsurprising given the Wizards’ recent history of looking past opponents.

With three days before their next game and plenty of time to burn before playing the Houston Rockets, they started their off-time on a Sunday afternoon—coinciding with Boylen’s first win.

“It was fun. First of all, I feel bad for Fred. I’ve never seen him this sick before,” Boylen said. “Before the game, John Paxson grabbed me and said, ‘have fun with it’. And that’s what we did.”

Lauri Markkanen certainly helped with that, hitting five 3-pointers and scoring 23 points in 25 minutes, his 12th time crossing the 20-point threshold, and second time in three games.

Bobby Portis entered the game late in the first quarter and scored a quick nine, helping the Bulls to a 15-point lead before the period ended. He finished with 18 points in 16 minutes as the Bulls hit eight triples in the first and a franchise record-tying 18 overall—including two rare four-point plays.

If one wants to point to player development, it’s Markkanen expanding his game beyond the 3-point line and Portis moving his range to the outside. After hitting 48 triples in his first two years combined, Portis is at 76 in 68 games this year.

“I was always a mid-range shooter in college,” Portis said. “But the league has now transitioned to all bigs shooting threes and that’s something I’d be glad to work on and that I’m into. Last year I would make a couple here and there.”

“I really tried to hone into that and it’s worked so far.”

That should’ve been a signal that the Wizards had no interest in competing, and the Bulls won their second straight game for the first time since a three-game winning streak in January.

“I thought our guys really competed. Played together,” Boylen said. “When you get into the game defensively, good things happen for you at the other end. I thought we did that.”

Wizards leading scorer Bradley Beal was five of 17 from the field, missing all five 3-point attempts as the Wizards shot 27 percent from three and turned the ball over 17 times.

In a way, it was a classic Wizards performance and one the Bulls were going to take advantage of.

If there’s one way to give the Bulls’ front office a kernel of credit is acknowledging they didn’t want to be the Wizards—a capped-out team not good enough to advance through the East, just meandering through the regular season for a first-round knockout.

That’s what they also have to avoid moving forward with this rebuild.

No one can argue the Wizards hitting on John Wall, Beal and to a lesser extent Otto Porter with high draft picks. But subsequent moves and management of the salary cap has played a part in preventing the Wizards from advancing beyond the second round in the East.

The Bulls will have another high pick this summer and even if it’s a hit, there are no guarantees for how it’ll turn out. Markkanen, Kris Dunn and Zach LaVine are as good a haul as the Bulls could’ve gotten in the Jimmy Butler deal, but in the big picture it does nothing aside from the temporary adrenaline of a front office getting a trade right.

The East is developing new faces rather quickly and the dependable ones don’t seem like they’ll register enough on the Richter Scale when it matters most.

Wall has missed extended time with a knee injury this season and didn’t play Sunday due to the back-to-back portion of his return. Even if he hadn’t gotten hurt, it’s hard to see this roster doing much in the postseason this year—and without major moves going forward, competing with Boston and Philadelphia as the future of the East.

They’re stuck in the middle, with games like Sunday as more evidence that something hasn’t gone right with team-building or the culture.

“We made the playoffs, but are we just excited about making the playoffs?” Wizards coach Scott Brooks said. “That’s a question we have to ask. The good habits that we talk about and we work on, it wasn’t displayed tonight.”

The Wizards specialize in tantalizing an audience on the “if” factor: If Wall and Beal can stay healthy long enough, if the Wizards can develop a third option next to them, if the Wizards can simply get out of their own way.

Those “ifs” almost culminated in an appearance in the Eastern Conference Finals last season, falling short in a Game 7 in Boston—the same set of “ifs” that seemingly haunted the Bulls franchise over the last decade, with a whole new set of “ifs” on the horizon.

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