With losses in their first 21 away games of the NBA season, the lowly Washington Wizards are approaching the league record for road futility to start a campaign.
And their two longest road trips of the season remain, the first of them a four-game-in-five-day swing starting tomorrow at Oklahoma City and continuing on Saturday in Memphis, Tennessee, on Monday in Dallas, Texas, and on Tuesday in New Orleans.
“It has passed embarrassment,” Wizards forward Andray Blatche said.
The Wizards could not even put on their clothes correctly in a 115-106 loss on Monday at New York, with French rookie backup forward Kevin Seraphin starting the game with his shorts on backwards. Teammates surrounded him to block the view of spectators as he switched the shorts around during a timeout.
The Wizards made 20 turnovers in their 21st consecutive road defeat of the season.
“You can’t turn it over 20 times and beat people on the road,” Wizards coach Flip Saunders said.
The 1992-93 Dallas Mavericks own the NBA record for most consecutive road losses to start a season at 29, having overtaken the 0-28 road start of the 1974-1975 New Orleans Jazz under three coaches in their debut season.
Washington is one defeat shy of matching the third-worst road start to a season at 22, shared by the 1992-1993 Denver Nuggets and the 1949-1950 Waterloo (Iowa) Hawks, who finished 1-22 on the road in their only NBA season.
“If you lose on the road, you’re going to think about it,” Wizards 2010 NBA draft top pick John Wall said. “You see what everybody’s talking about — you not winning road games. It gets tough.”
“But for us to get them to stop talking about it, we’ve got to do what we have got to do on the road and get one,” he said.
Counting their loss in the final road game of last season, the Wizards have dropped 22 in a row away from home, but that is well off the all-time record multi-season road losing streak of 43 by Sacramento in the 1990-1991 and 1991-1992 campaigns.
The Wizards are already more than halfway to becoming the first team to go winless on the road for an entire 41 games since the NBA adopted an 82-game schedule. If they do, they will be only one shy of the dubious all-time mark.
The franchise already has the fourth-worst overall road losing streak in NBA history at 32 games, set over the last 12 such games of the 1952-1953 season and the first 20 of the 1953-1954 campaign. That stood as a record for 37 years.
Saunders has watched his team lose 30 of its first 43 games. The fact that Cleveland, New Jersey, Toronto, Sacramento and Minnesota have worse records is no consolation for his rebuilding squad.
“We said from the beginning the maturation of a young team, the first thing you’ve got to do is you’ve got to beat the bad teams at home and beat good teams at home,” Saunders said. “Then you beat bad teams on the road and you beat good teams on the road.”
The Wizards shocked Eastern Conference leader Boston at home last week, but the upcoming trip sees them facing three of the five win leaders in the Western Conference, Memphis the lone straggler at 22-23, ninth-best in the West.
No team wants to be the one to surrender the Wizards’ first road victory.
“We knew how important this game was,” New York’s Amare Stoudemire said on Monday. “We all pretty much showed the urgency to get this win.”
If the Wizards fall to 0-25 on the road this season after next Tuesday, they have a Feb. 13 road date at NBA doormat Cleveland. Failing that, they are at Orlando and Philadelphia before a possible record-tying 29th road loss in a row on Feb. 25 at Miami against superstars LeBron James and Dwyane Wade.
The 0-30 record setter could be at Detroit on March 6, with later in that month bringing a five-game road trip to Portland, the Los Angeles Clippers, Denver, Golden State and Utah.
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