It’s hard to believe that a team that’s 10 games below .500 two-thirds of the way through the season and whose star player has missed about half the season due to injury is still very much in the playoff mix, but that’s the position the Washington Wizards find themselves in right now.
Coming out of the All-Star break, the Wizards are 24-34, but somehow just three games back from the No. 8 seed in the Eastern Conference.
This says more about the East than it does the Wizards. John Wall hasn’t played in nearly two months, Dwight Howard has barely seen the court, and the team traded away a handful of players who were central to their recent success in Kelly Oubre Jr.