Comment from sgriff17
Time October 1, 2008 at 4:32 PM

Thanks for the reply. As I said, I’m from Illinois – followed the Fighting Illini (Still do!), followed Dee’s career in Turkey. It’s killing me having him in my own back yard and I can’t watch him play. If you can, give him a shout out from “InTheSTL”….he may remember me that way. If nothing else, maybe I can get him to sign my CARDINALS hat…lol.

I’m extremely glad to hear he is out on the floor doing what we all KNOW he can do.

SG
“InTheSTL”

Comment from SportzWiz
Time October 1, 2008 at 5:18 PM

SG Dave and I had the chance to spend some time with Dee today earlier, what a great guy! The guy is just non-stop going as hard as he can.

Comment from wiz3terps3
Time October 1, 2008 at 5:19 PM

dave, second practice is canceled, you have been up since 5:30, you have been working extremely hard, u need to get some sleep my man!!!

Comment from neal
Time October 1, 2008 at 6:19 PM

Really good to hear Dee is doing so well. And if Young and McGuire continue to play well we really don’t have a weak position.

Comment from neal
Time October 1, 2008 at 6:26 PM

And with the addition of Dixon and Brown, plus the maturation of Young, McGuire and Blatche we should be mentally tougher. I think we have made strides in that area in the last few years anyway. We’ve been standing tall in the 4th quarter, rather than fading, as we used to do.

Comment from Tom Mandel
Time October 1, 2008 at 7:59 PM

Nice to hear that DerMarr is doing well — but, I think we have no way to keep him if we keep Dee and Juan. Isn’t that right?

There is no injured reserve in the NBA, so Gil stays on the roster, and 15 is the limit. We have 15 w/ Dee and Juan.

Comment from GlingGling
Time October 1, 2008 at 9:26 PM

Yeah Tom, it’s unfortunate that hard working guys have to get the boot. The Wiz seem determined to keep Juan and it sounds like Dee’s work ethic is through the roof. I’m pretty excited about Dee because you can never go wrong with someone who is giving 100% 100% of the time. Plus apparently he is our “lightning bolt.” Truly something we haven’t had in a good while.

I’m with neal. What appears to be an amazingly improved bench should really show itself in the 3rd and 4th quarters where traditionally we’ve been known to let opponents back in the game. At the beginning of last season there was usually a slump somewhere down the stretch, I never liked seeing that.

It’s so hard to keep things in perspective with Dave and SportzWiz (I don’t know your name ) giving us pretty much nothing but good news.

Let me ask, is there any bad news besides Gil prolonged recover and the odd strain/bump? Anything that hasn’t improved as fast as the the rest of it seems to?

Comment from GlingGling
Time October 1, 2008 at 9:39 PM

NBA.com’s season preview misses quite a bit of what the Wiz are doing to prepare for the upcoming season. They spend ages talking about Gil being out and forget important things like Etan looking good, generally not being knowledgeable about the bench, and how dedicated the Wiz are to defense under Randy Ayers. They got one thing right and that is Blatche being a critical component to this years success.

Comment from GrifonRacing
Time October 1, 2008 at 10:41 PM

GlingGling Gil “IS” our news guy. Before he got here we never got any press at all. That is why, even injured, he is so important to the team.

I got ahead of myself the other day too Tom. I asked Dave during a practice if he thought Demarr looked like he could play the 2/3 positions and he said yes. I dreamed about “our” possible back up at swing player until I realized we already had 15. I guess I’m still used to last year?

Comment from neal
Time October 1, 2008 at 10:44 PM

You got it glinggling. We’ll live or die with internal improvement. And it looks good to me, too.

Hard to tell how important Gil’s absence is. Were we just as good last year because the guys coelesce better w/o him? Or did we offset his absence with better defense?

Comment from GlingGling
Time October 1, 2008 at 10:51 PM

neal, I hope it’s the later. The way I see it Gil’s absence allowed a lot of our players to get a lot better. He didn’t just leave $16 mil on the table he’s been leaving 38 mpg on the table too and that has been very important for our bench. Saying all this Gil has had to endure the pain of being injured during prime years of his career.

Best case scenario, it makes Gil the hungriest guy on the team and he comes back 110% *on top of* the seriously improved bench created by his absence.

The (all)stars would have to align for it to come off that nicely but it’s something I’ll keep it in the back of my mind, the recklessly optimistic back of my mind.

Comment from GlingGling
Time October 1, 2008 at 10:59 PM

Etan helped the bench improve too. Between Gil, Etan, Pech our bench last year had an amazing opportunity to improve (Andray being the primary beneficiary). If all the good news coming out of training camp isn’t just self-praise then it seems like all the injury we suffered has actually put us in a very good position this year.

Comment from Tom Mandel
Time October 2, 2008 at 9:50 AM

DerMarr may not make it with us, but he will make a good living playing basketball — probably overseas. Can’t worry too much about guys who make very big bucks playing a kids’ game. Good for them!!

Doing a quick tour around fan-bases for other teams in their camps, everyone is optimistic as is to be expected. To be much better than last year, we’d need a player to push out of the pack and become *a star*. Can’t be at the 3 or 4, where we already have a couple of the league’s best players. It’s not going to be at the 5, and Antonio is going to rule the 1 spot.

In other words, if Nick Young turns into *a star* this year, we can actually improve over last year by some meaningful margin. I want to believe that’s going to happen.