Players, teams in dogged pursuit of downtime as NBA season nears ends

Written By Sportal
#John Wall

Why are the Washington Wizards having one of their best seasons in the last 20 years? You can point to Scott Brooks, the new coach. You can note that Otto Porter ranks No. 2 in the NBA in 3-point percentage. Or you can talk about Marcin Gortat averaging a double-double. They're all factors.

MORE: Kawhi making MVP case with clutch performances

But they're excelling because their two best players have been on the floor most of the season. Really, that's all.

John Wall has played in 59 of the team's 61 games this season. Bradley Beal has played in 57 of 61.

They're Washington's bell cows, the guys that get the big basket or make the big stop. It's the same for every team in the league -- when your best players make it through most of a season, you tend to have your best seasons. And thus Washington leads the Southeast Division for the first time years, with the likelihood of a top-four seed in the playoffs an increasingly distinct possibility.

It's new territory for Beal, who'd missed a whole season's worth of games -- 81 -- in his first four NBA seasons. He's never played more than 73 games in a season, and he only did that once. The other three have been lost to stress reactions in his legs and hamstring pulls and broken noses and concussions.

"This is the first year I've had a really, really healthy season," Beal said. "I'm excited. What we've been doing is terrific. They've been telling me about resting, taking care of my body, lifting, eating right. A lot of stuff has changed for me, and resting is one of them. I always used to think I was young, I'm all right, I've got fresh legs. I learned fast. You learn that it's the total opposite."

The most important part, and hardest to pull off, of being great is showing up. But if it was a matter of pride in the old days to play all 82 games in a regular season, it's folly today to push things. And this is the time of the season when discretion is most decidedly the better part of valor.

This is when healthy players often sit, as teams try to lower their workloads before the playoffs, or keep them from getting hurt before the playoffs, when an injury can have devastating consequences.