Over a four-day stretch that began last Friday, the Washington Wizards lost road games to the Los Angeles Clippers, the Sacramento Kings, and the Golden State Warriors by a combined 68 points, and the NBA barely blinked. The team’s coaching staff and players may have gone sullen, and the team’s fan base may have lost its collective mind, but the league as a whole chalked it up to just another case of Wizards going Wizard.

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Wednesday was supposed to change that. A seemingly alert and angry Wizards team lined up against the only other Eastern Conference playoff contender struggling just as much as the Wizards were (and, spoiler alert, are) – an Indiana team that had lost six straight games. The Pacers then proceeded slap the Pacers around in their own building for three quarters before John Wall’s 24-point second half dragged an unwilling Washington squad back into a tie game during the final stages.

With under ten seconds left, as he’s done for most of the season, George Hill went to work:

As the Wizards fandom quickly noticed, this particular play reminds quite a bit of a game-loser earlier in the year from Oklahoma City’s Russell Westbrook:

Hill and Westbrook have acted as their franchise saviors all season, and the Wizards are a decidedly mediocre team this year. There shouldn’t be too much shame in either of those two guards beating you at the last second, should there?

Well, Bullets Forever’s Jake Whitacre beat me to the spot in pointing out that not only was 7-footer Marcin Gortat on the bench for the final seconds, leaving Nene to both attempt to trap an early screen and roll and dash back to guard the rim, but stellar defensive guard John Wall was kept off the ball for some odd reason.

From Whitacre:

In both situations, Wall was playing with five fouls, so you have to assume Wittman moved him off the ball to keep him from fouling out. But there's some really messed up logic in that decision. For starters, referees almost always swallow their whistles in late game situations, so the risk of Wall fouling out is extremely low. Secondly, even if Wall does foul out, his absence doesn't hurt the team nearly as much as the two free throws he just gave the other team to seal the game. Leaving Wall to cover a standstill shooter in the closing seconds is a self-defeating strategy.

For the second time this season, we've seen Randy Wittman make the classic mistake of overcoaching in the final seconds. Rather than let his best defender try to extend the game by forcing a stop, he left him in the corner on a lesser player to save him for an extra period that's never going to come.

Randy Wittman, to his credit, also decided to stick with his timeout-less team until the very end ha-ha just kidding he turned his back started walking to the locker room directly after Hill’s layup went in even though there were a few seconds left watch:

Wittman’s continued insistence on removing himself from the sinking situation was noticed by Wizards fans even before Wednesday night’s embarrassment. From Chris Thompson’s fantastic pregame column on the Wizards/Pacers clash at TruthAboutIt.Net:

Not surprisingly, nothing he said even nodded in the vague direction of the fundamental and fatal weakness in Washington’s whole basketball system, brutally and embarrassingly exposed by Speights’ comments. In talking about his job, in acknowledging his responsibility to put his team in position to win basketball games, he took a swipe at the effort and professionalism of his players. The team is incapable of playing 48 minutes of solid two-way basketball—on that we can all agree—and the extent of the coach’s responsibility is to exclude those players who can be blamed for this phenomenon. Nevermind that Wittman has had more than 70 games to find out which of his players are willing to grant him this nebulous effort-based boon.

Preaching accountability while being totally unwilling to accept any meaningful accountability for your own actions undermines credibility, like, a lot. If it seems like the Wizards are losing their edge, their confidence, their faith in one another, their common purpose; if it’s true that they’re bitching in timeouts and in the locker room about offensive touches; if their commitment is truly out of whack, maybe it’s time to consider whether these new dynamics flow from the experience of following a head coach who implicitly and constitutionally dismisses accountability. If players look to Wittman for direction, and all they see is a finger pointed back at them bereft of real solutions, there’s nowhere left to go but the wrong way.