Wizards Have Lower Seed, but a Higher Expectation

Picking the Wizards over the Cavaliers in six games makes no sense, especially given the bare facts. The Wizards are the lower-seeded team, having won eight fewer regular season games than the Cavs. They don't even have the best player in the series, inarguably LeBron James.

Yet, as the NBA playoffs begin today in Cleveland on national television, the pressure is somehow on Washington. You can sense it in the tone of most NBA observers, the majority of whom are picking against James and his postseason newbies.

The Wizards, not the Cavaliers, have more to prove and disprove surrounding the perceptions of their organization.

While Washington got rid of its mutt-franchise stigma a year ago, knocking off Chicago in six games to advance to the second round, this is LeBron's maiden playoff voyage. It's a place his club has not been since 1998. The thinking is, he needs to play otherworldly and go six or seven games, then take solace in the fact that it took Michael Jordan three years to finally get out of the first round.

Gilbert Arenas is a two-time all-star. He's supposed to be here. For Arenas to be seen as a bona fide upper-echelon player and not just an indefensible scorer, he needs to advance his team to the conference semifinals. That's what maturing supernovas do.

Arenas cannot turn this into a game of H-O-R-S-E between him and James, who should be the league's most valuable player. He can't worry about his name being below LeBron's on the TV marquee or get caught up in a personal duel with a player as gifted offensively as himself. He needs to lead, get to the free throw line and defend much more aggressively than he did at times during the regular season.

Antawn Jamison, with as many big shots as he has hit for the Wizards in two seasons, has to prove his body and his game are not in decline at age 29.

I love Jamison's offensive arsenal, his use of trajectory and angles, those off-the-wrong-foot floaters that somehow find the net. He's got so much old-school junk in his game the next time he releases that unorthodox finger-roll the Verizon Center speakers should start blaring the theme from "Sanford and Son."

But Jamison will be 30 in June, and it's common knowledge around the league that if the Wizards are ever going to procure a premier big man they have to part with a proven scorer. Caron Butler at 26 and Arenas at 24 are going nowhere, leaving Jamison as the only real trade bait. A monster playoffs, in my mind, takes him off the market.

All Brendan Haywood has to prove is that he still wants to be in Washington. The season-long feuding with Coach Eddie Jordan -- all the criticism Haywood received for not being rugged enough at 7 feet -- will dissipate if he can stop 7-3 Zydrunas Ilgauskas from dominating the inside during the series.

Haywood has become the scapegoat for every nonaggressive behavior trait associated with Washington. He's been called "Brenda" and worse, which kind of crosses the misogyny line, no? Some have even deigned to say that calling Haywood "Brenda" is disrespectful to every hardworking American woman named Brenda.

We won't go there. We will say that Brendan Haywood needs to get his rump on Ilgauskas and move him off the blocks if he wants to remain a Wizard.