Wizards Will Tread Lightly

With Nothing at Stake, Avoiding Injuries Is Goal of Finale

With nothing at stake for Washington or Orlando, veteran guard Antonio Daniels believes the Wizards should have only one goal in tonight's regular season finale: Get out of the game healthy.

"The biggest thing at this time of the year when you know what's going on is to stay healthy and not have any injuries in that last game of the season," said Daniels, who has been playing with a torn ligament in his left wrist that will require surgery after the season. "That's the biggest concern. You want to go into Cleveland as healthy as possible with all of the firepower we have. We want to get Gilbert [Arenas] healthy, get Caron [Butler] healthy and then we'll have those couple of days before Game 1 to get our chemistry together and get ready to go. It's the best time of the year."

The Wizards (43-38) are locked into the fifth seed in the Eastern Conference and know they will open a best-of-seven series in Cleveland on Saturday or Sunday. (Dates and times of all playoff matchups will be announced early tomorrow morning, hours after the conclusion of the regular season.)

Arenas sat out Monday's win over Indiana to rest his surgically repaired left knee while Butler missed his second straight game because he was still bothered by a right knee bruise suffered when he banged knees with Detroit's Rodney Stuckey on Friday night.

Also banged up is shooting guard DeShawn Stevenson, who suffered a bruised tailbone during Friday's loss at Detroit after taking a hard foul from Pistons forward Jason Maxiell. Stevenson played 32 minutes during Saturday's win over Philadelphia and made his 249th straight start Monday night against Indiana but left the game early in the third quarter and did not return.

"It's been nagging him for a few days," Coach Eddie Jordan said. "We didn't go through a lot of shoot-around [Monday morning] and we didn't practice [Sunday] so it stiffened up on him."

X-rays taken on Stevenson's lower back revealed no structural damage and he is listed as day-to-day; Wizards fans should not be surprised if Stevenson is in the starting lineup tonight.

The rugged veteran has already played through a sore knee and a severe ankle sprain this season and indicated earlier in the season that it would take something other than an injury to stop his streak, which is now the second longest in the NBA behind only Detroit's Tayshaun Prince (353).

"It's probably going to take something like me getting benched for being late to the team bus or something like that," Stevenson said. "I don't like missing games."

Following Monday's win, Jordan indicated that he would like to see Arenas and Butler play "some" tonight if they are healthy and also said that his plan is to give his top eight or nine players limited minutes before turning the game over to rookies Nick Young, Dominic McGuire and Oleksiy Pecherov and third-year forward-center Andray Blatche.

"That's what we're looking at right now," Jordan said. "Get our bench some minutes and then hope that nobody gets hurt."

For his part, Daniels said tonight will be about working up a good sweat before taking a seat. He doesn't plan to make any of his kamikaze drives to the basket that so often end up with him crashing to the court.

"I think that's safe to say," Daniels said with a grin. "You won't hear me say that often but like I said, this is my 11th year, I've been down this road before. Our biggest asset going into the playoffs is our health, and we don't need to take that for granted because we've been hit by the injury bug numerous times. We know that we need to go into Cleveland as healthy as possible. After all that we've gone through these last couple of seasons, the injuries have to be behind us."