Orlando Magic @ Washington Wizards

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The Orlando Magic have lost three straight meaningful games for the first time in two years. This was supposed to be a time for the Magic to make up ground in the Eastern Conference because they will be playing a team under .500 for the fifth straight game when they take on the Washington Wizards on Friday night. The Wizards have been the talk of the league because of Gilbert Arenas’ suspension.

The Wizards, enter the game with an extremely disappointing record of 11-22 while the Magic are 24-11. The Wizards have played the majority of their games on the road and are just 6-13 there. Orlando is 13-4 at home.

Tip-off from the Verizon Center in Washington D.C. is set for 7:00 pm EST and the game will be shown by FSN. As always, if you can’t watch the game, you can hear it locally on WDBO 580 AM and in Spanish on WONQ AM 1030.

The Line: Orlando -7

Starters:

Orlando

Dwight Howard
Rashard Lewis
Matt Barnes
Vince Carter
Jameer Nelson

Washington

Fabricio Oberto
Antawn Jamison
Caron Butler
Nick Young
Randy Foye

The Magic need to make some changes to the team’s effort and attitude in order to improve and the players discussed the team’s recent struggles after Wednesday night’s loss to Toronto.

The Wizards have lost five of their last six games.

Before the season started, Sean Deveney of the Sporting News ranked the Wizards ahead of the Magic of the Magic in his power rankings.

Washington has not been an especially good offensive team. They score 99.1 points per game on 44.4% shooting and rank 23rd in efficiency. And that was before the suspension of Guard Gilbert Arenas. Arenas was leading the team in both scoring (22.6 points per game) and assists (7.2 assists per game). Earl Watson replaced Arenas in the starting lineup against the Cleveland Cavaliers on Friday and scored 10 points and dished out six assists. Boykins is averaging 8.2 points per game and 3.3 assists per game in 25 games this season. Although Boykins started, Randy Foye logged 28 minutes off of the bench and scored 18 points on 8-of-12 shooting.

It will be up to veteran forwards Antawn Jamison and Caron Butler to carrying the scoring load. Jamison is having another excellent season, averaging 21.3 points per game and 8.2 points per game. Butler has been solid – he’s scoring 16.6 points per game. No other Wizards player averages over 10 points per game. Former Magic Guard Mike Miller has the potential to do so but he has played in just nine games because of a calf injury. He has been active since January 5th, but has yet to play.

Defensively, Washington ranks 21st in efficiency and gives up 103.1 points per game, so this will be a good game for the Magic to attempt to get their offense back on track in.

Brendan Haywood isn’t much of a scorer but he’s a big body who averages 10.2 rebounds per game and 2.31 blocks per game so he should present a nice challenge for Dwight Howard, who has been struggling as of late.
Haywood and Jamison are good rebounds but that’s about it. The Wizards are frequently outrebounded and have a rebound rate of 49%. The Magic should be able to take advantage of that.

Orlando should be able to bounce back against a poor team missing their leading scorer Gilbert Arenas.

(Andrew Melnick is Howard the Dunk’s lead blogger and a contributor at NFL Mocks Subscribe to his RSS feed and add him on Twitter to follow him daily.)