The Washington Wizards are a bad basketball team but can be an entertaining watch because their defense is breathtakingly awful but they have enough bucket-getters to keep things interesting on nights where shots are falling.
They also are a young team with a lot of players taking on roles they’ve never really had before, which can lead to some funny (or infuriating, depending on your perspective) learning moments. On Monday night, during what became a 142-129 loss to the Milwaukee Bucks, Jordan Poole found himself on the wrong end of one of those learning moments with four minutes to go with the Wizards down 10. After a made Bucks basket, Poole had Kyle Kuzma roll the ball up the floor so he could walk up without burning time off of the shot clock. The only problem was, the clock doesn’t stop after a made basket in the NBA until the two minute mark of the fourth quarter, meaning 15 seconds wound off of the clock before Poole recognized his error — jumping up and down and gesturing at the clock in anger before picking the ball up.
The good news is, he avoided real disaster by quickly picking it up and scoring on a floater. However, it might be time to brush up on the NBA rulebook in Washington to avoid such situations in the future. This isn’t the first time a team has not understood clock rules to a hilarious degree, as a year ago Ja Morant was able to burn 31 seconds off of the game clock just standing over the ball before the Hornets realized they needed to make him pick it up. Time may be a construct, but it is one NBA players need to understand before they start trying to manipulate it.
