My Sixth Man is a Blog

The Washington Wizards may not know how to play defense worth a damn, but they do have one asset in spades that other teams lack -- political magazine writers moonlighting as basketbloggers prepared to defend them from John Hollinger's smears -- so let me quote Chris Orr from The Plank on his prediction that the Wizards will go 33-49:

Hollinger comes to his cataclysmic conclusion by making incontrovertibly true observations (the Wizards play atrocious defense) and downright odd ones--e.g., suggesting Caron Butler is going to get worse because he just had "a career year at 27." First off, Butler has improved every year for the last three years, so this wasn't some kind of strange outlier. (Indeed, the "career year" was only marginally better than his previous year--18.41 PER to 17.11 PER, using Hollinger's own vaunted stat for overall performance.) As for the fact that his best year so far came at 27(!), I'm not even sure whether Hollinger thinks that's too old or too young; it seems to me a pretty typical place to have a (to date) career year.

The real question, however, is whether or not we can proclaim the Wizards to be the Association's bloggiest team. Agent Zero himself is a blogger. Dan Steinberg's DC Sports Bog for The Washington Post sets the pace for newspaper sports blogging. And, of course, the team has its following among the world's highly trained professional political pundits. Advantage: Wizardsphere.