NBA Betting – Washington Wizards at Charlotte Hornets
By Zack Garrison in News
Updated: January 17, 2018 at 9:40 am ESTPublished:
Washington Wizards (-1, 186.5) at Charlotte Hornets
The Washington Wizards (31-19) will look for revenge tonight when they meet the Charlotte Hornets (21-27) at Time Warner Cable Arena (7:00 p.m. Eastern).
On Monday, the Hornets – who are without star point guard Kemba Walker for six weeks due to a knee injury – rolled into D.C. and downed the Wizards, 92-88. That win continued what had been an amazing month of January for the Hornets; the team went 10-4, including 5-1 sans Walker. Walker’s replacement, Brian Roberts, led the team in scoring on Monday, putting up  18 points; Gerald Henderson chipped in with 17.
“We have a couple of guys who are going to have to score every night,” Charlotte coach Steve Clifford said. “Al [Jefferson]’s going to have to score, I believe [Henderson]Â will score every night, and then I think it’ll be different guys different nights.”
Charlotte’s hot-streak has moved the team up to seventh in the Eastern Conference, though they are just one game up on ninth-place Brooklyn and trail sixth-place Milwaukee by 5.5.
Meanwhile, the Washington Wizards have played uninspired basketball in the last couple of weeks, and their record reflects it; the team is just 4-6 in its last ten and has lost three in a row coming into tonight.
The players recognize that the level of hustle has dropped off since the start of the year.
“We are not hungry,” said shooting guard Bradley Beal. “We are not the same team we were coming into training camp and to start the year off. I don’t think we still have that same heart and desire to prove ourselves and put teams away and show that we are still about business. I think we definitely took several steps back in these last five games.”
The odds have Washington as a one-point road favorite, despite their current rough patch. Looking at the trends, Charlotte has beaten Washington in each of the last ten meetings. With that in mind, the Hornets and the points (+1) looks like the play.
(Photo credit:Â Keith Allison (Flickr: Bradley Beal, John Wall) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons. Photo has been cropped.)
Sports Writer
Zack is a tour guide whose favorite sports are football, baseball, and golf. He enjoys giving obnoxious commentary during games and hopes to some day write a book about sports. His favorite underdog victory was the Diamondbacks beating the Yankees in game 7 of the World Series.
