Something amazing is happening to the Washington Wizards that deserves a little more attention, and we can think about this instead of wondering whether the massive Midwest storm will cancel the Bobcats' game in Detroit. Look at the Wizards' records at home and on the road.
HOME: 13-10
ROAD: 0-24
On the face of it, that's nothing short of amazing. Not only has Washington lost every road game this season, they've been blown out a lot, too, with only one game that went to overtime, and one other game that was as close as four points at the end of regulation.
What conclusions can we draw from that? The Wiz stink on the road! They've got an unusually strong home court advantage! They fight with each other in hotel lobbies!
Those conclusions could be true and directly responsible for the difference. However, I tend to believe the home/road split is just one of a series of outcomes likely to happen given the Wizards' talent level mixed with -- deep breath -- randomness.
Stuff happens over the course of 82 games, let alone 47. In a five or seven game playoff series, the clearly superior team is going to win it the vast majority of the time, and then every decade or so, the 2007 Warriors or the 1994 Nuggets happen. Both of those teams were pretty good to begin with (Nugs took the Jazz to seven games in their next series, Dubz played Jazz tight in the next round), but they eliminated #1 seeds in the first round, which simply doesn't happen in the NBA. If the first round was best of three, it'd happen more often.
All that's to say that there likely isn't a discrete reason the Wizards are over .500 at home and winless on the road. There likely isn't a reason Raymond Felton's True Shooting Percentage was at 60% earlier in the year. And there likely isn't a reason a bird pooped directly into my open palm the first day of school in 1997. The odds may have been relatively against such an event happening to me, specifically, but the odds that it would happen to someone, somewhere, at some time, were probably staggeringly good.