2. Are John Wall and Brad Beal the best backcourt in the playoffs?
First: I really like the name Brad Beal. I propose that we begin moving away from Bradley Beal and toward Brad Beal. It sounds so strong and so slick. It sounds like the name of a character in a John Grisham novel. If Bradley Beal started going by Brad Beal, it’d probably be two, maybe three weeks before he started averaging 37 points per game. It’d be like when Ron Artest changed his name to Metta World Peace between the 2011 season and the 2012 season and then averaged fewer points and fewer steals, shot worse from the free throw line, shot worse from 3, and also missed more games, except the opposite.
Second: Yes. As of this exact moment, they are the best duo in the playoffs. The top five goes: John Wall and Brad Beal > Steph and Klay (I anticipate this will change by the end of the next round) > James Harden and Pit Beverley (since we’re changing names, I’m going to go ahead and reinforce the idea of
changing Pat’s name to Pit) > Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum > Russell Westbrook and Russell Westbrook.
Couple of stats: Wall and Beal and LeBron and Kyrie are the only teammate pairs in the top 10 in playoff points per game right now. Wall and Beal also combined to score 20 of the Wizards’ final 21 points in their Game 2 victory, which gave the Wizards a 2–0 lead over the team that knocked them out of the playoffs the last time they made it in. Also, John Wall dunked on Dennis Schröder and then asked him,
“fukk is wrong with you, boy?” afterward. (It’s my new favorite time a Wizards player was caught cussing on camera, beating out when the Wizards played the Raptors in the 2015 playoffs and Beal was hollering that
Kyle Lowry couldn’t “fukk with” him.) Also, and this isn’t specifically a right-now thing, but they’re 10–1 in playoff first rounds. (If you want to point out that Beal has not had that great of a shooting percentage during the first three quarters of playoff games so far this year, that’s fine, but I’m going to point out that he’s scored 28 of his 53 total points in the fourth quarter.)
