Unseld Has Bullets Playing Hard, and Winning

I’m not afraid to admit it when I’ve made a mistake, having had some practice in that area.

But I don’t feel so bad on this occasion, because my mistake was about the Washington Bullets, who appreciate, as few can, a really good blunder. Give them a draft pick, and they’ll squander it. Their good trades backfire; their bad ones couldn’t get through airport security.

And so, when I wrote last fall that the Bullets would win 22 games this season, I made the same kind of prediction the Bullets made when they suggested Muggsy Bogues would be an All-Star point guard.

It turns out, of course, the Bullets could win 40 games. You try to explain it.

They have no center, which is to say they have Charles Jones, one of the many Joneses, who is a backup power forward if he’s in the league at all. Of course, he’s far superior to Dave Feitl, the would-be Bullets center who came to town in the ill-fated (which is to say, dumb) trade for Manute Bol.

Their power forward, Terry Catledge, is, like Jones, a backup power forward on a decent team.

Darrell Walker, the point guard, is having a spectacular season playing out of position. He is, on most teams, a shooting guard coming off the bench.

How do you win without a true center or point guard?

How do you win with John Williams, a real talent, who should be a small forward, playing big forward and center and even point guard?

How do you win with a roster that has expansion team written all over it and win to the point where you might finish .500 and where you’ve played, in the second half of the season, among the upper third of the teams in the league?

Well, there is Bernard King, of course, whose comeback is the stuff of legend. The King is dead, long live the King. He has been a leader, a go-to guy, a winner. He matters.

And there is shooting guard Jeff Malone, who does just what a shooting guard is supposed to do, except better than most.

But the real answer is not in the personnel, which hardly separates the Bullets from the San Antonios and the Clippers of the world. The answer is they play hard. They play hard on Tuesday nights in Indiana. They play hard before a home crowd against Cleveland.

And the credit for that has to go to the coach, Wes Unseld. Who else?

What I like about Unseld is he says he’s still learning his job. He’s not interested in being proclaimed a genius, only one who coaches as hard as he played. He believes in the work ethic, as does his star, King. Everyone has come to believe the same way.

It’s an interesting league this season, which may be a watershed. Certainly, there are a number of Coach of the Year candidates.

With a patchwork lineup not much better than the Bullets’, Golden State, under Don Nelson, has had a winning season. Cotton Fitzsimmons, who was basically run out of San Antonio, has made a contender of Phoenix this season, one year after the Suns went 28-54. Adding Tom Chambers and Kevin Johnson didn’t hurt, either.

For much of the year, Cleveland had the best record in the league. The Cavaliers have talent, but Coach Lenny Wilkens had to help teach them how to win. But winning awards isn’t as important as accomplishment, and Unseld has accomplished as much as any.

What’s different about this season is that the Boston Celtics, without Larry Bird, are fading in the East, and the Los Angeles Lakers, in Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s last gasp, are struggling to stay atop the West.

Before Isiah Thomas suffered a broken hand in a bad Mike Tyson imitation, I thought the Detroit Pistons were a cinch to win the NBA. Now, if the Pistons fall, it could be the Lakers, the Cavaliers, the Suns, the Jazz, maybe the Knicks. Never have there been more legitimate contenders.

It won’t be the Bullets, of course, for which they can be grateful. It would have been an especially cruel twist for this team to have so overachieved and then have to settle for another one-round appearance in the playoffs and a draft pick in the middle of the first round. By missing the playoffs, as now seems certain, they are in the lottery and in position to pick a player that can help them.

This is the year. The Bullets’ first-round pick next year belongs to Dallas, in exchange for Jay Vincent -- another in a series of great trades. Unfortunately, this does not look to be an exceptional year in the draft, and there’s no sure bet on who is No. 1, although it could well be Danny Ferry, the son of Bullets General Manager Bob Ferry. That would be an interesting development.

The Bullets can ill afford to blow this one. Of course, they are on a roll, having hired Wes Unseld out of the front office, making him their vice president-coach. No one could say that wasn’t a great decision. Of course, you could also say the Bullets were due.