Washington Wizards Stumbling Through Rough Season WASHINGTON - On Jan. 10, when the Washington Wizards won their first game of this truncated N.B.A. season after eight losses, the talk in the locker room was of relief, but also of candy and coins. Two weeks and one coach later, the talk after the team's third victory was about cigarettes. If nothing else, the Wizards are keeping things unpredictable as they stumble along the bottom of the Eastern Conference. Washington's first victory came on the night of the New Hampshire primary. At that point, the Wizards were as close to a sure bet as there was in the Beltway, where everyone was struggling to figure out the race for the Republican presidential nomination. Candidates were surging and falling back, but the Wizards were losing every game. That night, though, they soundly beat a Toronto Raptors team playing its third game in four evenings. Local reporters buzzed, asking various Wizards about a so-called Game Changer coin that was given to the Czech rookie Jan Vesely for his role in the victory. "It's a big old coin that says "Game Changer," " Wizards point guard John Wall said matter-of-factly to reporters hoping for more of a revelation. A few minutes before and a few feet away, Wall's backcourt mate Nick Young, the team's leading scorer, was talking about Twizzlers. "The Twizzlers helped today," Young said of the snack he shared with his teammates. Except the candy was not authentic Hershey's Twizzlers, but a knockoff brand. "But they're original red," Young said. So it goes in Washington, where the coach, Flip Saunders, was gone two weeks later, replaced by one of his assistants, Randy Wittman, who had a career winning percentage of 32.6 as a head coach. The last time the Wizards made the postseason was 2008, and it is far-fetched to think they will this season. Wittman himself seems bluntly realistic. When asked about his past struggles as an interim coach in the N.B.A., with the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2006-7, he said, "The last time, I tried to invent the game of basketball, and I learned from that." When the Wizards picked up their third win of the season in his coaching debut against the woeful, depleted Charlotte Bobcats - flip-flopping the two teams at the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings - Wittman used cigarette smoking as a metaphor to describe his team's reckless play and reluctance to make the extra pass. "If you're a smoker, you ain't going to drop those cigarettes the first day," he said. I've got to help them kick some of these bad habits that we're into. That's all it is. We've fallen into playing a way that is not conducive for us to win. So when I see them pull out a cigarette, I've got to take it out of their mouth. That's basically what I'm trying to do. The Wizards beat Charlotte again Saturday night, 102-99, and, at 4-16, have moved ahead of the Detroit Pistons, too, in the East. For the Wizards, the best thing about the season may be that there are only 46 games left. They are a team filled with young players whose mentors, for better or worse, are veterans with expiring contracts. It is a tough combination, and 10 games into the season the Wizards held a team dinner to straighten things out. A day later, as the Wizards prepared to play the formidable 76ers in Philadelphia, the veteran Mo Evans spoke of progress made at the dinner and said: "Now, if we criticize John Wall for not making the right play, he's not going to backlash and retract and shut down for three plays, because he knows that we care about him. Because we spent that time, and invested it off the court. "It's a whole work in progress here in Washington," Evans added. Hours later, the Wizards produced their worst loss of the season, 120-89, in a game that featured an 84-46 run by the 76ers and a postgame interview session with Saunders, then the coach, that lasted all of 75 seconds. That defeat came two days after the team followed up the initial Toronto victory by scoring a franchise-low 64 points against a Chicago Bulls team missing Derrick Rose. Left to explain what happened against Philadelphia, Wall said, "One game we might be together, the next four or five we might be separated." Wall, the No. 1 overall pick in the 2010 draft, took only eight shots against the 76ers. "Trying to lead my team," he said.