Washington fires head coach Eddie Jordan after nightmarish 1-10 start

SCOTT JACOBS

Generally the rule of thumb in the NBA is that mediocrity gets you fired.

Look around, the third longest tenured coach in the NBA had six years under his belt, and today he was relieved of his head coaching duties after his Wizards got off to a horrendous start.  When you win one game out of your first eleven, no matter what the situation, you’re generally likely to get canned.  Even if Jordan has taken the Wizards to the East playoffs four years in a row with teams hampered by major injuries, it wasn’t enough to give him a chance to get out of this woeful start.

The longest tenured head coach in the East (if you can believe it) Jordan was ousted almost as quickly as another Jordan once was: Michael.  The moral to the story: well there isn’t really one.

But how dumb does the Wizards front office look right about now?  After an offseason in which they handed out ridiculous contracts to keep a mediocre team intact, the Wiz are feeling the blow of their decisions. The major mistake came when they handed out an absurd 6 year, $111 million contract in the off-season to oft-injured Gilber Arenas.  Arenas is a brilliant player, a clutch shooter, and he’s got a ton of talent.  But he has been unable to stay healthy, and handing out such a long contract to a guy who’s had some major injury problems the last few years has already proven problematic.  Arenas is expected to be out until at least January, if not later.

It’s an unfortunate situation, but Washington isn’t even a great team when they are fully healthy, which is rare if ever.  So this day was kind of inevitable.

Expectations were too high for a team that had pretty much peaked over the last few years.  And to think, it could have been worse.

The Wizards originally offered Arenas a 6 year, $125 million deal deal in the offseason, but as a team player he settled for $14 million less.  Still, the Wizards are in major trouble and don’t have a lot of wiggle room out of these bad contracts.  And when your team is handicapped by tough contracts, and a miserable start someone has to take the fall.

Today that fall guy was Eddie.

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