It’s currently 20 minutes before the Knicks and Wizards tip-off at MSG. A few minutes ago I caught up with Antawn Jamison in the Washington locker room for his thoughts on the Wiz’s two wins over the vaunted Celtics, Zach Randolph in NY, and his squad’s outlook moving forward…

“When you got a guy like Gilbert who can give you close to 30 and Caron who can give you close to 20, 21, you know sometimes offensively your role is to be the second or third option. I’m one of those guys – whatever it takes to win I’m willing to do it. That was my role for the last couple of years. Like I said with Gilbert going off, and also Caron, it was time for me to get back in that old school scoring mode that I once was in during my Golden State days. And you know, I can do that.

“When the news hit about Zach coming to the Knicks, I just thought that I didn’t want to have to guard him. That’s another tough forward that I’m going to have to guard in addition to Rashard Lewis going to Orlando. I kinda knew I was going to have my work cut out for me as far as defensively.

“But I thought it was a good addition – you know a relentless guy like him who puts the ball in the basket offensively and also gets you some boards. He goes hard, he plays hard, he’s a guy you really have to concentrate on so he doesn’t get into a rhythm.

“To me, a win is a win. To not only beat the Celtics at home after they’ve been playing phenomenally well and for them to have yet lose back-to-back games, and then to go on their homecourt and find a way to get it done says a lot about the character of this team. That doesn’t mean that we’ve arrived. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to stop working hard or that there’s no room for improvement. It shows that this team has a lot of character no matter who’s out there on the court. We did a phenomenal job.

“We played defense and we got some big time buckets from some big time players. Sometimes you can just sum it up that easy. But defensively, the last two basketball games have been phenomenal. [The Celtics] are a team that scores 100 points a game and for us, one game they had their lowest point total of the season and the next game to only allow them a certain amount of points during the last six or seven minutes says a lot about us being focused enough to get a lot of stops and offensively getting baskets when we needed to.

“It’s been a while since I played defense like this. It’s been one of the weak points of my game, but I just knew that in order for us, with the absence of Gilbert, to be a quality team and a team that can really push for a playoff spot, I couldn’t be a liability defensively. We got a new defensive coach who expects a lot out of us as individuals and as a team and sometimes you gotta really concentrate on the defensive end and make sure that you can be the type of team that you want to become.

“Antonio [Daniels] has been doing a great job as far as running our offense and getting us in the proper positions to make plays. You know we’ve been together for a while – we got good team chemistry. Guys trust each other, they pull for each other. I’ve been in this league for a while, and a lot of teams don’t have that. But we got two guys who have bee non the All-Star team with the absence of Gilbert. So we’re just having fun and doing what it takes to win.”