The hottest team in the East (save for the Miami Heat, against all odds) will meet the best team in the East on Monday. The Washington Wizards' 17-game home winning streak will be on the line when they host the Cleveland Cavaliers, and star guard John Wall sees it as the biggest regular-season game of his career. From the Washington Post's Candace Buckner:

"I've been in some big (regular season) games before," Wall said Saturday night after the 105-91 win over the New Orleans Pelicans, "but I don't think one is bigger than this one."

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The Cavaliers are "a team that's been playing okay, but they're the defending champs," Wall said. "We know which team we have to chase in the East. We've got a great home streak going on ... It's going to be a packed crowd. A lot of people here. It's on TV. It's going to be an important game for us."

Bradley Beal backed up Wall's assertion about the significance of Monday night while also viewing the Cavaliers more as the hunted than a wounded animal crawling into Washington.

"We're climbing in the rankings and we're going to keep climbing. They're a great team. They're a targeted team with a big red X on their back and we're coming after them too," said Beal, who missed the previous Nov. 11 matchup due to hamstring tightness. "We're excited. We're amped up about it. I'm definitely excited because I didn't play the first game, so I'm looking forward to it."

Wall and the Wizards should be amped up. Over the last month, they've been the best team in their conference, with the league's third-best offense and fifth-best defense. They have had a couple of particularly impressive performances in that stretch -- a 15-point victory over the Boston Celtics and a blowout over the Atlanta Hawks come to mind -- but they haven't had a signature win. Defeating the Cavs would qualify as one of those and serve as a confidence-builder, especially because these two teams could meet in the second round of the playoffs or the conference finals. Heading into a game like this, coach Scott Brooks' message to his players might be about calming down and controlling their emotions rather than trying to dial up the intensity.

Nobody in Cleveland's locker room, however, will be looking at this as the most important regular-season game of his career. The Cavs are focused on improving for the postseason, and this matchup with Washington is just another chance for them to fix some of their bad habits. They're coming off relatively easy wins over the Minnesota Timberwolves and New York Knicks, but they lost to the Dallas Mavericks before that and are 6-7 in their last 13 games. The Wizards aren't their rivals, but beating them would be nice -- it would be Cleveland's first three-game winning streak of the calendar year.

The Cavs, by the way, have only a two-game lead on the Celtics for first in the East. Washington and Toronto are both 2.5 games behind Boston.