Story By: Sol Tucker
Photos By: Sol Tucker
Washington, D.C–
Coming into the season, many people questioned the depth of the Wizards and ability to find scorers other than Bradley Beal and Kyle Kuzma. Well tonight, the Wizards improved to 3-1 with a 120-99 victory over the Pistons through a balance scoring act.
They would have to go without Bradley Beal for quite a bit of the game as his action was limited to due to back soreness.
“It’s always tough to go a stretch without Brad,” coach Wes Unseld Jr. said. “He was able to come back into the game and kind of gave us some life. The changing defenses throughout — last season gave us a lot of problems. I thought we handled it a little better tonight.”
Watching the game closely and analyzing the scoring performance right out gate, it was mostly all Wizards and Kristaps Porzingis.
Porzingis had another solid overall game and wasn’t forced to carry most of the scoring load for the team. He threw down a one-handed alley-oop dunk from Beal in the first quarter and finished 8 of 13 from the field.
“Decent win for us — a game that we’re supposed to win and we took care of business,” Porzingis said. “Would have been better if we got the lead earlier and not let them stay around in the game. … That way we could give more minutes to the guys that maybe don’t play as many minutes.”
Wizards fans got their first look at Johnny Davis, their first-round draft pick this season. Davis just played 2:54 and missed both of his shot attempts. Davis was the No. 10 pick out of Wisconsin. He did not play in any of Washington’s first three games.
“We are going to be looking at a few different variations of this bench,” said Unseld Jr. We have to see what works best and from there we can better manage the minutes on all of our starters.
