Story By: Erin Zollars
Photos By: Sol Tucker
Atlanta, GA–
For the Wizards the past two games have been nothing less than a solid team effort, today in Game 3 on the road, well the Wizards looked as if they left their team effort back in D.C as Atlanta opened the game with domination and cruised to a 116-98 victory.
Paul Millsap scored 29 points, Dennis Schroder had 27 and Atlanta delivered an early knockout blow in a 116-98 victory Saturday, slicing the Wizards’ lead to 2-1 in the opening-round playoff matchup.
Atlanta pushed out to a double-digit lead before the game was 3 minutes old and stretched the margin to 38-13 with just under a minute to go in the opening quarter on Schroder’s 3-pointer. This was the tone for the game. The lone highlight of the game
Again in this game, the heat between player exchanges was part of the post game mixture of both teams, this time Morris and Milsap going at each other.
”He’s a crybaby,” Morris said afterward. ”You get all the calls when you’re a crybaby. That’s how it went tonight.”
Those comments were quickly relayed to Millsap at the postgame news conference.
”It definitely got personal now,” he replied, before offering some unsolicited advice to Morris: ”Take his loss and go back to the hotel, be ready for the next game.”
Regardless of the comments after the game, perhaps Milsap was commenting on the entire team that could use a rest after this game.
Again the Wizards had foul issues late in the game and Jason Smith was fouled out before midway of the 4th quarter forcing Scott Brooks to make some adjustments that just did not seem to work today at all.
”They jumped on us in that first period,” Wizards coach Scott Brooks said. ”Their sense of urgency was very high. I wouldn’t say we came out relaxed, but we came out missing shots, and we let that affect out defense.”
