I was actually at this game, and quickly realized this wasn’t going to be a fun game to watch irl. Here are my 5 takeaways from the blowout in the district on Saturday:

1. We were very winded from the game against the Bucks. This was very apparent in the sloppy play. There were a lot of stupid TOs. There were a lot of sloppy passes. A lot of mistimed unforced TOs. A lot of airballs as well. Lot of shots were way off even from our sharpshooters. It seemed like a team that was running on like 5 hours of sleep, and that probably was the truth. Can’t blame them for being tired after going down to the wire against a contender the night before, but that was undoubtedly the main culprit in the demise of the Wiz in this game.
2. The Hawks got every shot they wanted, and not only got the shots they wanted but made them too. The Wiz on the second night of a back to back, played basically no defense. The Hawks got everything they wanted and there was little resistance. The Hawks were hitting some crazy shots later on too, at which point you kind of just had to laugh and say “it’s not our day.” Some crazy fadeaways from Bogey and Trae and DeAndre. We were terminally cooked.
3. Nobody on the Wiz scored more than 13 points. Take a guess who led the team in scoring. It was Jared Butler. A true who he play for sorta guy. Butler was nice to his credit, but he got all his points in garbage time. WUJ waived the white flag unusually early in this one as the starters sat the entire 4th quarter and 3 min of the 3rd as well. This gave all of our deep bench and third stringers a lot of useful playtime and developmental time. Bilal was the one who got the lion’s share of the minutes. I would’ve loved to see Kispert and Deni out there, but by the time the third quarter ended, Kispert was already 1-10 from three, and Deni was 3-8. It wasn’t their best games by any measure and I don’t blame WUJ to keep them out to prevent it from being a bad game to their worst games (particularly for Kispert). Even Kuz never got it going, which was surprising to see, because the Hawks don’t really have anyone to guard him. It just seemed like he didn’t have the juice to take over and be the “guy” that he usually is and has been up to this point.
4. Gaff was cooking early on, but for some inexplicable reason we took him out early and did not go back to him. It didn’t really make sense to me, because in the first half, it seemed like the Hawks had no answer for the guy. He only played 18 minutes which was nonsensical to me. I don’t know what WUJ has against the guy, but a common trend this season has been the lack of Gaff play. I get it “he’s not conditioned or primed to play 35 minutes”, but 18 ? Really? You can’t convince me he shouldn’t at least command 25 minutes a night. Very questionable decision making as has been all season from WUJ and Co.
5. In his return from injury, Bilal looked decently nice. He didn’t quite get into double figures but 7 points on 3-5 shooting in 31 minutes isn’t TOO bad. He had a BLK and STL as well for his efforts, and was very good on the defensive end. I was impressed at how calm the kid looked in real life, and how collected and methodical all his movements looked. I really want to see him get 8-10 shots a game as the season progresses, and hope to see him put up 10-12 ppg, because he has all the tools to do it. It’s just a matter of giving him the ball and the opportunity to grow and score.

Overall, a true blowout, but not disappointing considering the circumstances. You know what they say though,“there is no rest for the weary.” We’ll have to see how the Wiz cope with these B2Bs. To be fair JP was out, but with how inconsistent he’s been and how much of a net negative he’s been overall, can’t put the loss on his absence and pretend like he woulda made a difference. We were just gassed. It was interesting that he wasn’t even on the bench though… Anyhow, I’ll see y’all tonight in the Tank Bowl when we take our tanking brethren the Pistons.