--- title: "Wizards vs Hawks Recap" subtitle: "The soup tastes more like an 8th-10th seed." author: "Riley Leff" url: "https://rileyleff.com/blog/wizards-vs-hawks-2026-11-04" published: "2026-11-05" series: null tags: ["Basketball", "NBA", "Wizards"] --- # Wizards vs Hawks Recap *The soup tastes more like an 8th-10th seed.* [Wizards vs Hawks, 2026/11/4](https://www.nba.com/game/atl-vs-was-0022600174/box-score), no Jalen Johnson. > **Figure:** View of the court from a lower-level seat at Capital One Arena before tipoff, with a drumline on the floor beneath the center-hung scoreboard I came away very impressed with AJ. In person, he’s roughly the size of a pickup truck, big enough to bump Lu Dort and move him. Before he drives, he coils up to explode to the rim, but he can hang in that coiled state for a moment to read the help defense and locate cutting teammates. The help defense already reacts a lot to his drives, and I like his balance of playmaking and chiseling his way to the bucket. He missed a few bunnies after stumbling out of the carnage he leaves in his wake, but I figure with a bit more strength and balance he’ll settle in as an elite finisher. I haven’t seen many players his age create rim opportunities like these. He already has a few nice midrange counters off of his drives and he looks really comfortable shooting them. This was against an undersized and wingy Hawks team, so I’d like to see how he looks against a Gobert or a Clingan or something. His 3-point shot is a little flat and inconsistent, as are his free throws. He will generate so so so many free throws. Improving his FT% will pay dividends. He was far more active defensively than advertised, and hilariously threw a lob to AD immediately after AD rolled his ankle. Give the old man a break! What’s going on with Tre Johnson? He’s ostensibly there to shoot threes, but he seems to believe that his job is to pump fake threes in order to take lots of very difficult twos. The point of having an elite shooter is to tilt your team’s shot distribution better, not worse. Wizards need more 3PA, make it happen, Tre. I love Will Riley’s game but it’s not clear what his role is on this team. Every time he touched the ball he would just dribble it back out and dump it off to Trae. He had some nice moments defending the point of attack, staying down against a bunch of CJ McCollum fakes before sliding back to interfere with the next action. But he also made a few mistakes on that end, notably peeling off a wide-open Corey Kispert in transition to help with a cutter that was (from my POV) reasonably within AD’s territory. I’m a big fan of Will Riley’s rambling adventures to the rim but the court is a bit cluttered for him on this team and he isn’t being very assertive about his skillset. Every time I watch Bub I’m not quite sure what Bub is doing. Anthony Davis is an incredible basketball player. A healthier Wizards offense probably relies less on dumping him the ball 13 feet from the basket and hoping he makes yet another beautiful turnaround middy. Defensively, Alex Sarr + Anthony Davis on the court at the same time is like two-factor authentication. You’ll see AD get lifted higher in the paint, someone sneaks behind him from the dunker spot, yet they still get erased by our second giant shot-blocker. After years of watching a very thin Wizards frontcourt, this feels like luxury. The numbers don’t yet indicate a big difference defensively between both of them vs just one of them, but the sample sizes are quite small, especially if you remove any Ayton minutes from the equation. Sarr and AD occupy similar places on the court, and the net result is that Sarr does not really know where to be or what to do on offense. In person, you can see all these slight miscues: he wants to fade but Trae needs him to roll, now he’s in position for a rebound but so is everybody else and the paint is too crowded for a second-side drive. I don’t think this is too negative of a referendum on Sarr, this is just a new challenge for him (and the coaching staff) to figure out. I remain a Sarr optimist. I now understand why DeAndre Ayton has been so infuriating to his various fanbases. He stands straight up the whole game, is often the last guy up and down the court, and catches the ball with absolutely no intention of doing anything. I saw him get a catch within ~dunkable range against a smaller defender only to kick out and re-post into a worse position. It sucks because he could just choose to not do that stuff. Get him a neuralink and get me a PS5 controller and we can make something happen. Kyshawn George is clearly an all-star waiting to happen. So poised and balanced. There’s a potential Jaylen/Jayson dynastic wing situation brewing in DC between him and AJ: | On court | Off court | Net per 100 | Minutes | |---|---|---|---| | Ky, AJ | — | +11.6 | 110 | | Ky, AJ | Trae | +9.3 | 45 | This is heavily confounded with AD: they’ve only played 4 minutes together without him. There was a very brief moment where the Wizards ran a Kyshawn - AJ - Bilal - Ayton - AD lineup. Fascinating and gigantic. They didn’t let it run for very long. I want to see the same group but with Sarr in Ayton’s place. Trae seems to be kinda winging it out there. The Wizards offense currently boils down to “Trae is going to find some loose change on the ground again, we hope”. I don’t think this is necessarily Trae’s fault. It would be nice if there was a clear offensive identity that leveraged Trae’s skillset within a system of some sort. The team *feels* a little directionless without Trae out there but I think this sense is a bit confounded with AD’s minutes thus far. Here’s how the lineups have done so far: | On court | Off court | Net per 100 | Minutes | |---|---|---|---| | Trae, AD | Ayton, Sarr | +5 | 47 | | AD | Trae, Ayton, Sarr | +12.6 | 47 | | Trae, Ayton | Sarr, AD | -19.2 | 67 | Trae + Ayton lineups have been slaughtered. What a privilege it is to be able to plaster over your problems by simply throwing more Anthony Davis at them. Bilal was quiet. On the Hawks side, I really like this Kingston Flemings kid. He’s small but that didn’t slow him down at all. He took it to the rack a few times against AD and finished over him! He has a fun little bounce in his step and he looked confident shooting 3s. NAW looked like god himself at times. Okongwu’s three-ball has improved a lot. The Hawks have a real identity, they’re all wingy and they pressure ball handlers a lot. Offensively, their strategy of making a lot of threes was far superior to the Wizards' strategy of not making very many threes. Overall I think the Wiz have the talent to win 45-50 games but right now, barring outlier development, the soup tastes more like an 8th-10th seed hanging around 40 wins. And maybe that leans a tad optimistic. The lack of shooting is a big issue but I expect the defense to be pretty solid. I’m a bit fearful about the Trae contract. I’d be really happy to go to a play-in game in DC after the last few years of tankapalooza.