Otto Porter went off on the Bucks, and the Wizards might have something here
Little went the Washington Wizards’ way early in the season, as the combination of an underperforming second unit and a porous defense left first-year head coach Scott Brooks looking for answers to jump-start his flagging team. Quiet as it’s kept, though, the Wiz have started to get on track over the past two weeks, a run that continued Monday night thanks in large part to the play of one of their season-long bright spots: fourth-year swingman Otto Porter.
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The Georgetown product and No. 3 overall pick in the 2013 NBA draft continued his breakout season, scoring the game’s first six points on his way to a game-high 32 on stellar 13-for-18 shooting, including a 5-for-9 mark from 3-point range. The lanky wing would add 13 rebounds, one assist and one block in 41 minutes of work against the gifted, athletic and long-limbed Milwaukee Bucks front line.
Six of those points came in a decisive fourth quarter that saw him team with the Wizards’ two other high-lottery foundational pieces — 2010 No. 1 pick-turned-All-Star point guard John Wall and 2012 No. 3 pick-turned-max-contract shooting guard Bradley Beal — to spark a fourth-quarter rally that erased a 10-point deficit and handed Washington a 107-102 comeback win at Verizon Center.
After the Bucks pulled ahead early in the fourth with with an 8-0 run fueled by reserve scorers Greg Monroe and Michael Beasley, Beal, Wall and Porter took over. The trio accounted for all every Wizard point in the game-closing 21-6 run over the final 7:49 of the fourth quarter that turned a dispiriting defeat into what could become a galvanizing win for Washington. Porter scored six, including a right corner 3-pointer that put the Wiz up by two possessions with 49 seconds remaining. Beal scored 10, including a pair of 3s that helped winnow Milwaukee’s lead down to one point and the game-sealing free throws in the closing seconds.
Wall scored just three, and split a pair of free throws that gave Milwaukee a chance to knot the game up with a triple with 13 seconds left, but the ace playmaker dropped four dimes in the closing kick. He broke down the Bucks defense off the dribble before feeding Markieff Morris for a short jumper that put Washington up for good with 3:10 remaining, gaining Brooks’ club a measure of revenge after the Bucks wiped the floor with the Wiz in Milwaukee last Friday.
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Wall was the straw that stirs the drink, finishing with a season-high 16 assists to go with his 18 points, and Beal came on after a slow start to finish with 22 points and five assists, but Porter was the constant on Monday. He defended Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo about as ably as you can check the emerging star these days, limiting the Greek Freak to 22 points on 7-for-12 shooting, 12 rebounds and seven assists in 38 minutes, with the bulk of that damage coming early and just three field-goal attempts coming in the second half.
On the other end, he showcased the array of skills — the savvy off-ball cutting, the confident catch-and-shoot stroke, the floor-spacing 3-point marksmanship, the improving ability to attack off the bounce and finish through contact — that have made him one of the season’s leading contenders for Most Improved Player honors. He’s averaging career bests virtually across the board and has been exceptionally efficient in the opportunities he gets to contribute offensively alongside high-volume creators Wall and Beal. That’s been especially true of late; Porter’s shooting a blistering 58.8 percent from the field and 49.1 percent from 3-point land in the month of December, an uptick in form that has helped the Wizards start to move into the Eastern Conference playoff picture.
With Monday’s win, the Wizards are now 7-3 in their last 10 games, scoring an average of 109.4 points per 100 possessions in that span, which would rank them as the NBA’s sixth-most-potent offense over the course of the full season. The Wiz finished with 29 assists on 40 made field goals on Monday, shooting 50.6 percent from the field as a team and knocking down 12 of their 29 triple tries.
“Offensively, we feel like even when we miss shots at times, we feel like we do a good job of moving the ball and sharing it with each other,” Wall said after the game, according to Candace Buckner of the Washington Post.
Washington hasn’t totally kicked its early-season defensive woes, but Brooks’ team has nudged closer to average than bad during its 7-3 run — they’re giving up 106.5 points-per-100 in that span, 15th among 30 NBA teams — and they clamped down on Milwaukee when it counted on Monday, holding the Bucks to just six points on 3-for-17 shooting over the final 7:49 of regulation. And they’re still not getting nearly enough support from their second unit; all five starters played at least 36 1/2 minutes, with Wall, Gortat and Porter each logging 41-plus, as Brooks remains uncertain (at best) he can rely on a bench led by Kelly Oubre and Marcus Thornton. As Jake Whitacre of Bullets Forever wrote last week, recent improvement shouldn’t mask the reality that this year’s Wizards have been a disappointment, on the whole.
Still, improvement matters, and the Wizards are better now than they were six weeks ago. The starting five of Wall, Beal, Porter, Morris and Gortat has been consistently strong on both ends, outscoring opponents by nine points per 100 possessions in a significant 501-minute sample, scoring at a top-10 clip and preventing points like an elite defensive unit. Wall’s scoring like he never has before and playing more efficiently than ever; Beal’s been shooting the lights out for the better part of two months; and Porter’s becoming exactly the “do a little bit of everything well” complementary wing Ernie Grunfeld hoped he’d be.
The Wizards now sit at 14-16, tied with the Chicago Bulls for ninth place in the East and just a half-game back of the Bucks team they just beat. Their upcoming slate does feature a few tough games — road games against the Houston Rockets and Boston Celtics, a visit from the Memphis Grizzlies — but it also looks to offer opportunities to keep the good times rolling, get back over .500, and prove that the Wizards have enough firepower to return to the playoffs behind the playmaking of Wall, the scoring of Beal, and the all-around play of Porter, who’s finally developing into the consistently effective connective tissue that keeps everyone together.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
