There were any number of stats, metrics and data points from Wednesday night’s Washington Wizards season opener that could illustrate the way everything about this team is vastly different from years past — beginning with the single number that matters most: at 1-0 this season, these Wizards already have as many wins as they managed during the horrid, final seven weeks of 2025-26, when they staggered home with a 1-26 finish.
But for sheer visceral impact, what stands out most from Washington’s 128-116 win over the Milwaukee Bucks is something that can’t readily be measured: the sheer alpha-maleness on display on Capital One Arena. We can’t say this with any type of certainty, but through one game the Wizards must surely lead the NBA in flexes, chest-thumps, fist-pumps, jersey-pops and primal screams of dominance rising from their cores toward the rafters.
They are the sorts of gestures you simply don’t make — that would be too unseemly, if not laughable — when you are a moribund franchise in the depths of a gut-job rebuild, amassing 196 losses across the past three seasons.
Wednesday night, then, was the moment everything changed.
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It was the moment the same fans who had endured untold humiliations and misery during those three years — such as five different losing streaks of 14 games or more, the 53-point loss to Indiana in 2025 and, heaven forbid, Bam Adebayo’s 83-point game at the Wizards’ expense some six months ago in Miami — could blink their eyes and suddenly see what it looks like on the other side, with perennial All-Stars Anthony Davis and Trae Young together for the first time in Wizards uniforms, doing what they have always done best in someone else’s colors.
For Davis, playing his first game in nine months on Wednesday night, that meant 34 points, 12 rebounds and such sheer dominance during one stretch of the third quarter that the crowd began chanting, “M-V-P!” For Young, it meant 20 points, 13 assists and the sort of vintage playmaking that created open shots for his teammates all over the floor. (And still to come in the next few days: AJ Dybantsa’s NBA debut, as the Wizards’ No. 1 overall draft pick works his way back from a preseason ankle sprain.)
“The crowd was great. They were into it. They got us over the hump,” Davis said. “Last year … it was like ‘Dress Like a Seat Night’ in here.”
The electricity in the arena, particularly as the Wizards came back from an 8-point deficit in the third quarter, had D.C. hoops old-heads calling it the loudest home crowd in decades. Some of the younger Wizards players had previously only heard such noise in road arenas. To hear it unleashed for them instead of at their expense was mind-blowing.
“It felt like you were more than five on the court,” forward Bilal Coulibaly told Monumental Sports Network. “It really helps us. It brings a lot of energy. We need that all season.”
“They showed out,” guard Kyshawn George said.
As good as Wednesday night may have felt, you wouldn’t want to make the mistake of reading too much into one win, particularly a sometimes sloppy and disjointed one against a Bucks team picked to finish at the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings — a team that traded away superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo in June and that on Wednesday night ran out a rotation made up of mostly role players and retreads.
The Wizards, it is worth remembering, are trying to do something extremely difficult in modern professional sports this year: proceeding along two different timelines at once — the long-range, methodical one associated with trying to develop a young and talented nucleus into a perennial contender, but also the short-range, week-to-week mission of attempting to win now behind a pair of superstar veterans.
Most betting sites have the over-under for the Wizards’ 2026-27 win total at somewhere between 34 and 36, which would be a significant improvement over the last three seasons — when their win totals were 15, 18 and 17 — but still unlikely to earn them a playoff or play-in tournament spot.
Though he was dressed in street clothes and walking gingerly, Dybantsa, the team’s first No. 1 overall pick in 16 years, received one of the night’s loudest cheers during pregame introductions. With his status listed as day-to-day, he could make his Wizards debut as soon as Friday night against Toronto.
Onboarding a No. 1 overall pick, even one regarded as a generation talent, doesn’t guarantee a team immediate success, as Cooper Flagg’s 2025-26 Dallas Mavericks (26 wins), Victor Wembanyama’s 2023-24 San Antonio Spurs (22 wins), Cade Cunningham’s 2021-22 Detroit Pistons (23 wins) or Anthony Edwards’ 2020-21 Minnesota Timberwolves (23 wins in a COVID-shortened season) could attest.
But none of those teams already had a Trae Young and an Anthony Davis in their midst — the former a four-time All-Star guard and all-world playmaker who has averaged 25.1 points and 9.8 assists across an eight-year career; the latter a future Hall-of-Fame forward with 10 All-Star nods and a reputation as one of the best two-way big men of his generation.
“Those are the some of the best players in the game,” Bucks coach Taylor Jenkins said of Young and Davis. “The dynamic ability of Young in the pick-and-rolls and the gravitational pull AD requires in his [isolations] — and with Young spacing the floor — it’s going to be a trickle-down effect for the entire roster and enhance what they can do [offensively].”
Perhaps moving from the late stages of a gruesome, three-year, fan-hemorrhaging rebuild to the early stages of a championship-contending window is not as simple as flipping a switch. But when those pregame introductions were over Wednesday night and the lights suddenly came on, even the longest-suffering fans in the building had to love what they saw.
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