“I was tired of looking at that [expletive], to be honest,” Saunders said, but the Wizards had to play nearly two more quarters before an embarrassing 103-78 defeat halted the optimism that had been felt throughout the franchise during seven days of training camp. “I was disappointed with our main guys. They got their ass kicked out there. How hard we played in practice for those six or seven days and how we competed, that didn’t translate over, and that’s the one thing I was waiting to see.”

On cue, John Wall (8 points, 3 assists) opened the night sending a pass out of bounds past Jordan Crawford, who wasn’t even looking, for the first of his six turnovers. Andray Blatche had a team-high 18 points but settled for low-percentage jump shots. JaVale McGee (9 points, 8 rebounds) was wild offensively, missing with his jump hook. Crawford and Rashard Lewis battered the front rim with 3-point attempts, going a combined 0 for 5 from beyond the arc. The starters finished 14 for 45 from the field.

“Terrible,” was how Saunders described Wall. “He was bad. He didn’t play with the same aggressiveness, passion that he played with downstairs. The one thing you have to watch, and he’s a young player, we have a lot of young players, when you go into games as an individual and you think about trying to get yourself going, that becomes very contagious.”

Despite an emphasis in camp on limiting turnovers, defense and rebounding, the Wizards coughed up the ball 20 times, allowed the Sixers, with six different players scoring in double figures, to shoot better than 50 percent from the field and got beaten on the boards by seven.

“It’s disrespectful to the team and the whole coaching staff,” Wall said. “Everything they did to us and they got us to do, what we all did through seven days of training camp – and ya’ll seen some of it – how everybody was playing hard and stopping each other. We can talk junk to each other while out there going against each other, but going against another team, nobody did nothing.”

By the time the Wizards saved face in the fourth quarter after trailing by as many as 40 points, it was thanks to the scrappy play of a second unit consisting of veteran Roger Mason Jr., who hit a pair of trademark 3-pointers, along with second-year center Kevin Seraphin and rookies Jan Vesely, Chris Singleton and Shelvin Mack.

Wall’s angry crossover and slam past Evan Turner, who was picked second overall right behind him in the 2010 draft, didn’t make up for missing McGee badly on an alley-oop moments before. It was Mack who hit Vesely later to give this year’s top Wizards draft pick his first dunk in an NBA uniform.

While newly-signed Maurice Evans was officially added to the roster at halftime, the night seemed to bolster the case for the Wizards to make a stronger offer to absent restricted free agent Nick Young, perhaps in time for a rematch in Philadelphia on Dec. 20, six days before the regular season opens and offers a chance to start over again at home.

“We’re better than what we showed,” Mason said. “The guys are pissed off, and we should be. No one in this locker room wants to lose like this, whether it’s a preseason game or anything.”

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