Brandon Miller, take a bow.

The $209M man put together the most complete performance of his young career and carried the Charlotte Hornets to their third win in four games to start the 2026-27 season.

In a hard-fought 48 minute battle against Washington, Miller, Naz Reid, Grayson Allen, and Moussa Diabate willed the Hornets over the line in the fourth quarter and delivered Charlotte it's second clutch win in two attempts.

That's not nothing for a team who finished 26th in the NBA in clutch win percentage last year.

Below is a series of highlights, stats, and takeaways from the game bundled into a neat package I like to call the four-point play.

One Highlight of the Night

Brandon Miller makes history

Lost in Brandon Miller's incredible shooting night was the moment when he etched his name into NBA history.

When Miller canned a three-pointer early in the second quarter, he became the second-fastest player to make 500 threes in an NBA career, trailing only Duncan Robinson.

We'll talk plenty more about Miller later, and he deserves all of the air time after what he did in the win over Washington.

Two Game-Defining Statistics

+10 offensive rebound margin
117.0 offensive rating

Charlotte's penchant for creating extra possessions on the offensive glass is the reason they continue to win games when their offense doesn't play well.

Their 117.0 offensive rating against Washington was the team's best single-game output this season, and their prowess on the glass was the main driver for Charlotte's success (along with the team's season-low 12.8% turnover rate).

Until Kon Knueppel and Coby White come back and stablize the Hornets' offense, they're going to have to win on the margins. They did so tonight on the backs of Moussa Diabate's 11 offensive boards, and the eight that Naz Reid, Brandon Miller, Tidjane Salaun, and Christian Anderson combined for. I'm not sure how well Charlotte shot on second-chance attempts tonight, but it did feel like a good number of their clean looks came off of offensive rebounds.

Three Players of the Game

Brandon Miller
Moussa Diabate
Naz Reid

Miller painted an absolute masterpiece as a scorer in the win against Washington.

He looked comfortable getting to his spots and he found ways to convert when he arrived at them. This is the man that Charlotte paid $209M to be the face of their franchise.

I'm curious to see how his ancillary impact changes once Charlotte gets fully healthy. Can he continue to improve as a passer and become a cleaner facilitator for this Hornets team? Miller has to score right now. But when White and Knueppel come back and lift some of that burden from him, how the rough edges of Miller's game smooth out will be worth watching.

Diabate was a man possessed from the opening tip. He came close to sniffing the Hornets' single-game offensive rebound record of 15, hauling down 11 of his own tonight. I implore you to ignore the noisy +/- numbers this early in the season -- Diabate has been awesome and the Hornets are a better team when he creates extra possessions like he did tonight.

Reid was abhorrent through three quarters, there's no other way around it. He looked like a player who was battling an illness that landed him on the injury report just hours before tip-off.

However, he atoned for that slow start by scoring 13 points in the first six and a half minutes of the fourth quarter, single-handedly carrying Charlotte's offense in the first half of the final stanza.

Naz is such a cool player. The footwork is Al Jefferson-esque, but he can also run off of screens on the perimeter and punish lazy defenses from behind-the-arc. That fourth quarter encapsulated everything Charlotte thought Reid could be in a scaled-up role.

Four Takeaways From the Win

1. Grayson Allen: Future Sixth Man of the Year?

At 31-years-old, the veteran shooting guard still has something left in the tank.

This wasn't Allen's finest game as a member of the Hornets, but he was integral in breathing life into Charlotte's moribund offense. Allen has made an impact as a shooter in the early aughts of the 2026 season, but tonight, two other traits stood out: his physicality as a driver, and his scrappiness as a defender.

Allen plays a well-rounded game that should scale down nicely once the Hornets return to full health whenever that may be. If Charlotte continues to win games, Allen will assuredly garner some buzz for this award as the season rolls on.

2. Brandon Miller's Mid-Range Masterclass

Washington's porous perimeter defense was the medicine that Brandon Miller's struggling efficiency desparately needed.

The $209M man poured in 31 points in the win against Miami, but it took him a ton of shots to get there. Tonight, he nailed 53% of his field goal attempts, including 55% inside the arc.

He was awesome in isolation, patiently stalking hapless Wizards defenders before shaking them with a quick crossover and rising up for a jumper. Miller has developed a handful of go-to counters with his back to the basket, and he busted out a couple of them tonight in late-clock scenarios, including one with 50 second left in the game that effectively iced the contest.

3. Young Players Percolating

There was more good than bad from both Tidjane Salaun and Christian Anderson Jr. tonight.

The former, a much malignted third-year forward, is much improved on the defensive end. Save for the occasional lapse in concentration as a help defender, Salaun has really turned himself into a servicable multi-positional deterrent who can be relied on for stretches.

It isn't anything special, but it's better than we've seen for the majority of his NBA career.

Anderson Jr., on the other hand, looked much more comfortable handling the ball against Washington's defensively-deficient back court. When the Wiz turned up the pressure, Anderson was far from perfect, but he found ways to impact the game in other ways.

He hauled in a pair of offensive rebounds, he made some genuinely impressive on-handed skip passes off of a live dribble (which lacked a solid end product so they won't show up on the stat sheet), and he nailed his first three-pointer of the season as well.

Smaller guards often take some time to develpo into useful NBA players, and it seems like that is going to be the case for Christian Anderson Jr. The baby steps he's made thus far have been noticebale, though.

4. Kudos to Charles Lee

I'll say it until I'm blue in the face: I think Charles Lee is a great head coach. He and his staff continuiously find ways to put the available players into advantageous situations to accentuate their strengths and mitigate their weaknesses. It takes a great coaching staff to hold a team accountable for what happened on Friday night against Atlanta, which they did by all accounts, and get their troops ready to go back to battle less than 24 hours later.

The Hornets are 3-1 and it feels like they haven't even played a B- game yet. To me, that says a ton about the coaching staff and how good they are at squeezing out every advantage they can on the margins with an undermanned roster.