Atlanta Scored Twenty-Six in the Paint and Still Won

Atlanta spent the weekend holding a trial, and tonight the defendant did not show up.

Jalen Johnson sat in Indianapolis with the left ankle he turned in New Orleans on Saturday. Kingston Flemings started the suspension nobody here was arguing about. Jock Landale missed his first game of the season. Mouhamed Gueye and Henri Veesaar are months away. Atlanta dressed ten men, won 108-104 at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, and are 4-4.

And the jump shot this city has been litigating since Saturday had the best night it has had all season.

### The shot was not the problem

Twenty-three of fifty-one from three, 45.1 percent. All three of those are season highs and none of them is close: the previous bests were eighteen makes, forty-nine attempts and 42.1 percent, each set on a different night. Fifty-one of Atlanta's one hundred and three field goal attempts came from behind the line. Through seven games they had been 97 of 296, 32.8 percent, 42.3 attempts a night.

This morning I wrote that the city had changed defendants over the weekend without changing the number, and that a figure two different men can be blamed for inside three days is a container rather than an explanation. Tonight emptied the container. Not by proving anybody right. By letting the shot go in at the highest rate of the season and watching the game come down to the last ten seconds anyway.

### Twenty-six

Atlanta scored twenty-six points in the paint.

Their first seven games, in order: 60, 54, 58, 56, 52, 50, 52. An average of 54.6, and the lowest they had posted was 50. Tonight was half of that low. Indiana scored fifty-four, which is almost exactly the number Atlanta usually posts themselves.

It is not in any season summary. There is no endpoint that will hand it to you, so the only way to see it is to open all eight box scores and read one row out of each. I did that, then counted it a second way out of the play-by-play, because a figure that far off its own baseline should be made to say it twice. Seventeen two-point field goals. Seven layups. No dunks. Eleven of the seventeen unambiguously inside.

I am not going to tell you why. Nobody has shot quality and nobody has the pressure data, and Indiana blocked nine shots with a six-man rotation, which is its own strange sentence. What exists is where the points came from. Tonight they came from twenty-five feet because they were not coming from anywhere else.

### Six

Indiana used six players. Jarace Walker forty-five minutes, Braden Smith forty-two, Jalen Slawson forty-one, Jay Huff forty, Kobe Brown thirty-eight, Quenton Jackson thirty-five. That is the entire team. ESPN's injury board carried eleven Pacers rows and a note saying the club had ruled out ten men; another said Obi Toppin only dressed in case of an emergency, because they were down to eight. It was the second night of a back-to-back. They lost at Brooklyn on Sunday. They are 2-6 and have not won at home in four tries.

Atlanta beat them by four.

That belongs here, in the middle, where it cannot be skipped. A road win is a road win and this team needed one. It is also the smallest available version of one.

### Four minutes, thirty-four seconds

Atlanta led by nine with 3:56 on the clock, 104-95. Indiana took nine of the next eleven points. Huff made a free throw at 2:24 and it was 104-102.

From 4:34 to the horn, Atlanta scored four points. Two CJ McCollum free throws. Then Onyeka Okongwu, from twelve feet, off a McCollum pass, with ten and two tenths of a second left. Their only field goal of the stretch.

Fifty-one threes, and a twelve-footer ended it.

Nickeil Alexander-Walker had thirty-four and nine of them, which is Dex's piece tonight and not mine. McCollum had thirteen points, twelve assists and nine rebounds on four-of-seventeen shooting, which is a line that should not work and did.

### What game eight settled

Nothing, and that is the honest answer. The shot worked, the shot was never what was holding them up, and the win was four points over six available men. The only number that moved far enough tonight to mean something is one nobody had put on trial, and I am not going to pretend a single night tells me what it means either.

Atlanta are 4-4, sixth in the East, half a game back of Washington, 3-2 on the road and 1-2 at home. Six games were still running when I read the table, so the seeds under them will have moved by morning. Wednesday they are at Washington, where Johnson, Flemings and Landale all carry a return date of the fourth.

The argument will be waiting. It will have a new name in it by then. It usually does.