Atlanta Went Ten Deep and Gave It Away Twenty Times

Fifteen thousand five hundred and sixty-one people gave up a Monday night in November for this, which tells you where this team currently sits in the city's priorities. Four straight wins will move a building. So will the best record in the Western Conference walking in with Luka Doncic attached to it.

They got the game they came for. Atlanta was never really in it.

The Hawks lost 124-114, led for eighteen percent of the night, and changed the lead exactly once.

The question got answered, quietly

This morning I wrote that the nine-man rotation had stopped being a decision and turned into a habit, and that the healthy men sitting at the end of Quin Snyder's bench would eventually force him to renegotiate it.

He went ten deep tonight. Jock Landale, listed questionable on the morning injury report, played fourteen minutes and pulled down five rebounds. Dorian Finney-Smith and Corey Kispert were the only healthy men who never left the bench.

So the door opened. It turned out the door was never what was holding this one shut.

Twenty

Atlanta gave the ball away twenty times. Los Angeles converted that into twenty-nine points. Atlanta got fourteen back off sixteen Laker giveaways of their own.

In a game decided by ten, the entire margin — and half of it again — is sitting in a single column of the box score.

Everything else was level or better. Forty rebounds each. Atlanta won the offensive glass by four and the assist count by three, and the two teams blocked six shots apiece. Seventeen of forty-four from three, thirty-nine percent, a number this roster would sign for on most nights of the season.

That is the uncomfortable part. This was not a night Atlanta got outclassed. It was a night Atlanta was efficient and generous at the same time, and only one of those two compounds.

The youngest hands in the building

Dyson Daniels played thirty-one minutes, took four shots and made four of them, and finished with ten points, eight assists, four steals and one turnover. He was the standing argument against everything else that happened.

Kingston Flemings is nineteen years old. He played twenty-four minutes, handed out four assists and handed the ball to Los Angeles four times. Jalen Johnson — who played more minutes than any other Hawk — did the same four. Eight giveaways between the rookie and the guy the offense runs through, on a night the whole margin came out of that category.

That is not a character flaw. It is a nineteen-year-old guard getting a graduate seminar from a man who finished with five steals while also taking twenty-two shots and handing out ten assists. Doncic spent the evening with his hands in Atlanta's business. The thirty-two points were almost incidental.

Read the terms, not the score

Here is the part that should actually sit badly.

Los Angeles played in Detroit on Sunday, won there, got on a plane, and turned up in Atlanta on the second night of a back-to-back without Austin Reaves, who had scored forty-three in that Detroit game and was ruled out here with an illness. Quentin Grimes didn't play either.

They won by ten anyway. Sandro Mamukelashvili came off their bench for twenty-three points on five made threes. Walker Kessler had twenty-one and ten.

A tired team missing the man who scored forty-three for them twenty-four hours earlier came to State Farm Arena and was never seriously inconvenienced. Atlanta spent this run earning the right to be taken seriously by exactly this kind of opponent. Tonight that opponent arrived at half strength and did not have to take them seriously at all.

Seven and five

The streak ends at four, which is what streaks do. Atlanta is 7-5, still the fourth seed in the East, two and a half games back of Philadelphia. Nobody has to pretend a home loss to a 10-2 team is a referendum, and I'm not going to write it as one.

But the rotation argument is closed, and it closed without ceremony. Snyder has nine, ten, thirteen — he used one more of them tonight than he has all week, and it changed nothing about the shape of the evening.

What shaped the evening was twenty possessions Atlanta volunteered.

Fifteen thousand people came to find out whether the run was real. They got an answer. Just not to the question they walked in holding.