Jalen Johnson Took That Shot Once

Four minutes and four seconds into a new season, Luguentz Dort stood up.

Orlando led 16-13, a whistle had gone, and the first substitution Atlanta made all year was Dort walking to the scorer's table to go in for Nickeil Alexander-Walker. He started six straight seasons in Oklahoma City. The new arrangement opens with a chair.

That is a tempting story and it is the wrong one.

Dort played twenty-eight minutes — more than CJ McCollum played, exactly as many as Jalen Johnson played. What he lost is the part of the night that happens before anybody keeps score. The name called, the walk out, the business at center court. That is a real thing to lose, and it is not the same as losing the job. He kept the job. He stopped being introduced.

The night's actual argument arrived with 1:49 left.

Atlanta led 122-119. Jalen Johnson had the ball above the break with the clock winding and nobody coming to free him, and he rose into a thirteen-foot step-back. It missed. Franz Wagner took the rebound. Paolo Banchero scored twelve seconds later, and a three-point lead was a one-point lead with ninety-seven seconds left in the first game of the year.

That possession is the one I have been circling since the spring. Earlier this month, in a piece about the one thing this roster cannot do, I wrote that nobody here reliably creates a bucket in isolation against a set defense, and that the closer was not coming. The first time the Hawks needed exactly that shot, they got exactly that outcome.

The next thirty-six seconds are the part I did not see coming.

Johnson did not take the next one. At 1:27 he gave the ball up, and Alexander-Walker caught it and rose from twenty-seven feet, and it went in. At 51.4 seconds Johnson gave it up again, Alexander-Walker shot from twenty-five, and that one went in too. Orlando did not get within five the rest of the way.

Four of Johnson's six assists found Alexander-Walker. Two of them were the only shots that mattered.

Those two will get written up tomorrow as Atlanta finding a closer. They were not that. Alexander-Walker did not beat a man off the dribble and rise over a set defense; he caught a pass and shot it, twice, from a long way out, on a night he finished with thirty-one. That is not the shot the Hawks have been missing. That is what you do instead of the shot the Hawks have been missing.

Atlanta did not solve the problem in Orlando. It went around it.

And the other team had the player Atlanta keeps being told it needs. Paolo Banchero made ten of his twelve shots, scored thirty-five, handed out ten assists, and finished minus-nine. Orlando had the guy, had him for forty-one minutes, and lost by seven. That does not make the closer overrated. It does mean that having one and getting an answer are two different nights.

I want to be careful about how much weight that holds. The Hawks made eleven field goals in the fourth quarter and six of them were assisted, which means five were not — Johnson scored twice on his own in those ten minutes, including the floater at 2:36 that made it a three-point game. The isolation problem did not evaporate tonight. It just never got to decide anything. A weakness that has been fixed and a weakness that never came up at the right moment look identical for exactly one night, and this was one night.

Still. A team can be built so the weakness comes up less often, and that is design, not luck. Twenty-eight assists. Six men in double figures. A fourth quarter taken 33-25 by a group that kept moving the ball toward whoever Orlando had stopped accounting for.

For years the argument in this city was about whose hands the ball belonged in at the end of a close one. Tonight the answer was whoever happened to be open. That is a less romantic sentence than Atlanta is used to hearing about itself.

It is also 1-0.