The Kid Took The Lead. Then He Sat.

Kingston Flemings stole the ball from Ja'Kobi Gillespie with 8:51 left in the fourth quarter, dunked it three seconds later, and put Atlanta ahead of San Antonio for the first time since the opening minutes.

Then Quin Snyder took him out of the game.

Same clock reading. 8:48. A nineteen-year-old does the one thing this city has spent two days being told nobody on this roster can do, and his reward is Kobe Johnson checking in for him before the play finishes settling. That is October in a single substitution.

Here is the stretch Snyder pulled him out of. At 10:16 Flemings hit a 24-foot running jumper. At 9:52 he found Zuby Ejiofor for a 26-footer. At 9:38 he took a defensive rebound; at 9:31 he split a pair of free throws to tie the game at 102; at 8:51 he picked Gillespie clean. Then the dunk. Eighty-eight seconds, one teenager, and a hole that had been twenty-three points deep was gone.

That is what Atlanta was climbing out of. San Antonio led 45-22 with 9:40 to go in the second quarter, and Atlanta had scored twenty points in the entire first. That is not a slow start. That is a dismantling.

Now the part I am obligated to write, because I set the rule myself this morning. In a piece about a roster with nobody to hand the ball to I said the closer is not coming and that this city would have to learn to love a team without one, and that tonight's game was "also not evidence." The inconvenient thing about publishing that sentence at breakfast is that it is still true at midnight, on a night the result went the way I would have picked. San Antonio did not put a single starter on the floor in the fourth quarter. Victor Wembanyama played seventeen minutes and none of them came after halftime.

So hold the conclusions. What tonight actually produced is a personnel fact, and a genuinely strange one. On Monday, Flemings started and played more minutes than any other Hawk. Tonight he came off the bench for fifteen points on six-of-eight shooting, five assists and three steals. Four days, two different jobs, same teenager. Snyder is not auditioning him for a role. He is auditioning him for two, which is a thing you can only do in the one month of the year when the answer costs nobody anything.

And the argument this city is actually having remains unavailable for inspection. Jalen Johnson did not play, listed as rest rather than injury. CJ McCollum did, after not appearing at all on Monday, and he shot four-of-six from three. Two preseason games in, the two players the entire closer conversation is built around have not shared the floor for a single possession. Atlanta is arguing about a duet neither singer has turned up for.

What held, then, was the arrangement. Thirty assists against ten turnovers. Sixty-six points from the bench. Fifteen players used. The leading scorer was Asa Newell, who is in his second season and should not be called a rookie by anybody, and who needed fourteen minutes to get sixteen points. The leading rebounder was a guard. Nobody was the reason for longer than about ninety seconds at a stretch, which is either the most encouraging thing about this team or the most frustrating, and October is not permitted to tell us which.

Atlanta won it 123-116. It counts for nothing. The Hawks are at Indiana on Saturday night.

But somebody in this city watched a kid Atlanta took eighth overall steal a ball, dunk it, and take the lead on the road, and leaned forward before they could stop themselves. I spent the morning explaining why that lean has nowhere to go. I am not going to sit here and pretend I did not feel it too.