Dyson Daniels Took the Ball Off Houston Exactly Once

The first home game of a season is an introduction. Everyone who walked in tonight had spent a week reading about this team and had not yet watched a minute of it in person. Two road wins, a 47-point one, a league feed telling them what they were about to see.

What they saw was Houston winning 121-114.

Atlanta are 2-1 now, and 0-1 at home. Houston are 3-0.

### The part with my name on it

This morning I wrote that if Dyson Daniels did not take the ball off Houston tonight, I was wrong. I want to be exact about what happened, because being vague about it now would be the cheap way out.

He took it off them once.

One steal, in 29 minutes. He had five at Orlando and seven at Charlotte — twelve across two games, and twelve was the number the entire argument stood on. Tonight it was one, against the first opponent either of these teams had played that had also not lost a game.

One is not none. I am not going to round it down to make the sentence land harder. But one is not twelve either, and the question was never whether Daniels is good. It was whether those steals were a skill showing up or a byproduct of two blowouts against teams throwing the ball into traffic with the result already settled. One game does not answer that for the season. It is, though, the first evidence that did not come out of a game decided by halftime, and it went against me.

Here is the part I did not expect to be typing. Daniels was excellent tonight. Eighteen points on eight-of-eleven shooting, eight rebounds, one turnover. He was among the best players in the building. He was simply not the player the argument was about, and I am not going to let the second thing stand in for the first just because it flatters me.

### Both teams made 43 shots

That is not a coincidence I am dressing up for effect. Atlanta made 43 field goals. Houston made 43 field goals. Atlanta needed 96 attempts to get there. Houston needed 89.

The threes are where it actually lived. Atlanta took 49 and made 13. Houston took 35 and made 14. More made threes, fourteen fewer tries.

Almost everything else belonged to Atlanta. More assists, 35 to 27. More steals. Twelve more points in the paint, 58 to 46. Nearly twice the fast-break points, 20 to 12. Fewer turnovers. Seventeen offensive rebounds against Houston's thirteen, though Houston finished with the one extra board that counted, 43 to 42. Atlanta won nearly every column that measures how badly you want it and lost by seven, because Houston needed fewer shots to score more. Kevin Durant had 22. Reed Sheppard had 19 with five threes in it. Tari Eason came off their bench for another 19.

Jalen Johnson had 26 points, nine rebounds and sixteen assists. Sixteen. On a night his team shot 27 percent from three, he kept finding the people missing them, which is either the most encouraging thing that happened or the most frustrating, depending how long you have supported this franchise.

Kingston Flemings got fifteen minutes and took four shots. I said this morning that a rookie point guard is a thread, not a number, and that the third game is where a thread starts saying something. The third game said very little — two points, two assists, two turnovers, in a game that never once got comfortable enough to let him find anything out.

### Monday

They play Houston again on Monday, at Toyota Center.

I wrote this morning that seventy-two hours gave me two chances to be wrong. One of them is now spent, and I would still rather do this out loud than be quietly right somewhere nobody can check.