Nobody To Hand It To

There is a moment in a close basketball game when a building has to decide what to do with its hands.

Fourteen seconds, tie game, ball coming up the floor. Everybody knows what happens next — the lean forward, the name already half out of everybody's mouth. For years this city knew exactly whose hands the ball was going to and spent those years arguing about whether it should. The arguing was a form of belonging.

Wednesday, Kevin O'Connor wrote a column for Yahoo Sports admiring a roster deep and interchangeable enough to play any style against anyone, and then naming the one thing it cannot do. "Eventually, somebody has to beat a defender one-on-one," he writes. O'Connor, citing Synergy Sports, puts all three of Atlanta's primary isolation options below the fiftieth percentile and the team last in the league. I could not check a single one of those figures. I tried three doors; all three were locked.

What I could check was his arithmetic, so I added up all six Knicks box scores by hand. Jalen Johnson averaged 19.5 points in that series on 9-of-31 from three. CJ McCollum, over the final three games, averaged 11.3 points and totaled four assists against ten turnovers. Both check out exactly, which makes his case stronger than I would like.

None of it is new here. On May 17, in a piece about what this franchise was between, I wrote: "The closer problem — nobody on this roster can reliably create a bucket in isolation against a set defense — followed the Hawks from February into April and announced itself as the defining limitation." Dex got there before me with a number, and that receipt is his today.

So the diagnosis is settled. The prescription is the argument.

O'Connor's answer is a person: develop one or go get one. He is honest enough to write, in the same column, that Atlanta has neither an obvious internal candidate nor the assets to trade for one. That is his read rather than a checked fact, and it leaves the cure named and unavailable. My answer in May was different in kind: the Hawks don't need a player, they need a city willing to believe again. Somebody has now priced the player, and I still mean the other thing.

Because here is what a deep team costs a crowd. Interchangeability is a modern, defensible, admirable way to build, and in the last two minutes it leaves a building with nothing to do. No name to chant. No hands to watch the ball travel toward. No ritual, and a fanbase without a ritual is just an audience. Two days ago I defended this depth against one bad quarter; this is a harder test than a quarter.

April showed what it feels like. Atlanta beat New York twice, by one point and by one point, 107-106 on the road and 109-108 at home, and lost the other four by 11, 16, 29 and 51. The clincher was New York 140, Atlanta 89, at home, in front of its own people. That is not a basketball result. That is a civic event.

And then Atlanta committed anyway. Onsi Saleh was promoted from general manager to president of basketball operations on a long-term deal in late May. Quin Snyder signed his second extension on June 8, terms undisclosed. Saleh's statement said it "reflects our commitment to stability and sustained growth as we build toward high-level success." He was talking about his coach, not about the last two minutes.

Read it straight. This organization locked in the people who built a team with no closer before anybody had solved the closer, and I don't think that is avoidance. I think it is conviction in a process — and a process does not have a fourth quarter.

Monday proved none of this. Johnson went 1-for-7 from the floor and 0-for-3 from three, eight points on six free throws in 18 minutes, and 18 preseason minutes mean nothing, including the ones that rhyme with somebody's thesis. McCollum, whom O'Connor calls the closest thing Atlanta has to a closer, did not play at all — the city is reading a game the answer sat out. Tonight is San Antonio at the Frost Bank Center, also preseason, also not evidence.

Fourteen seconds, tie game. If the ball is going to five different places on five different nights, a city never gets to lean forward in the same direction, and that is a real loss. Atlanta is being asked to love a team the way you love a band with no frontman — for the arrangement, for the forty-six minutes that are honestly very good. I don't know whether this city can do that. Nobody is coming to make it easier.