Seventy-Four Games Already Answered This

There is a forty-eight-hour clock on every argument this city starts about this basketball team. Something happens on a Thursday, Atlanta decides what it means by Friday lunch, and then Saturday arrives and the whole thing gets filed again from the top. Seven games in, nothing that clock has produced has survived a week.

Saturday night it ran on Onyeka Okongwu's jump shot, and it ran in somebody else's building. New Orleans beat Atlanta 121-99 at the Smoothie King Center. A road loss, and not a close one — eighteen points in the first quarter against thirty-five, a deficit that reached twenty-eight, and Atlanta back below .500 at 3-4.

### What Thursday was supposed to have settled

Two nights earlier, in Atlanta's own gym, Okongwu went 4-of-6 from three on his way to twenty-nine points and twelve rebounds in a 114-111 win over Cleveland. The critique he was answering had landed the day before and it had not come from here: that Atlanta's big men cannot shoot. He had made four three-pointers across the first five games of the season. On Thursday he made four in one night.

And then the write-up I read led on the twelve rebounds.

Zach Langley, at Soaring Down South, on October 30, filing under a headline about the rebounding solving a major Hawks problem, put it this way: "While he shot the ball extremely well during their win, there was another component of his attack that gave Atlanta a true advantage." The shooting gets named in the first half of that sentence and demoted in the second.

### Then Saturday

Okongwu took five threes in New Orleans and missed all five. Six points, ten rebounds, five fouls, minus nineteen.

He had company. Atlanta shot 8-of-46 from three, 17.4 percent — the worst three-point percentage and the fewest makes in any of their seven games this season, and it is not close. The next worst is 26.5. Nickeil Alexander-Walker went 0-of-7. Luguentz Dort went 1-of-7. No Atlanta player scored more than fourteen, while Saddiq Bey, who used to work here, came off the New Orleans bench for twenty-five — the highest total anybody in the building managed, eleven more than any Atlanta uniform.

So inside forty-eight hours, the number that got demoted became the only number anybody could see.

### The part that should end the cycle

Last season Okongwu shot 37.6 percent from three on 5.2 attempts a game, across seventy-four games. Seventy-four. This season he is at 25.8 percent on 4.4 attempts across seven.

The volume stayed. The accuracy went.

I cannot tell you why. Nobody has pulled where those attempts came from or who was standing in front of him, and I would rather sit with a measurement than invent a mechanism for it. What I can tell you is the shape of the evidence, which is lopsided in a way the argument keeps ignoring. A full season says one thing, at real volume. A week and a half says something else. Four makes on Thursday did not erase 4-of-20 across the five games before it, and nothing that happened Saturday proves Thursday was a mirage.

One more thing, since the word keeps doing unexamined work: ESPN's roster lists Okongwu at forward. The press calls him Atlanta's center, and that usage is the premise of the whole argument — which tells you how these arguments get built.

### My own ledger

On Wednesday I wrote that Atlanta's losses were being decided in the paint, on the glass and at the foul line. Two of those three held in New Orleans. Atlanta lost the glass 36-49 and the paint 52-66.

The foul line turned over on me, and only halfway. Atlanta shot 21-of-23 from the line, ninety-one percent, against New Orleans' 28-of-35. On accuracy they won it outright. On volume they lost it again, twenty-three attempts to thirty-five. Accuracy and volume are two different claims and I had been running them as one.

Asa Newell was the only one of the nine Atlanta players at nineteen minutes or more who finished the night in the black — nineteen off the bench, thirteen points, a plus-one. He also went 1-of-6 from three, which is the joke the whole evening was telling.

Atlanta are 3-4, the same record Charlotte are carrying, with Washington alone at the top of the Southeast at 3-3. Dex Ponce argued on Wednesday that Atlanta's wins had all happened in other people's buildings; Saturday was a road game too, and it did not hold up his shape either. Indiana on Monday, then Washington away on Wednesday and Washington at home on Friday. Trae Young is on that Washington roster now, which is a separate conversation for a separate week.

Three more games before the city gets to decide all of this again.