The Five Snyder Saved For Last

There is a particular kind of Friday in October when nothing counts and everybody watches anyway.

The last preseason game is the one where the pretending stops. The auditions are over. Whatever a coach still wants to find out, he has four days left to find it out in, and the first five names he writes down are the closest thing to a statement he is going to make before it starts costing him something.

Atlanta's five in Dallas were Onyeka Okongwu, Jalen Johnson, CJ McCollum, Nickeil Alexander-Walker and Dyson Daniels.

That is not a neutral list. On Thursday, ESPN's Ben Golliver went around the league looking for what the preseason had revealed about all thirty teams, and when he got to Atlanta he arrived at a recommendation. Snyder, he wrote, "has used multiple starting lineups during the preseason, but he's best served sticking with last season's top group" — Alexander-Walker, McCollum, Daniels, Jalen Johnson and Onyeka Okongwu — because that group "posted a phenomenal plus-20.3 net rating." He was straight about what the recommendation would cost, too. It would "move Dort to a reserve role after he spent the past six seasons as a starter for the Oklahoma City Thunder."

A man in a national outlet said do this on Thursday.

On Friday, Snyder did it. Luguentz Dort played twenty minutes and scored five, and every one of those minutes came after the game had already started without him.

Here is where it gets more interesting than a coach taking advice.

Snyder did not drift toward that lineup over five games and finally settle. He used five different starting fives in five preseason games — not variations on a theme, five genuinely different groups. Kingston Flemings started the opener against Memphis. Aaron Wiggins started in San Antonio. Against Oklahoma City he sat McCollum, Daniels, Okongwu and Jalen Johnson on the same night — four of the five he is now being told to commit to — and started Corey Kispert, Asa Newell and Jock Landale, which is less a lineup than a scheduling decision. Golliver noted, accurately, that Snyder had used multiple starting lineups. What the recommendation reads like is a correction — as though the five were a default Snyder had wandered away from and ought to wander back to.

The record says he had never used it at all.

And the one night he came closest, the arithmetic ran the other direction. October 10 in Indiana, Snyder put four of those five on the floor together for the only time all preseason. The man he left out was not Dort. It was Alexander-Walker. Dort started that game, played twenty-four minutes, and the group Golliver wants protected was already one short — with Dort in the protected part.

So the evidence, right up until Friday night, pointed at Dort staying. Then the last game before the season came and he was the one sitting when the ball went up.

About that plus-20.3. It is Golliver's number, not ours, and it is doing a lot of work in a sentence that calls it phenomenal. The thing worth knowing is that the group it describes has a birthday. CJ McCollum's first game in an Atlanta uniform was January 11. He played forty-seven regular-season games here. Whatever that five did together, it did in the back half of one season, in the weeks after a roster had been taken apart and rebuilt around the people who were left.

McCollum is here, and Kispert is here, because Trae Young is in Washington. That is the mechanism. Every conversation about this starting lineup is a conversation about a trade, and the five names Golliver wants on the floor include two men who only exist on this roster because Atlanta decided it was done building around somebody else.

Which brings it back to the guy who was standing up.

Six seasons is a long time to be the one who starts. It is a long time to have the walk, the handshake, the name called last or close to it, the particular arrangement of a night that begins with you already out there. Dort built an entire professional identity in Oklahoma City on being the man they sent at the other team's best player from the opening possession, and that job has a ceremony attached to it, and on Friday the ceremony happened without him in it. He did not sulk it away. Twenty minutes is real. But it is twenty minutes that start from a chair.

None of this is an announcement. Snyder has not said this is his opening-night five, and a preseason finale is evidence, not a press release. He could walk into Orlando on Wednesday with a different idea and he would not owe anybody an explanation. Teams have used a dress rehearsal to mislead before.

But four days out, after a month of trying combinations the way you try keys in a lock, he picked up the one somebody else had already pointed at and used it. That is a choice, and it was made in public, and the person it was made about had to go stand near the scorer's table and wait for it.

The season starts Wednesday in Orlando. Watch the first substitution.