Dyson Daniels is on the prowl

I’m not much for nicknames, although every once in a while a moniker pops up so good it becomes the only way I can think of a player. Atlanta’s Australian ballhawk Dyson Daniels has earned such a nickname: the Great Barrier Thief. In his first season with the Hawks, the 21-year-old Daniels is making his first start and as such is having a breakout season. It’s always fun when a young, promising player gets their first chance at a big role, because all the newfound responsibility is a much stronger test of their abilities; there is so much talent in the league right now that every team definitely has several players who could do more if given more opportunities. Through 13 games with the Hawks, Daniels has shown that he is one of the best defensive playmakers in the NBA.

Daniels currently leads the league with 3.4 steals per game. match; his 91 deflections are a whopping 34 more than runner-up De’Aaron Fox. Daniels is averaging 4.7 steals per 100 possessions, the most since Nate McMillan, the man who coached the Hawks for some of last season, did it in 1993-94 for the now-defunct Seattle Supersonics. Daniels recently put together an unholy streak of four games of six or more steals per game. game, and he has recorded a steal in every game except Monday night’s win against Fox’s Sacramento Kings.

Don’t discount him, though, as Daniels blocked four shots and sealed the game with one something badsort of a block on the hottest player in the NBA, the aforementioned Fox, as the latter pulled up for a game-winning shot.

What’s impressive about Daniels’ body of work this season is how extensive it is. He gets steals by knocking back ball handlers coming around him, by helping from the weak side and looking for the pass into the corner, by backing a ball handler the moment they commit to a pass and grabbing it easy, by waiting for a player in the post to catch his breath before running in and grabbing it, by staying down and swiping instead of ever jumping on shooters, and by simply taking the rock from it opposing point guard. He described his process in blunt terms. “For me, you know, it’s ‘See ball, get ball'” Daniels said after pouncing six steals in a win at Boston.

There’s a tired strain of reactionary complaint about defense in the modern NBA, one that bemoans how no one gets to play it anymore. It’s true that players can no longer hand-check each other on the perimeter, and that the spread offenses that every team now runs make each defender more isolated, responsible for covering more ground and therefore less often able to contest shots in the lane. Daniels, to me, is the NBA defender of the moment. The trick is that he is extremely aggressive in the help defense. He stays in front of his man, but he knows exactly how much time and space he needs to leave himself to get to the assist, and he uses that time and space to pursue the ball with power. If the complaint is that the invention of the three-point shot has eluded defenses, Daniels offers a retort: ​​You can’t shoot if you don’t have the ball.

Daniels showed this ability with the New Orleans Pelicans, averaging 17 and 22 minutes off the bench in his first two NBA seasons. With a weird, misshapen roster full of vaguely flawed power forwards, the Pelicans couldn’t afford to start someone shooting 31 percent from three, so he feasted primarily on backup point guards. The theory behind last summer’s Dejounte Murray trade, from the Pels’ end, was that Murray could bring Daniels’ level of first-line pressure while also being able to create and make a ton of shots. For the Hawks, Daniels was a younger, cheaper defense-first guard who wasn’t a huge intimidating freak like Murray and wouldn’t demand the ball. On offense, Daniels does what every teammate of Trae Young’s has ever done and will likely do forever, which is stand on the edge while Young looks for either fouls, stepback opportunities or lobs (in that order). The simple role suits Daniels as he isn’t much of a creator, although he can attack shifting defenses quite well.

The Hawks are as misshapen and strange as ever, the most spiritually .500 club in the league. Now that the Murray experiment is over, they’ve returned to playing a slightly retuned version of the aesthetically hideous, moderately efficient brand of Traeball they’ve been playing for years, this time with a bit more emphasis on engineered lobs. Despite Daniels’ excellent perimeter defense, they are 22nd in defensive rating.

Does it avoid his steals and deviations? No. Consider how much worse the Hawks would be without him. They sit in fifth place in the East with a 7-8 record, and Daniels is pretty clearly their third-best player. In other words, he plays good defense on the best players in the NBA, and that means something. He’s not going to keep getting six steals per game, but he’s going to keep trying, and he’s so young that he can probably get better.