When you play fantasy basketball, you start to look at NBA statistics differently, and seemingly inert numbers start to take on much louder character. For no categories is this more true than those of steals and blocks. The “Mendoza line” for both is, essentially, one per game. Any player who hits that mark is a difference maker in your weekly matchups, and worth acquiring for their impact in that category alone. And along the continuum from 1.0 to 2.0 lies a wealth of juicy options.
What Dyson Daniels provides here is simply scale-breaking. The third-year guard is playing a career high 34 minutes per game since being traded to the Atlanta Hawks and is averaging just over three steals per game in that time, putting him a full steal per game ahead of anyone else in the sport. His current steal average is the eighth-largest in league history, and the highest since Michael Jordan and John Stockton both eclipsed the number three in the late 80’s. He’s a thief! These numbers make Daniels a top 30 fantasy player, at worst. And on the real court, he’s been a big part of the Hawks’ surprisingly hot first quarter of the season, in which they’ve recently won six games in a row.
Daniels, like Ben Simmons before him, is the son of an American father and Australian mother. A national who—unlike Simmons—still has his accent, his dad Ricky played at North Carolina State before his playing career took him abroad, where he found love. Now, his son is part of a Hawks makeover that prioritizes athleticism and tenacity around Trae Young. Important, too, in this equation are a more liberated Jalen Johnson and a rejuvenated De’Andre Hunter, who’s having the best scoring season of his career. Young, in this pivot, is himself scoring worse than he has in any season since his rookie efforts, but he’s deeper into his role as a wins manager as the primary ball-handler on the squad, and thriving as a gritty distributor.
Young, in other words, has hurt fantasy owners—his assists are up, but his field-goal percentage is toxic—and yet become more the player that the flesh-and-blood Hawks need him to be. One players’ efficiency is, to them, less instrumental to victory than incidental. Young’s numbers tell a story of slop, but that’s just the cost of doing business for a team leading the way in game pace in the light-speed 2024 NBA. The mud on Young's hands is frustrating in the imaginary box scores, but in the real ones, they’re just the expected, accepted consequence of a monster truck’s glorious path.
On the other side of the trade that re-made the Hawks is the New Orleans Pelicans. Recipients of Dejounte Murray in the deal, their end of the swap is, so far, hard to judge. Murray got hurt in the first game of the season, and then everyone else who wasn’t already on the injury list joined him. Zion Williamson, Brandon Ingram, Herb Jones, Trey Murphy III, Jose Alvarado, and C.J. McCollum—basically all of the Pelicans’ veteran rotation rotation, in other words—have missed significant time. Most have missed half of the season, if not more.
This is where fantasy owners need to consider things like organizational infrastructure, and more celestial forces—curses, juju, ghosts. At the tail of the Mississippi River is a franchise that seems stuck in the swamp of the country’s biggest aquatic runoff. The bird in there has wings, and a beak big enough to kill in certain quarters, but its dimensions are too comically lopsided for it to ever really fly for a while. Williamson, in particular, embodies this stasis. Coming into the season after missing only 10 contests last year, he’d also lost dozens of pounds, appearing to be in the best shape of his professional days. But he blasted his hamstring, regardless, because his is a physics problem that requires more than a dietician to solve.
Amidst this mess, savvy fantasy owners see opportunity in the unusual usage rates for marginal players that are inevitable to emerge. Grab Brandon Boston Jr. for a while, or Yves Missi; somebody’s got to have the ball and take the shots. Elfrid Payton will even return to the league for a week or two, and look like a centerpiece in the time before he yet again leaves it. This is the kind of raw-number arbitrage, divorced from wins and losses, that you must consider when you manage an imaginary team.
Back in the actual thing, though, the Hawks’ so-far-victorious stance after the benchmark late-June exchange is now manifest in their primetime appearance in December’s NBA Cup. It happens during week two of a longer fantasy matchup, one of two over the season—the other comes around the All-Star Game. If by pure dumb luck your players are on the teams slated for extra games, you’ve got a weird edge. Enjoy it. If you don’t have those players, try to get some—Zaccharie Risacher is lying around as a free agent in most leagues, perhaps due to explode Daniels-like at any moment.
That is not what happened—Risacher’s jumpy rookie nerves continued; his Bambi year continued. But the Hawks thrived. Fantasy owners who grabbed Hunter early in the year, for nothing, rejoiced yet again as his blessed season marched on, a surprising year-six flourish from nowhere. The New York Knicks could not, as they haven’t been able to all season, defend the rim. Young and Johnson threw lobs there for free throughout the second half, and Trae skipped with mirth and malice in front of his great Manhattan haters. He played great, but shot poorly, per usual. That there’s still space to close between his reality and his ideal should have everyone paying attention.