Daniels’ safe hands secure a late victory over Kings, 109-108

A needed win.

The Hawks got some good health updates — plus one late-breaking bad one. Kobe Bufkin appeared for the first time this season and Bogdan Bogdanovic returned after missing all but the opening night game.

But a late scratch to Jalen Johnson moved Garrison Mathews into the starting lineup for this matchup with the Kings.

Zaccharie Risacher got the party started with nine early points, and the Hawks as a group jumped out to a 17-6 lead behind threes from Risacher and Dyson Daniels.

They put together another mini-run to push the lead to 22-6, but the team still needed to lock in the rest of the way lest they have a repeat of the game in Portland yesterday.

And on cue, a 13-3 run from Sacramento immediately slashed the big early lead.

Still, the Hawks welcomed the return of Kobe Bufkin and ‘Bogi’ late in the first quarter.

But six straight threes from the Kings knotted the game at 30-30, later revised to 31-30 Kings — although a De’Andre Hunter follow gave the Hawks the edge after one quarter, 32-31.

Then, the Kings, and Keon Ellis in particular, couldn’t miss from deep, although lax closeouts from the Hawks certainly had an effect. Atlanta surrounded an absolute avalanche of threes from the Kings, and that turned a 16-point lead into an 11-point deficit and climbing by the 7:20 minute mark in the second quarter.

Atlanta worked to stay in the game after the shooting onslaught, and once the starters plus Hunter came back in, they created some havoc defensively and were able to score against scrambled defenses.

The Hawks winnowed the lead back down to 54-51 with four minutes remaining in the half. From there, they hung in there and tightened the screws on the defense.

At half, the Hawks were thankfully down just two points, 66-64. De’Andre Hunter was the high scorer for the Hawks with 13 points off the bench. Risacher added 11 points on 3-for-7 (43%) shooting from the field.

In the third quarter, Ellis picked up where he left off, hitting his seventh, eighth, and ninth three of the game to give the Kings an 85-77 lead. The only hope Atlanta had was to fight fire with fire — knocking down threes to give themselves a chance in a shootout.

Hunter did his best to help the cause with a couple of deep buckets in the period.

After three quarters, the Hawks found themselves down 93-89.

After a flowing game of high-octane basketball, the game slowed down in a major way in the fourth quarter. It was a choppy affair with numerous offensive fouls on screens and loose balls. The stop-and-start nature benefitted the Hawks as they were able to get stops as well as draw Keegan Murray’s sixth foul early in the period.

A cut finish by Risacher off a feed from Trae Young tied the game at 96-96 midway through the final quarter.

But the Hawks calmly put out most fires on defense down the stretch, including creating a 5-on-4 from a trailing De’Aaron Fox hitting the floor by the stanchion that ended in another Hunter triple.

With a 106-101 lead, the Hawks gave up a pair of trips to the line for Ellis, who promptly cut the lead to two. But Atlanta able to get around the trapping Kings defense and get the ball in the lane to good results in a pair of possessions with fewer than three minutes remaining.

At 109-108, there was a frantic set of final possessions. First, Atlanta had a couple of chances to add to the lead. But after a Hunter desperation three from the corner clanked off the rim, the ball ended up in De’Aaron Fox’s hands.

Dyson Daniels was able to bottle him up (despite maybe stepping out of bounds) and secure the ball as time ran out, clinching a 109-108 Hawks victory.

Hunter finished with 24 points, and Young had a brilliant game distributing the ball with 19 assists to just five turnovers.

The win moves Atlanta to 7-8 on the season and they’ll next play at the resurgent Warriors late on Wednesday.