Hawks have better basketball ahead of them after season opener

The Hawks opened their regular season with a win on Wednesday, but they believe they have much better basketball ahead of them.

They downed the Magic 132-125 to get their first win of the year. But they still have plenty to clean up as their new players, Lu Dort and Aaron Wiggins, continue to acclimate to the new system. They also have No. 8 overall NBA draft pick Kingston Flemings navigating his rookie year.

“It’s just hard to get like a real barometer (until), you know, a couple weeks into the season,” Hawks general manager Onsi Saleh told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a phone interview.

“But overall, (I’m) super happy with Lu and Aaron and what they’ve been doing and what they brought to the table. It’s kind of everything we expected out of them. I think both guys have a, like, significant role here. They’ve been just great.”

In their debuts, Dort and Wiggins helped to bolster the Hawks’ second unit, kicking off the erasure of the Hawks’ first-half 10-point deficit. The two also accounted for 24 of the Hawks’ 34 bench points, with Wiggins hitting some key shots down the stretch of Wednesday’s game.

The new duo’s contributions proved huge as the Hawks’ Nickeil Alexander-Walker and Jalen Johnson dealt with some foul trouble. That led the Hawks to play Wiggins and Dort for extended minutes.

But the Hawks weathered the foul trouble, and Saleh said he couldn’t be prouder of the maturity the team showed in fighting through it.

“It showed a more mature team by being able to handle that and not letting it get us down, and we fought through and still played our game and ended up getting the win, which was great,” Saleh said.

“But, we still got a lot of work to do for sure.”

The Hawks face a tough stretch at the start of the season, with seven games in 11 days. They have three sets of back-to-back games and 12 road matchups in their first 20 contests.

Saleh is confident the team will weather it.

“I think we’ll be all right,” Saleh said.

Johnson continues to grow as a leader. Despite picking up his fourth foul at the start of the third quarter and a fifth in the fourth quarter, Johnson played with patience and poise.

“It was like that last Jalen pass — where he drew two (defenders) — to Nickeil, that was, like, super mature,” Saleh said. “He played the right way. A lot of times, like, the superstar player or the guy that’s like the best guy on your team will try and take that shot still.