Dyson Daniels is an NBA player with a burgeoning resume, a cool nickname and worries so profound that he finds himself constantly looking over his shoulder.
That was evident Sunday night, when he represented the first line of the Atlanta Hawks’ defense against Tyrese Maxey. Daniels, 6-foot-7 and stringy, would assume his stance as Maxey, 6-foot-2 and speedy, advanced the ball upcourt, then begin glancing this way and that: Now where is the screen coming from? And sure enough, one of the Sixers’ big men, be it Joel Embiid, Andre Drummond or Adem Bona, or maybe even one of their guards, usually Jared McCain or Quentin Grimes, would arrive to set a pick on Daniels.
That is standard operating procedure for every team, especially when a perimeter scorer of Maxey’s talent faces a defender of Daniels’ pedigree. The idea is to put that defender and his teammates on the horns of a dilemma, to make them mull whether they should trap or hedge or, as is often the case, switch. This puts a lesser defender at Maxey’s mercy, allows him to do his best work.
And indeed the Hawks prefer to switch, coach Quin Snyder said before the game.
“But,” he added, “Dyson won’t, because he cares so much about the guy he’s guarding.”
Not that Snyder minds. Daniels, 22 and in his fourth season, has earned some degree of trust, having been named a first-team All-NBA defender for the first time in 2024-25, when he led the league in steals. (He’s tied for the lead this season.) Such is his larcenous knack that the native Australian, also the league’s Most Improved Player last year, has been dubbed “The Great Barrier Thief,” according to basketball-reference.com.
So yeah, he would rather work alone, more or less. And never mind how many of those dastardly screens come his way. As Daniels put it before Sunday’s game, “I would love to keep my matchup as much as I can. I like taking that challenge.”
It’s a considerable one, especially against a force of nature like Maxey, who put up 44 points Sunday. It was, however, a flawed masterpiece, one that saw the league’s third-leading scorer (at just over 32 points a night) miss 11 of his 13 three-point attempts but hit the one triple his club really needed, in the dying seconds of regulation. That tied a game the Sixers had trailed by eight with 49.8 seconds left and sent it to overtime, where Maxey was again great until he wasn’t. His two missed two free throws with 4.6 seconds remaining left the door open for Atlanta, and the Hawks’ Jalen Johnson, who scored 41, connected twice at the line with less than a second left to knot matters once again.
Johnson went on to bury a pair of three-balls in the second OT, helping secure a 142-134 victory for Atlanta, which was without Trae Young and Kristaps Porzingis.
Daniels’ exact contribution was difficult to quantify, as is usually the case with defenders facing a top scorer. The boxscore showed him with respectable totals of 17 points, nine rebounds, eight assists and two steals. Of far greater importance was the manner in which he fought over as many of those screens as possible, attempting to stay in front of Maxey, attempting to make his life as difficult as he could.
And still Maxey scored 44. Because here’s the thing: Nobody actually stops anybody in the NBA. Not individually, anyway.
“Good offense beats good defense any time,” Daniels said. “People make tough shots. It’s just, how tough can you make the shots?”
Maxey, who because of his struggles from deep regularly attacked the rim as the game wore on, finished 14-for-31 from the floor. He was also 14-for-17 from the foul line, and saw his nine assists offset by six turnovers.
Afterward, he was only too happy to give his counterpart his flowers.
“Dyson’s really good,” he said. “He’s really good.”
Easy to see why. He’s rangy, with arms for days.
And, Grimes said, “He’s just solid. He just moves his feet really well, he’s got great hands and he gets his hands on a lot of steals, (in) a lot of passing lanes. He’s a great on-ball defender and team defender. Usually you see either one or the other.”
Funny thing, once you earn a reputation as a good defender.
“Some people go at you a little harder and try to prove a point,” Daniels said. “That’s fun. That’s what it’s about.”
And Snyder and Co. have reminded him that he has to be equal to the challenge – and reminded him in no uncertain terms, apparently.
“Some of the coaches,” Daniels said, “have been on my ass: People have been scoring too much, so time for me to pick it up.”
He did not face Maxey last season, as the Sixers star missed all three meetings with the Hawks because of injury. And Daniels, true to form, said before Sunday’s game that he relished the opportunity.
“Obviously very, very quick,” he said of Maxey. “Very talented. Can do it all. So it’s about trying to be physical with him, keeping him in front.”
That’s a possession-by-possession chore, and Daniels had some wins. In one second-quarter stretch, for example, he fought over Embiid screens on three straight Philadelphia trips, two of which ended with turnovers.
Through three quarters, Maxey was 4-for-12 from the floor and 1-for-7 from the arc while scoring 20 points. That wasn’t all the result of good defense, as Nick Nurse observed.
“It felt like he had a ton of great looks that he wasn’t hitting,” the Sixers coach said.
Maxey had another miss, as well as a turnover, in the first 2:42 of the fourth quarter, when the Sixers were outscored 13-0 and saw a six-point lead turn into a seven-point deficit.
But this would turn into a 58-minute joust, the irresistible force meeting the necessarily movable object. And goodness knows the Sixers erected the necessary obstacles to impede Daniels and aid Maxey.
“We try to make it easy for him to get a lane to the basket, get an iso, a stepback three, something like that,” Grimes said of his teammate.
In the last 5:35 of regulation Maxey barged to the bucket for three conventional three-point plays, then hit his clutch triple. He would add 12 points in the two overtimes.
Twenty-four points. In 15:35.
“He hung in there,” Nurse said. “I thought he did a heckuva job of navigating their length down the lane in the fourth and the overtime. Those are some long athletes.”
No wonder Daniels, like so many other defenders, was left looking over his shoulder. You just never know where the trouble’s coming from, or when it might arrive. But with a guy like Maxey, it always seems imminent. It’s just a matter of hanging on for dear life, and hoping for a miss or two. And in the end, that’s exactly what happened.