2015 NBA scores: Kyle Korver leads Atlanta to 12th straight win and 3 other things

Korver’s mind-boggling numbers helped the Hawks stay on an incredible streak.

by Tim Cato

Jan 18, 2015, 2:00 PM UTC

Kevin Liles-USA TODAY Sports

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NBA scores and results: Hawks win 12th straight, Warriors cruise in Houston

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The Atlanta Hawks are still the NBA's surprise story of the year, but as they dismantled yet another team on Saturday for a 12th straight win, it felt completely normal.

How things have changed for Atlanta in the span of just weeks. In December, people started noticing them: "Look at how great the Hawks have begun the season!" Then, "Wow, Atlanta is playing really good basketball right now -- I wonder when they'll fall off." That gave way to various degrees of certainty and uncertainty at how good the team really was. As we reach the halfway point of the season, their dominance is just something as normal and ordinary as a Tim Duncan bank shot.

All the while, the Hawks have won 26 of their last 28 games -- that's two losses in 52 days. They've essentially turned the NBA into a hegemony for the past seven weeks. On Saturday, it was the Chicago Bulls who fell victim to their emergence in Atlanta's 107-99 win.

Kyle Korver led the way with 24 points, hitting 7-of-9 of his 3-pointers. He played 37 minutes and only took one shot inside the arc -- which he missed in a rare moment of mortality.

Kyle Korver hits 7 threes, taking all but 1 attempt from long distance in the @ATLHawks win pic.twitter.com/ykow9B2GY2
— NBA.com/Stats (@nbastats) January 18, 2015

Korver is having the most incredible shooting season in recent NBA memory. Seriously, these numbers are hard to comprehend.

FG%	3PT%	TS%
51.0	52.7	73.9
Rank: 19	Rank: 1	Rank: 1

Once a niche shooter, he’s slowly expanded his game so much and in so many areas that’s he’s a starter playing 33 minutes a night. He’d play more, but Atlanta blows so many teams out that they don’t even need him to.

Korver is just one part of the multi-pronged Atlanta attack that has them with a league-best 33 wins. Nobody saw this type of season coming from the Hawks, but now their incredible play is just something we’ve come to expect nightly. That’s something we all can live with.

3 other things we learned

Golden State also won on Saturday and all we can do is wait for these two teams to face each other. It's still three weeks away, but the first Hawks-Warriors show down of the year deserves to be circled and marked in red on your calendar for premiere viewing. It's on Feb. 6 with a rematch later in the season on March 18.

Andrew Wiggins set a career-high with 31 points to lead Minnesota to its seventh win. Last summer's No. 1 overall pick started the season slow, but something clicked in a couple days before Christmas. In an otherwise insignificant blowout loss in Cleveland, Wiggins showed his holiday spirit by scoring 27 points and sparked the best 13-game stretch of his career. He has scored double figures in every game and more than 20 points in all but three, shooting 50.5 percent from the floor, 45.9 percent on his 3-pointers and averaging 4.9 rebounds a game.

On Saturday, it reached a new high -- in a win, no less! Wiggins' 31 came on 11-of-17 shooting (4-of-5 from distance) with nine rebounds, four assists, three blocks and only two turnovers. He was a team-best +13 when on the floor in a game the Timberwolves only won by eight and played 40 minutes to help seal the victory. This feels like a good time to remind everyone the rookie doesn't turn 20 until next month.

Hopefully you didn't watch the Pacers play Charlotte. If you did, I'm sorry -- the game went into extra time because it was tied at 68. The Hornets eventually won 80-71 -- even with the extra five minutes, those were the two lowest scores in the NBA on Saturday. It wasn't a defensive affair reminiscence of the 90s. No, it was just two bad offenses running sloppy offense and missing way too many shots -- Charlotte is the No. 27 best offense in the NBA and Indiana No. 29.

Play of the Night

You watch this and you can kind of see it coming. You see Curry get the deflection, of course, and see it caroming off in a direction that he'll definitely control it. You see Harrison Barnes notice and streak back towards the basket. You see a tiny window, but you think: can Curry get to the ball in time? Can he actually pull this off? Then all in one motion it happens and you wonder why you would even doubt him.