NEW YORK — As far as statement games go, that wasn’t much of a statement by the Atlanta Hawks. It was more like a whimper.
The New York Knicks smashed Atlanta 126-97 in Tuesday’s Game 5 of their best-of-seven first-round playoff series to go up 3-2 and put the Hawks on the brink of elimination. Atlanta trailed by 13 after the first quarter and made nary an utterance afterward, much less any kind of louder oration to offset its disappointment at losing home-court advantage in a Game 4 defeat three days earlier.
Advertisement
“We’ve gotta be better, we’ve gotta come out, we’ve got to play harder, “ said Dyson Daniels, who was one of the Hawks’ few bright spots Tuesday with 17 points on 7-of-11 shooting. “They came in and just manhandled us.”
“Their defense never let us establish consistently how we could play to beat them,” Atlanta coach Quin Snyder said. “We had some shots that didn’t go in. (The Hawks were 13-of-42 from 3 and missed seven of their 17 free-throw attempts.) That’s always in play. But for us, I think we need to execute who we are and what we’ve done to be a good team. That’s hard when you play against a team of their caliber.
“That level for us, we didn’t hit it. They had a lot to do with that, but that can’t be where it stops. We’ve got to be more committed to that, to play in the way that we know we need to play to be successful.”
Let’s backtrack 72 hours. Almost to a man, the Hawks were disappointed in themselves after Saturday’s 114-98 loss to New York in Game 4, feeling New York dialed up its intensity to another level, and the Hawks didn’t respond.
“We just got punked,” All-Star forward Jalen Johnson said.
“They wanted it more, they played harder,” Most Improved Player winner Nickeil Alexander-Walker added.
“We didn’t play Hawks basketball,” center Onyeka Okongwu noted.
So you might imagine they would have come out with fire in their eyes at the start of Game 5. But whatever flames they mustered were rather easily doused by the combo of Karl-Anthony Towns and Jalen Brunson.
Brunson — freed of Daniels’ pestering defense by a matchup switch that put Daniels on Towns — erupted for 39 points, and the Knicks scored in the paint so easily in the first half that they barely needed to bother with jump shots, attempting only seven 3s before the break and 26 for the game.
{“endpoint”:”https://api-prd-nyt.theathletic.com/graphql”}
As for the Hawks, the players felt their effort was … better. But still not where it needed to be to compete with a talented, physical New York team whose size and depth are starting to wear on them.
Advertisement
A paper-thin bench hasn’t helped, with Jonathan Kuminga’s trick-or-treat minutes once again being the only source of anything remotely positive from the subs. Tuesday’s backup center lottery winner, Tony Bradley, had no points and five fouls in 13 minutes, while Corey Kispert also served up a bagel in 14 minutes of inaction and Gabe Vincent — inexplicably on the court for 24 minutes — took home a minus-20. (While we’re here: Zaccharie Risacher, the No. 1 pick in the 2024 draft, got another DNP and couldn’t even get run during four minutes of garbage time.)
Nonetheless, one of the jarring themes of this series for the Hawks is that the starters have lost their minutes in all five games. Atlanta was getting punched in the face long before Mitchell Robinson had a chance to dunk on Bradley or Snyder used some other, um, interesting lineups to try to stem the bleeding.
“I just think that their mindset was to come out and try to bully us and be physical,” Daniels said. “And they did that. They pushed us under on rebounds. They set really good screens. They did all the little things.”
It seemed notable that Snyder was more upset with the offense than the defense after the game; while the Hawks got cooked by the Knicks, New York had the league’s third-ranked offense in the regular season. Alas, a Hawks team that led the NBA in assists in the regular season has been reduced to a lot more one-on-one play in this series. More than two-thirds of the Hawks’ buckets were assists in the regular season; barely half have been in the playoffs, a figure that is no better than the league-wide playoff average.
“We just got to be better on that side of the floor to give us a chance on the other,” Alexander-Walker said. “And vice versa. You know, if you get rebounds, you can run, and that’s what we do. If we get good shots, we can get back on defense. … Basketball’s a two-way sport so, like, we gotta be able to propel us kind of into the next possession, every possession. Offensively, defensively, vice versa. And there’s flashes where our offense may have hurt us that allowed them to go on runs.”
It’s also tempting to point to New York’s experience advantage, as this Atlanta group is in its first run together and the Knicks went to the Eastern Conference finals last year, but that part is perhaps not totally true. Four of the Hawks’ top six players have been in the conference finals, and they’ve all been in the playoffs before.
Advertisement
Alexander-Walker, for instance, was on the Minnesota Timberwolves team with Towns that trailed the Denver Nuggets 3-2 in 2024 before rallying to win the final two games. He spoke passionately Tuesday about what will be required to repeat the effort.
“One thing I’ll say is, more than anything, it’s not when you watch the film, it is not about … this guy, that guy, you know what I’m saying? Both teams are watching film,” he said.
“It’s the playoffs, and what I’ve learned from being in the playoffs, it was the mental battles of guys … like Ant (Anthony Edwards) saying, ‘I’ll see you in Game 7,’ right after Game 5 and losing the way we did in Game 5. That confidence to say, ‘Yes, we’re capable of beating this team. We have beaten this team in this series.’
“It’s gotta keep you up at night. It’s got to be something that you don’t sleep til Game 6 because you just want the moment. You want to bring the fight to them. You don’t like how it went down. I think that great determination to fight, the ‘want,’ is really what it’s about at this point.”
So, yes, the Hawks can likely get a bit more help from the shooting-luck gods than they’ve had the last two games (a combined 23-of-83 from 3). They can probably tweak the lineup rotations more optimally than what they threw at the wall in Game 5 and continue to tinker with X’s and O’s to mix up looks on Brunson and Towns.
None of that will matter if they don’t come into Game 6 with a lot more energy and desperation. The Hawks are already underdogs against a bigger, deeper team with title aspirations. On Thursday, they need to play like it, or their season will end.