ATLANTA, GA – It was all good until it wasn't. The Atlanta Hawks came out in the first half of their game against the Toronto Raptors, clicking on all cylinders. The ball was moving on a string, the shots were falling, and the defense was stifling. Without Trae Young, this is how the Hawks are going to have to play if they want to find success and win games.
If they do the opposite, things might not turn out their way, and that's what happened in the second half. The Hawks were overpassing, which led to turnovers and bad shots late in the shot clock. The Raptors took advantage and took another win in Atlanta in two weeks, with a 109-97 victory. When you don't have a player like Young on the court, it can get tough to get easy shots.
Kristaps Porzingis knows this, but he also thinks the Hawks have been doing fine without Young so far. At the same time, he knows the reality of the situation: things just aren't as easy as they used to be.
“I think we’re doing a good job,” Porzingis said after the game. “We’ve won some games, we lost one tonight. The firepower offensively is not the same; it's just the truth. But we still have a lot of firepower. We can run, we can go, and we have guys that are stepping up and playing well. It’s just gonna add more when he comes back, but it's also not ideal because we want to get those minutes together.”
Consistency is the name of the game for the Hawks for the time being. There have been times throughout the past few games where they look good on offense, but when things get tight, that's when they fall apart, similar to what happened tonight.
Hawks fall apart on offense in second half against Raptors
It was a tale of two halves, as the Hawks shot 45% from the field in the first half and 26% in the second. Shots were harder to come by, especially in the fourth quarter, where the Hawks blew the lead. Too many times, they ended up passing too much instead of taking the open shot, which put them in bad positions more times than not.
“We have to understand they are our shots,” head coach Quin Snyder said. “When you're open, let it fly. Don't think about it. Because as you get away from the clock, you pass a shot up, you’re probably not going to get a better one. We have confidence in our guys to take them; you have to. Oftentimes, when we did get in the lane and people were open, we missed them as well.”
“In the first half, we played our game at our pace, and in the second half, we didn’t execute the game as well,” Zaccharie Risacher said. “That helped them get back, and from that point on, it was close, and they found their confidence; they were playing more in transition. It didn’t go our way after the first half.”
It's obvious the Hawks are still adjusting without their floor general, and they know they have to find other ways to get easy buckets. As time continues, that chemistry and flow of the game should improve, but they have to take the shots that defenses are giving them first.
The Hawks will have another chance to find some consistency as they play the Los Angeles Lakers in less than 24 hours.
