For seven seasons, the Atlanta Hawks had to be one type of team. Trae Young doesn’t exactly open many stylistic doors. He’s never really defended, nor has he ever been much of an off-ball mover or catch-and-shoot threat. If you’re going to justify building around him, it means building an offense around him and running dozens of pick-and-rolls every game. It’s basic and it’s effective. Between 2021 and 2024, the Hawks always ranked league-average or better in half-court efficiency, and they were always far better offensively with Young on the floor.
They also ranked 22nd, 25th, 29th and 30th in passes per game in that window. They never once posted an above-average season-long defense with Young on the roster. The style was, in other words, limiting. Young’s early season injury opened all of those doors that were previously closed. They jumped to ninth in passes and 10th in defense. They rebuilt their offensive identity around transition. Only the Clippers were more efficient in transition, and only the Pistons, Heat and Raptors spent a greater proportion of their possessions there. Atlanta’s reinvention held. The Hawks traded Young to Washington. They went all in on this identity.
And it fizzled in the postseason.
What went wrong vs. the Knicks?
Through the first five games of their first-round loss to the Knicks, only the Pistons, Magic and Trail Blazers were less efficient offensively than the Hawks. In their season-ending Game 6 loss on Thursday, they were down by 47 points at halftime and scored 36 points in the first 24 minutes. Atlanta dropped from about 18 fast-break points per game to 13 and, even more jarringly, after averaging about 295 passes per game in the regular season, they fell all the way to 257 in the playoffs. Only the Thunder and 76ers moved the ball less.
So what happened? A few things. The Knicks aren’t exactly a conducive opponent for track meets since they rarely turn the ball over. Their individual offensive rebounders are so good that they can crash the glass without compromising their transition defense. Only the Thunder, Raptors and Celtics allowed a lower percentage of opposing plays to come in transition. The Knicks were built to play the slower, more methodical game that the postseason creates. The Hawks, at least for now, were not.
Atlanta spent a lot of this series playing 4-on-5 offensively. New York simply did not guard Dyson Daniels from the perimeter. Atlanta built its offense to account for that. Daniels functions, to an extent, as a center, serving as the primary pick-and-roll screener for the Hawks, while their actual center, Onyeka Okongwu, fires more 3s than most players his size. He just isn’t enough of a shooting threat to compel the Knicks into compromising their rim defense.
The expectation coming into this series was that New York’s best defender, OG Anunoby, would guard Hawks All-Star Jalen Johnson. He did a fair bit of that, but he also spent quite a lot of time on Okongwu so he could serve as a spare rim-protector. Johnson, in his first playoff series in the rotation, couldn’t generate advantages while guarded by the smaller Josh Hart, so the Hawks dropped from about 52 paint points per game in the regular season to about 45 in the playoffs. Atlanta’s beautiful ball movement and speed ground to a halt.
Atlanta’s offense only really worked in the simplest way: when CJ McCollum generated his own offense. The Hawks won Games 2 and 3 behind 55 McCollum points, mostly scored at the expense of Jalen Brunson, against whom he shot 73.7% in the first five games of the series. Sometimes, the playoffs are as simple as having a great, individual shot-maker who can hunt the worst opposing defender to generate points. New York’s great, individual shot-maker is a 29-year-old about to make his third All-NBA team. Atlanta’s is a 34-year-old who has never made an All-Star Game.
What do the Hawks need?
There are lessons for the Hawks to take from all of this. For their playoff offense to function, they probably need a guard capable of doing what McCollum did early in the series, but more consistently. Young was that kind of guard. Does that mean they should have kept him? No, because he locked them out of all of the other things that went right this season. The Hawks don’t need to abandon their ball movement or transition. They need to amplify it with a better scoring guard than they currently have.
They fortunately have ample resources with which to try to do that. Johnson, Okongwu and Nickeil Alexander-Walker are all locked into such team-friendly deals that the Hawks have straightforward pathways to cap space in the next few offseasons if they want to pursue it. For now, they’ll likely operate above the cap this offseason to keep McCollum and Jonathan Kuminga. The focus will probably be on the trade market and, depending on the lottery, the draft.
Atlanta infamously managed to relieve the Pelicans of their unprotected 2026 first-round pick in a trade at last year’s draft. That pick came with swap rights attached to the Bucks, meaning Atlanta has two bites at the lottery apple coming. If either New Orleans or Milwaukee moves up, the Hawks have a chance at one of the star prospects of this class. And if they don’t? The back half of the top 10 is full of high-level guard prospects. In a perfect world, the Hawks draft Darryn Peterson. If they can’t, Keaton Wagler or Darius Acuff would suffice.
Ideally, the Hawks find their guard in June and are off to the races from there. If they don’t, it’s worth remembering that the Hawks have another Pelicans/Bucks pick coming in 2027, though it’s an inferior one. The Hawks will get the lesser of those two picks, provided they don’t both land in the top four. Not the golden ticket the 2026 pick was, but a useful trade chip nonetheless if the Hawks decide to go shopping for a veteran guard.
There are more questions to be answered here. Daniels is a big one. He shot 34% on three 3-point attempts per game last season. Not great, but serviceable enough. He shot below 19% on less than half of the attempts this season. The Hawks don’t need Daniels to be a marksman. They need opponents to guard him. His screening, passing and transition offense are enormously additive to the Hawks offensively when things are going right, and that’s before factoring in his role as Atlanta’s best defender. They just don’t have the collective shooting at this stage to compensate for him. Maximizing Johnson’s rim pressure, especially in the half-court, relies on improving their spacing.
These problems are just more solvable than the ones posed by the Young version of the team. There’s only so far you can go when you’re locked into one specific style. The Hawks landed on something more malleable this season, and it mostly fit their other players quite well. They’ll have to supplement those players with more talent and perhaps tweak the ways in which they use them, but considering how bleak things looked in Atlanta only a couple of years ago, this is a fairly promising overall position the Hawks have created for themselves. They cap-dumped their franchise player and still went on to trade blows with a Finals contender for six games. They’re only going to get better with more time to build around this new philosophy.
