Defense hurts Hawks in loss to Knicks

New York — There’s no defense for this one.

Hawks coach Mike Woodson knew it early in the fourth quarter, when his team’s body language changed dramatically as the New York Knicks kept pouring it on.

He might have known it earlier than that.

Any time a team playing for its playoff life falls apart the way the Hawks did in Wednesday’s 109-105 loss to the Knicks at Madison Square Garden, there’s no easy explanation.

“We really just got away from our game plan,” Hawks center Al Horford said after working the Knicks for 20 points, 13 rebounds and two blocks. “We played well the past three games, even though we lost one of them. But we came out tonight, played well in the first quarter and then tried to outscore them. And that wasn’t our script.”

The running and gunning Knicks are lurking outside the playoff chase, much like the Hawks were this time a year ago before securing the final spot in the last week of the season.

So the Hawks should have known what they were dealing with in Mike D’Antoni’s team, a crew with nothing to lose and everything to gain by beating the team currently in possession of the fourth spot in the Eastern Conference standings.

They certainly didn’t act like it with the game there for the taking early on. They led by as many as nine, only to cave when the Knicks fought back in the second quarter.

Clinging to the fourth spot themselves with a 34-27 record, the Hawks could not afford a slip-up, and especially not against a Knicks team that’s 10 games under .500 (25-35).

“This is tough,” Marvin Williams said. “We don’t want to be in the fourth spot now and then be in the fifth spot or the sixth spot a few weeks down the road, knowing that if we had taken care of business in a game like this, we’d be right where we want to be.

“Every game from here on out counts for us and we have to play with that same sense of urgency we had early in the season.”

That sense of urgency was nowhere near New York on Wednesday night. The Hawks outscoring the Knicks 60-42 in the paint, but went away from that when they got that early lead, basically daring the Knicks to catch them.

And they did, riding the hot hand of rookie Danilo Gallinari in the second and third quarters (season-high 17 points on 6-for-11 shooting). They stretched the lead to as many as 16 points before the Hawks’ mounted a frantic fourth-quarter rally to make things much closer than they should have been in the final minute.

But the Hawks couldn’t get their rally right, refusing to do anything other than rely on their shaky 3-point shooting to rescue them from a horrid defensive performance from start to finish.

Joe Johnson’s air-ball 3-pointer from the corner with 5.9 seconds left ended any chance the Hawks had of finishing off a miracle comeback.

It also punctuated their putrid night from long range, they shot 24 percent (6-for-25) from beyond the 3-point line.

“There’s no excuse,” Woodson said. “We went up nine and were playing extremely well, and we just got [too] comfortable. We let them get going, and this [Knicks] team is a shot-making team that scores a lot of points here in the Garden. Once they got going we couldn’t stop them.”