Good, bad, ugly: Hawks show fight vs. Pistons, but rebounding woes hurt
DETROIT — The Hawks swept their past two series of back-to-back games. But their run came to an end Monday when they lost to the Pistons 99-98 at Little Caesars Arena.
They took the game to the buzzer, despite their double-overtime efforts the night before.
Though their efforts will be marked in the loss column, the Hawks (13-9) say they hang their hats on their fight and will learn from Monday’s missteps.
The good
The Hawks have played 13 clutch games. They have an 8-5 record when playing in games with a score difference of 5 points or fewer with less than five minutes left in the fourth quarter or overtime.
In the clutch, Jalen Johnson and Nickeil Alexander-Walker have proved to be the guys that the Hawks can depend on to navigate them.
After clutch performances in the team’s double-overtime win in Philadelphia on Sunday, the two showed up again, scoring 28 of the Hawks 30 points in the fourth quarter.
Down 95-89 with 2:37 to play in the fourth, Johnson and Alexander-Walker made consecutive 3-point shots to tie the score with a little over one minute left. Alexander-Walker made another 3 with 1.8 seconds that cut the Hawks’ deficit to 99-98, which gave the Hawks a chance to try to steal it.
Over the past five games, Johnson and Alexander-Walker have ranked among the top 15 players in scoring in the clutch. Johnson has averaged 6.5 points (tied for seventh), while Alexander-Walker has averaged 5.5 points (tied for 11).
“It’s not only just us. It’s everybody,” Johnson said. “It’s Dyson (Daniels) on the offensive glass. It’s O (Onyeka Okongwu) hitting big corner-3 shots. It’s all the other things like that I think are playing in, and obviously we’re getting a lot of the credit for. But there’s a lot more that goes into it than just me and Nickeil.”
The bad
The Hawks tied the score at 61-61 with 5:39 to play in the third quarter. Then they needed to give their guys a blow so that they had enough juice to close the game.
They rolled with a lineup of Keaton Wallace, Vit Krejci, Luke Kennard, alongside Daniels and Mo Gueye.
Unfortunately for the Hawks, the three-man lineup that includes Wallace, Kennard and Krejci hasn’t netted them sustainable positive results.
On Monday, a 9-0 Pistons run at the end of the third quarter put them up 74-68 heading into the fourth. The Hawks went back to their starters to begin the final quarter.
Individually, each player gives the Hawks ball-handling that allows Alexander-Walker and Johnson to operate off the ball. But together they’re the worst three-man unit in the NBA, according to Cleaning the Glass, ranking in the zero percentile. They average just 98.9 points, while allowing 126 points per 100 possessions.
The ugly
This season, the Hawks have struggled on the glass. On most nights, they can overcome some of their rebounding deficiencies with their ability to force turnovers and gain extra possessions.
But on Monday, when facing the NBA’s second-best rebounding team, the Hawks had little margin for error.
The Pistons dominated the Hawks on the boards, outrebounding them 60-34 after 48 minutes. The Hawks slightly balanced the scales in the second half, but the Pistons did too much damage in the first half.
“Really, just the defensive glass is the thing that hurt us the most,” Hawks coach Quin Snyder said. “We (have) got to continue to grind on that. We’re going to be at a disadvantage. Everybody’s got to rebound, whether we got to tip it to each other, get on the floor. It doesn’t matter what it looks like. We just got to kill possessions with the ball.”
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