The Hawks will hit the floor again Friday but will have to do so without center Onyeka Okongwu.
With the team back from the NBA All-Star break Thursday, Hawks coach Quin Snyder said that the team would not have Okongwu for the “foreseeable future.” The Hawks center left the team’s penultimate game before the break against the Bulls with a left big toe sprain.
The team had plans to re-evaluate Okongwu seven to 10 days after, but Snyder shared that the team would need to adjust without him.
Fortunately for the Hawks, the team will have starting center Clint Capela back in the rotation. Since he has missed six games, the Hawks have placed him on a minutes restriction.
Though the Hawks welcome Capela back into the fold, they will miss Okongwu’s play. During Capela’s absence, Okongwu provided the Hawks with valuable starting minutes on both ends of the floor.
Okongwu averaged 16 points, 8.4 rebounds and 1.4 assists in Capela’s absence. He shot 64.7% overall on 10.2 field-goal attempts per game, while knocking down 44.4% of his 3-point shots. The Hawks big man ranked in the 90th percentile in points per 100 attempts this season, with 135.4, which is good for 15th among big men per Cleaning the Glass.
On the defensive end, Okongwu averaged 1.8 blocks per game in the five games he played as a starter before his injury.
“I think Onyeka, it’s tough because even before Clint went out, he’s someone that you can see his progress,” Snyder said at practice Thursday. “He’s getting better in a lot of areas, and then some of the things he does, and does well, will give us another dimension but on both ends of the floor. So losing him for, I don’t want to speak out of turn as far as a timeline goes, but he’s not going to be available for the foreseeable future.”
Okongwu allows the Hawks to space the floor offensively, and like Capela, he can inch out to the perimeter and take on smaller players.
But the Hawks understand that even without Okongwu, they’ll have continue get better on the defensive end. The Hawks rank 29th in the league in defensive efficiency (120) and have allowed opponents to score 121 points or more 34 times.
They sit seven games below .500 at 24-31 and are projected to win 36.2 games this season. They have 27 games left to play in the regular season and still struggle to play consistently connected.
“I mean, we’re just inconsistent in a lot of areas, defensive rebounding, sticking to the game plan, things like that,” Hawks forward De’Andre Hunter said. “But we just got to be consistent in those things and continue to communicate to each other just to get the game plan across.”
The Hawks feel ready to take on what’s ahead of them, but they’ll do so one game at a time.
“We just got to focus on the details and the little things and closing games and just making sure that we focus on every little thing,” Hawks guard Trae Young said. “It’s not just one thing that we can focus on because there’s a lot of areas that we can be better at and be really good at. So we just got to focus on that and not look ahead and just focus on one game at a time and try to win as many as we can.”
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