The Heat hit 23 threes to hand the Hawks a road loss on Wednesday night.
The Atlanta Hawks fell short of sweeping their home-and-home tilt with the Miami Heat, suffering a 131-109 loss to the Heat at Kaseya Center on Wednesday night. Dyson Daniels led the Hawks with 18 points with Trae Young and Caris LeVert adding 17 points apiece. For the Heat, Tyler Herro and Duncan Robinson scored 24 points.
Heading into last night’s rematch off the heels of a defensive victory for the Hawks on Monday night, there wasn’t much to choose from between two sides as the scene shifted to South Beach — the Heat considered slight favorites heading into the contest.
The first half showcased why this game was considered a tight one prior to tip, with the two sides separated by a point after the first quarter. The Heat then took a double-digit lead before the Hawks — behind 10 second quarter points from Terance Mann — clawed back to tie the game heading into the second half.
The two sides were again closely contested for much of the third quarter but a blitz to end the third quarter put Miami in firm control of the game, and the Hawks were never able to find their feet to make a run at the Heat, who cruised to a 22-point victory.
Let’s take a look at how things got so far out of shape for the Hawks in this quarter.
A missed three from LeVert is rebounded by Herro and finds Davion Mitchell. Mitchell tests the waters with Young, backing up to the three point line, and when Young doesn’t go with him Mitchell pulls up for three and connects:
This is poor from Young; he’s got to show a little more effort in closing out Mitchell here — it’s far too easy on this possession.
An alley-oop converted by LeVert reduces the lead to five points, but not for long. A drive from Herro gets the Hawks defense collapsed, combined with the Heat moving the ball well, resulting in a corner three attempt for Herro. His miss is collected by Haywood Highsmith, who finds a wide open Robinson for an open three-pointer:
LeVert and Young are fine defensively here, both work hard to close out the space worked out by the Heat’s movement, but Mann strays away from Robinson and doesn’t contribute much inside on this possession defensively and is completely at sea when Robinson receives the ball on the perimeter. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hawks head coach Quin Snyder called for timeout at this juncture.
The immediate response for the Hawks out of that timeout was poor, as Georges Niang turns the ball over on the attempted pass to mid-court as the Heat’s pressure prompts the turnover:
A basket from Clint Capela is immediately cancelled out as Robinson comes off the screen and scores in the paint:
LeVert is taken out of the play by the screen here, and Capela is forced to rotate to stay with Kel’el Ware; it’s Niang who needs to step in front and contest Robinson here; again, it’s too easy for Miami in this stretch.
The Hawks’ offense is, again, stuck, as LeVert finds Capela on the roll and his hook is missed. Mann collects the rebound, fires it out to Niang but cannot convert the three:
Capela probably should have found Mann on the baseline here, but outside of that the Niang shot is one you want to hunt offensively.
The Miami threes would continue, this time Mitchell gets a look in the corner for a three after the drive from Herro:
Mann has to do a little better to stay in front of Herro here — it forced Niang to have to step in front to plug the gap and left Mitchell open on the wing for the three. Fine margins on the drive, but Herro was through unless Niang had stepped in:
Niang — very involved in this third quarter stretch — gets another good look at a three, this time in the corner, but cannot convert as the Hawks’ struggles continue:
To cap the run, Herro shovels the ball back to Ware on the trail, who hits the three to bring the Heat’s lead up to 14 points:
The Hawks’ defensive stance here is confusing… It looks as though they’re trying to play zone (Capela planted in the middle with Young and Niang covering the wings and Mann and LeVert the perimeter. Mann and Niang switch seamlessly but LeVert gets caught too deep and is no where when Herro offloads the ball to Ware for the three. If the intention was to play a zone here LeVert has got this one wrong, sadly.
In a very short stretch, the game got completely out of the Hawks’ control, having led for much of the third quarter. In the fourth quarter, the Heat hit another six three-pointers to keep the Hawks at bay, taking the hosts’ tally to 23 on the night as the Heat eased to a comfortable victory.
A disappointing loss for the Hawks from the point of view that they held the Heat to just 86 points on Monday night and conceded 131 a couple of nights later. Of course, the Heat were going to shoot better than that game, but 23 three-pointers would not have been what the Hawks expected. The Heat shot 59% from the field and 54% from three, shooting 23-of-42 from distance — was it just one of those nights for the Heat?
“Sometimes that’s the case,” acknowledged Snyder postgame. “You don’t want to accept and say they shot well. I thought there were some offensive rebounds that led to threes. If you look at their second chance points, almost every time they got an offensive board…Highsmith in particular really hurt us on the glass. Those threes, they were teeing them up, they were too open. We knew they were going to shoot the ball better. I thought the first half we were right there. Our activity defensively wasn’t what it was, they did some other things, played a lot of screening actions, played more hand-offs. Highsmith for example, Mitchell, their pressure up the court was one thing…our defense having to take the ball out of the net when they are making shots, and then we got stagnant on the offensive end.”
The Hawks, in contrast to the Heat, shot 12-of-32 from three, meaning the Heat outscored the Hawks 69-36 from distance…that’s a massive differential that’s difficult to overcome. In fact, teams this season who hit 23 or more threes are 20-4 — it’s not impossible, but unlikely that teams can outscore their opposition; it requires all cylinders blazing.
Of the four instances where teams who hit 23 or more threes and lost, Dallas overcame by way of Luka Doncic scoring 45 points, when the Sixers beat the Cavaliers they did so with three 20+ point contributions and 21 threes themselves. Similarly, the Pacers needed three 20+ point performances, and overtime, to beat the Wizards, while Oklahoma City needed four 20+ point performances to beat the Nets’ 23 threes. You either need your offense firing or a monster individual performance to offset all those threes — the Hawks had none of that last night.
Dyson Daniels led with an efficient 18 points (8-of-10 from the field) and you can’t really ask much more from him. All-Star guard Trae Young struggled to get involved as he normally would, scoring 17 points on just 4-of-12 shooting from the field and 1-of-6 from three. Miami’s defense has often done a very good job defending Young and taking him out of games — it’s famously a likely contributor for the Hawks going out and acquiring Dejounte Murray in 2022 following a playoff series defeat in which Young was very limited.
Zaccharie Risacher had an active start to the game but struggled to make much of an offensive impact after that, scoring 11 points. Niang shot 1-of-6 from three, limiting his output, while Onyeka Okongwu shot 6-of-15 from the field for 13 points — lower than his typically efficient production from a shot percentage point of view.
All of this is to say that the Hawks were not firing on all cylinders offensively, nor were aided by the big offensive night they would’ve needed from Young to put them over the top in this spot, and thus had no opportunity to live with the Heat’s three-pointers. LeVert (17 points) and Mann (13 points) had solid games off the bench to help the struggling offense.
Outside of that, there’s a ton of positives for the Hawks here, who are caught in a very odd spot as they enter a frantic March. They can’t throw this season away for two reasons: one, they don’t own their draft pick so there’s no choice but to stay the course, but, two, they almost physically can’t throw in the towel — they’re four games ahead of the Bulls and 5.5 games ahead of the Nets to drop out of the Play-In spot completely. And even in both of these instances the Hawks are far more talented than both of those outfits.
Nevertheless, the Hawks march on (no pun intended), and there’ll be plenty of better games than last night…although their next game may not be one of them…
The Hawks (27-32) are back in action at State Farm Arena on Friday night when they take on the Oklahoma City Thunder (47-11).
These two sides have taken part in very entertaining fixtures of late, and the State Farm faithful can only hope for another on Friday night.
Until next time!