What should we make of the Atlanta Hawks right now?
They started the season 9-2, outscoring their opponents by 9.5 points per game. On the way there, they became the first team this year to defeat the defending champion Cavaliers, and they did it in Cleveland. But the Hawks also fattened up on an easy early schedule, going 8-2 against opponents that currently have a combined winning percentage that would yield 34 victories a season.
The Hawks have lost six of seven games since that point — including the lone home game in that stretch, an 18-point blowout at the hands of the Pelicans — while being outscored by an average of 9.7 points per game. That stretch came against teams that have a combined winning percentage that would yield 44 victories a year.
Read More: How did Andrew Wiggins become a deadly 3-point shooter?
So Atlanta is now 10-8, on pace for 46 wins. They have a plus-2.1 point differential which is 11th-best in the league and which backs up their overall winning percentage. They got hot against some pretty bad teams and cooled off considerably against some pretty good ones (and the Golden State Warriors).
They’re still humming along with the NBA’s best defense, and even held Golden State to a scoring rate more than 10 points per 100 possessions worse than their season average in Monday’s loss. But they Hawks are also 23rd in offensive efficiency, and just a hair outside the bottom five overall. They’ve cleaned up the rebounding issues that plagued them the last two seasons — after ranking 23rd and 25th in defensive rebound rate during the last two years of the Horford Era, they’ve shot up to 10th this season — but new issues have cropped up to plague them on the other end.
The Hawks squad that featured Jeff Teague at the point and Al Horford at center ranked third and fourth in the NBA in drives per game the last two seasons, per NBA.com’s SportVU data; the Dennis Schroder-Dwight Howard squad ranks 14th. The teams from the last two years were about average at taking care of the ball; only the Philadelphia 76ers have turned the ball over on a greater share of their possessions than this year’s Hawks. After knocking down 39 and 37 percent of their catch-and-shoot 3s the last two years, the Hawks are way down at 34 percent so far this season.
