Among their many other issues, the Atlanta Hawks struggled to consistently make 3-pointers all season. Is this fixable?
To become a contender in the modern NBA, being a proficient 3-point shooting team is paramount. Take this season for example; of the 10 best long-range shooting teams, nine of them made the playoffs. Obviously, those clubs excel at more than hitting 3s, but in this era of pace-and-space, constructing a good team devoid of it is a laborious task.
At some level, the Atlanta Hawks understand this, which is why former Golden State Warriors assistant general manager Travis Schlenk was brought in to rebuild this team from scratch. Given the moves he’s made early in his stewardship, transforming the Hawks into a supreme 3-point shooting team is at the top of the agenda.
Through one season, the strategy has produced mixed results. While the outline of head coach Lloyd Pierce’s offense looked promising — Atlanta ranked first in pace, third in 3-point attempts, 14th in passes per game, ninth in open 3-point attempts, and first in wide open 3s — they were still among the worst offensive teams in the league and only ranked 16th in 3-point percentage.
Even though they progressed from distance following the All-Star break, going from 34.5 percent to 36.6 percent, there’s plenty of reason to wonder whether this team can evolve into an elite shooting team in the coming years.
Let’s start by revisiting the plethora of uncontested 3s the Hawks took this year. The abundance of open treys is encouraging, but their respective 37.6 percent and 32.4 percent shooting marks on wide open and open looks (which placed them 17th and 23rd in those categories) are concerning.
Throughout the season, anyone who tuned in to a Hawks game saw a plethora of well-run offensive sets that ended with an off-target shot, like the play below against the Washington Wizards.
Here, swingman DeAndre’ Bembry rejects the side screen set by Alex Len. His dribble penetration sucks in three Washington defenders and once he catches Otto Porter Jr. ball-watching, he kicks it out to Vince Carter on the left wing. Everything about this play worked … except the most important part.
How about this possession in the opening minutes of a game against the Milwaukee Bucks? This morphed into a basic pick-and-pop after Eric Bledsoe blows up the dribble handoff. Trae Young collapses the defense with dribble penetration and Brook Lopez‘s decision to protect the rim creates a clean look for Dewayne Dedmon, a 38 percent 3-point shooter.
If you made it this far into the piece, you can guess how this turned out.
Here’s another example of Young’s gravity creating a pristine chance for a teammate. This time, it’s backcourt mate Kevin Huerter clanking from deep.
Young also wasn’t afraid to join the brick-laying party with some errant pull-ups of his own.
In a vacuum, it’s easy to dismiss these as aberrations; after all, even the best shooting teams bungle prime scoring opportunities from time to time, even the one Schlenk is trying to model this team after. But these weren’t occasional flubs; these were a common feature of Atlanta’s offense.
Obviously, the Hawks could correct a lot of this by simply converting more of these 3s. If guys like John Collins (34.3 percent on wide open 3s), DeAndre’ Bembry (28.9 percent on all 3s), and Kent Bazemore (31.8 percent on open 3s) improve their accuracy downtown, and if Young shoots and manipulates defenses as he did in the second half of the season, this team could sport one of the better offenses in the league as soon as next year.
Of course, teams that finish where the Hawks did in the standings aren’t done in by one thing, so it’d be silly to think they struggled primarily because of their spotty shooting, or that fixing it will immediately vault this team to the top of the Eastern Conference.
However, those 3-point woes make the other flaws more visible; you can’t be merely a ho-hum shooting team while also being terrible at overall defense (27th in defensive rating), transition defense (27th in opponent points per possession) and rebounding (20th in rebounding percentage).
If the Hawks can’t improve in those areas right away, then their 3-point shooting — particularly when a defender is at least four feet away — has to get better if they want to continue on this upward trajectory. Otherwise, questions about how good this young Hawks core can become may start to creep up.