Hawks offense in Year 2 under Lloyd and Trae

[Jamaaliver]

Previously covered in 2018 here.

The offense

Make no mistake, the Hawks offense was horrible last year. They scored 2.3 fewer points per 100 possessions relative to the league average and ranked 23rd in the league in that very category last year, not exactly a set of stats that make you feel like this team is on the precipice of a breakthrough.

Beneath the veneer of those woeful numbers, however, lay a League Pass-friendly scheme. They shared the ball (14th in passes per game and fifth in potential assists), created open threes (ninth in open 3-point shots, first in wide-open 3’s), converted a respectable rate of spot-up shots (13th in points per possession) and hovered around league average in true shooting and effective field goal percentage.

At this point, you’re probably asking “Well, if the Hawks’ offense generated all these clean looks, why was their offense so bad?”. It’s a fair strawman question with an obvious answer: They didn’t turn enough of those opportunities into points.

Among the lowlights: They ranked 27th in transition points per game, 29th in pick-and-roll ball-handler PPP and 23rd in open 3-point percentage. Eventually, the shots started falling — they ranked 11th in offensive rating after the All-Star break — and the Hawks are banking on that strong second half carrying over to this year. There’s a good chance of that happening for a few reasons…

Hoops Habit

[Jamaaliver]

Can the Atlanta Hawks become an elite shooting team going forward?

Among their many other issues, the Atlanta Hawks struggled to consistently make 3-pointers all last season. Is this fixable?

To become a contender in the modern NBA, being a proficient 3-point shooting team is paramount. At some level, the Atlanta Hawks understand this. Given the moves GM Travis Schlenk’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.

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) and DeAndre’ Bembry (28.9 percent on all 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 this year.

Hoops Habit

[Jamaaliver]

If Young is at the center of it all, dictating the tempo and direction of possessions, then John Collins is floating somewhere above it, waiting for the right moment to strike. Most often, those moments come within the flow of the game and without warning. Collins is a vital component of Atlanta’s offense but often seems to exist apart from it. Head coach Lloyd Pierce noted last season that he doesn’t call plays for his big man, but Collins is very much an intentional part of the offense. Rather than posting up or isolating against other bigs, however, Collins constantly buzzes — setting screens or darting toward the basket — looking for ways to impact possessions. While not necessarily a primary option, he’s a serviceable one in most any situation.

It’s that dynamic that informs the Hawks’ blueprint for roster construction: surround a consummate passer with an undeniable force at the basket and three potent shooters, and let opposing defenses pick their poison (the Hawks scored at a top-five rate and created the highest shot quality in the league when Young and Collins shared the court).

Fansided

[Jamaaliver]

[Last season], The Hawks’ core set was the double-drag. They ran it on their majority of plays, as they could use their size advantage in the screen game and also space teams at the same time. Young was incredibly proficient playing out of this set last year. He became excellent at hitting timed passes to Collins and Dedmon, with both being highly capable of filling multiple areas of the court out of this set. It made the Hawks unpredictable. When you combine this with Huerter’s terrific off-ball motion and Bazemore’s consistent shooting, the Hawks had one of the most potent core sets in the NBA.

The double drag won’t be dead, purely because of Collins. Collins is one of the smoothest players in the league on the interior. Per Cleaning the Glass, he was in the 79th percentile for finishing at the rim. This is relevant to the Hawks because they will be at their best moving forward with John Collins at the “4.” It allows them to have a major size advantage, and due to his proficiency as a roller and a post-up guy, he would force teams to play bigger...Collins loses a much-underrated double-drag partner in Dedmon, so it will be up to Alex Len and potentially Fernando to attempt to fill the void. Both are downgrades from the [dearly departed Dedmon].

Def Pen

[Jamaaliver]

Did the bad 3-point shooting teams in the NBA fix their problems for the 2019-20 season?

Atlanta Hawks



3-point shooters attained: Allen Crabbe (39.6% on 7.0 3FGAs), Evan Turner (27.8% on 2.1 3FGAs), De’Andre Hunter (rookie), Cam Reddish (rookie), Jabari Parker (34.6% on 5.6 3FGAs), Chandler Parsons (34.1% on 6.0 3FGAs)

2018 shooting stats: 16th in 3-point percentage (35.2%), 4th in 3-point rate (40.3%)

Play style and trend: I love a lot of what I saw from Lloyd Pierce during his first year as the head coach. They did a great job of making 3-pointers for such a young team. Pierce and Travis Schlenk have this team taking a high volume of them with the Hawks taking the fifth most in NBA history for a team. They will hoist them as often as they can.

X-Factor in outside shooting: The young wings...guys like Kevin Huerter, Reddish, and Hunter will swing just how much this team improves. Huerter showed his pre-draft scouting report was accurate. He knocked down 38.5 percent of his 6.2 attempts per 36 minutes. That volume needs to increase to closer to 10 per 36 minutes. Reddish was hurt in college and shot poorly. I’m a believer that his shooting stroke will translate to success in the NBA. Hunter shot a lot of corner 3-pointers and only took 160 of them in two years of college. But he shot a high percentage. If this translates to the NBA, the Hawks will look great from deep next season.

Overall outlook: Even with the 3-point shooting, I think it’ll be pretty up and down for this young team. They’ll probably hang around what they did last season, but I expect them to increase the volume even more. They had a couple of high months last season and a couple of low months last season. Young teams finding consistency is a mystery.

Expectation: Mostly stay the same.

The Athletic

[jayu70]

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I would like for us not to lead the league this year.

[Jamaaliver]

Ironically, Travis Schlenk is designing a team that will allow the Hawks to take the ball out of Young's hands. Schlenk comes from Golden State, where he spent 13 years helping build that machine. He knows the value of having five guys on the court who can all handle, pass and shoot. Predictability is easily punished in the NBA. It's the shots you don't expect that kill you. The Warriors took Stephen Curry off the ball and watched defenses run themselves ragged trying to account for all his movement.

"We've been talking to Trae about moving without the ball from the first day he got here," Schlenk said. "I remember him looking at me like I was crazy when I told him the hardest time to score in the NBA is when you have the ball, but it's true. When you have the ball, you've got five sets of defensive eyes on you. When you don't have the ball, you maybe have one set of eyes on you, the guy who's guarding you, and there's a good chance even he's not paying full attention because he's doing what? He's looking at the ball.

"So, yeah, we spend a lot of time talking with Trae about that," Schlenk continued. "Just trying to get him to realize if he gives it up, and then gets right into moving, he's going to get great looks. But that's only possible if you have other guys on the floor who can facilitate. I say it all the time, and it sounds so elementary, but if you have five guys on the court who can shoot, pass and dribble, you're really hard to guard. But you look around the league, and there aren't a lot of teams who can put five guys on the court that can do all three. They can maybe do one or two things, but not all three. We want as many guys as possible who can do all three."

Spoiler:

Enter Kevin Heurter, a known sniper who shot 39 percent from 3-point range as a rookie while also showing an ability to do things like this:

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And this:

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Enter Hunter, who comes out of Virginia as an elite defensive prospect on the wing, but also as a guy the Hawks believe has loads of offensive upside that he didn't necessarily get to show in his more conservative, pattern-oriented college system.

"I think people really underestimate how good of a shooter he is," Schlenk said of Hunter, who indeed shot 44 percent from 3 last season at Virginia and has already shown an impressive offensive arsenal this preseason. "We always envisioned [Hunter] as a guy in corner, stretching the floor, and with a guy like Trae making plays, he's going to get a lot of shots we like him taking. He can put the ball on the floor. We feel there's a lot there offensively. The thing with DeAndre is he's going play the role he's asked to play, and the way Virginia plays, he wasn't asked to do some of the things we'll ask him to do."

The same goes for Reddish, a sweet-stroke shooter whose talent is unquestioned, but whose tendency to fade from the action in college, to just sort of disappear for stretches, was a universal pre-draft concern among scouts. Schlenk, again, believes much of that perceived passivity was circumstantial.

"At Duke, he was asked to basically be a spot-up shooter," Schlenk said. "That was the first time in his life, coming up through AAU and high school ball, that he had to play without the ball. A lot of guys need the ball just to get into that rhythm, and when they don't get it, they have a hard time adjusting. It's easy to get sort of lost in the offense. I think for Cam, that was the cause of some of that passivity you're talking about. Just that adjustment to not having the ball as much as he was used to.

"Now, with a guy like Trae running our team, obviously he's not going to be a primary ball handler with us, either," Schlenk went on. "But our objective is to have him be more of a facilitator and play with the ball as much as we can. Obviously you have to do both these days, but we feel like we can take advantage of his skill set by putting him in positions where he is more involved with the ball."

CBS Sports

[Jamaaliver]

Advanced analytics are limited in the preseason, but teams schemed against Collins to take away his No. 1 strength as a pick-and-roll man. Collins and Trae Young linked up for zero alley-oops in the preseason, a staple of the Hawks’ offense last season. Head coach Lloyd Pierce equates it to being the second year for the duo and teams knowing that when they prepare for the Hawks, they should blitz Young and take away Collins’ lobs at the rim.

“We’ve got to find ways for those guys to still be effective,” Pierce said. “We have to set screens higher. We have to hit John earlier. John has to be more of a playmaker out of the pick-and-roll and not just be a lob guy. All of those things are big. John is a pick-and-pop guy, as well, but we’ll adjust. We know that is the dynamic that is going to get us going, and we have to be able to be versatile with that dynamic. We can’t just be a pick-and-roll team that sees John get lobs and Trae gets 3s. We have to be able to play second side action. John has to be more of a facilitator.”

The Athletic

[kg01]

I'm gonna go ahead and go on record and say I think we're going to have a similar year to last season. Struggle early, come together late. Record my be similar again although we'll have made progress. Brace yourselves.

.. then again my most recent prediction may or may not have been that Siakim will take a step back this year so ....

[Jamaaliver]

I still don't fully recognize comprehend this formula, but it's nice to finally see Trae on the right side of this graph.

Same with Collins.

Interesting that Vince was considered the least effective/worst player on the floor last night.

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[Jamaaliver]

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It took years before Stephen Curry and Damian Lillard had to deal with the blitzing, trapping defenses Young is already seeing on a nightly basis. He knows when to make the simple pass out of double teams and let his gravity do the work. Look how discombobulated Orlando's defense is on this possession, which starts with two guys having to rush Young 30 feet from the hoop, and everything systematically breaks down from there as they're too late to scramble back into recovery.

CBS Sports

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Ten NBA things I like and don't like

Trae Young, rejecting screens

Young is mastering crueler methods of exploiting all the attention he draws beyond the arc.

In dissecting pick-and-roll defense against long-range gunners, we tend to focus on the big guy guarding the screener. He has to scurry out of his comfort zone! Is he agile enough to trap and recover? We perhaps overlook the mental and physical strain on Young's defender. That guy feels the oncoming pick. He hears the footsteps. He knows if he runs into that screen, if he is even a beat late slithering over it, Young is going to unleash something bad. So he naturally girds himself before that pick arrives. He leans. Maybe he opens his hips.

Young senses that anxiety and preys on it by faking toward screens and then bolting the other way. He is rejecting about nine picks per 100 possessions, double his rate from last season, per Second Spectrum, and defenders are falling for the gambit over and over. Only Lou Williams, master of the right-to-left crossover fade, veered away from more screens before Young injured his ankle on Tuesday.

Atlanta has scored about 1.7 points per possession anytime Young rejects a pick, per Second Spectrum. Young zipping away from a screen has basically been the most profitable recurring play in the league so far. Atlanta has scored 110 points per 100 possessions with Young on the floor, and a Washington Generals-esque 92 when he sits, per NBA.com data. Yowza.

Young already had one anti-trap device: crouching low, splitting defenders and bee-lining into a 5-on-3. Mix in this reject trickery and Young is going to have defenses paralyzed with uncertainty.

From there, Young can start manipulating instead of reacting. He can scan the floor, then digest which four or five passing options might emerge depending on his plan of attack and choose one. He is a world-class passer with either hand.

It won't look pretty every night. That is the nature of a high-variance 3-point game. Philly's size smothered Young on Monday. He is averaging five turnovers per game, and he needs to make himself more of a moving threat when others have the ball.

But if Young maintains this -- and returns soon -- he will probably be an All-Star and keep Atlanta in the playoff race.

The Ringer

[Jamaaliver]

The question that pops up for this young Hawks team is where they go for offense — both scoring and distributing — when Young isn’t on the floor.

Because of the missed game for Young, the minutes with and without him are pretty much even. When Young is on the floor (119 minutes), the offense rating for the Hawks clocks in at 110.4 points per 100 possessions. Take Young off the floor (121 minutes) and the offensive rating drops to 92.4 points per 100 possessions. If you feel the split because of the missed time due to the ankle injury isn’t fair, that’s fine. Through the first three healthy games, the Hawks with Young on the floor (108 minutes) scored 111.0 points per 100 possessions. In the 36 minutes without Young, the offensive rating was just 85.5 points per 100 possessions.

The Athletic

[jayu70]

The question that pops up for this young Hawks team is where they go for offense — both scoring and distributing — when Young isn’t on the floor.

Because of the missed game for Young, the minutes with and without him are pretty much even. When Young is on the floor (119 minutes), the offense rating for the Hawks clocks in at 110.4 points per 100 possessions. Take Young off the floor (121 minutes) and the offensive rating drops to 92.4 points per 100 possessions. If you feel the split because of the missed time due to the ankle injury isn’t fair, that’s fine. Through the first three healthy games, the Hawks with Young on the floor (108 minutes) scored 111.0 points per 100 possessions. In the 36 minutes without Young, the offensive rating was just 85.5 points per 100 possessions.

The Athletic

If the starters scored at their 'regular' numbers and the bench (Parker and Bembry) pick up the slack in an ideal world.

[Jamaaliver]

The plays remain the same, even when the personnel changes.

As long as Trae is on the floor, we know exactly what we want to do.

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[jayu70]

The plays remain the same, even when the personnel changes.

As long as Trae is on the floor, we know exactly what we want to do.

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Only difference is in how Trae delivers the ball. For JC, more lobs, for Parker, more bounce passes.