Trae Young, Jalen Johnson sound off on Hawks’ ugly defense vs. Bulls

ATLANTA, GA – The Atlanta Hawks have several capable offensive players on their team. With that comes many points on the scoreboard on any given night. So, it was no surprise that the Hawks put up 150 points against the Chicago Bulls.

The only problem for the Hawks- and the biggest problem – was that they gave up 152 points.

Similar to the Hawks, the Bulls have several players who can score the ball. For most of the game, they were getting whatever they wanted, and the Hawks were playing from behind. Going into halftime, the Bulls had 83 points, and the Hawks had 73. To end the game, the Hawks had allowed 66 points in the paint, 26 fastbreak points, and 57 bench points.

The Hawks did what they had to do on offense. Jalen Johnson scored 35 points, and Trae Young scored 35. That one problem just hurt them in the end.

“It’s kind of tough when you’re giving up 80 points in the first half,” Jalen Johnson said after the game. “It’s kind of embarrassing in a sense. We just gotta get better. We seem them again in two days, so hopefully we can cut down on some of the things we’re doing.”

This was Young’s second game back since returning from injury. His minutes restriction went from 20 to 26, and he looked like himself on the floor all night, scoring and getting his teammates involved.

“It was good. Not good enough,” Young said. “We didn’t win the game. For me, that’s all I care about. I’ve had all the numbers. I put up numbers before. We gotta win, and tonight, we just couldn’t get enough stops. 150 points is plenty enough points to win the game. It’s not like they were stopping us at all; we weren’t stopping them and [they had] transition points. We just got to figure out how to get back and just stop them from scoring fast.”

Hawks can’t get stops in loss to Bulls

Though the Hawks were playing from behind for most of the game, they had some extra gas late in the third and going into the fourth quarter to make it a game. The Hawks were able to grab a four-point lead at a time, but they didn’t have it for long. The Bulls stormed back, and they didn’t look back from there.

The Hawks made a late push and got it to a two-point game with four seconds left, but Young was not able to get the shot to go.

“Teams are coming in here playing fast against us, and we gotta figure out how to stop teams that want to play fast beating us this way,” Young said. “They’ve had our number the last couple of years playing this way, and we gotta figure out how to stop it next game.”

“I think the first half we had a lot of breakdowns from an execution standpoint,” head coach Quin Snyder said. “Both teams shot it well; we just have to do more to impact the percentage where shots aren’t as clean. I thought we did a better job with that in the second half, as far as making them work harder. The first half, our transition defense wasn’t as good as it needed to be, but by and large, we need to be better defensively.”

The Hawks, who were once one of the better defensive teams earlier in the season, have taken a few steps back over the past few weeks. It’s still a long season, but if they want to get back to their winning ways, that’s the first thing they’ll have to fix.

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