Early season trends and analysis

The Hawks are 2-2. It’s a slightly disappointing turn of events after dismantling the Charlotte Hornets to a franchise-best game margin two games in.

The hope is that the Houston Rockets turn out to be a great team this season to make the recent sweep at their hands look less dispiriting in time.

Advertisement

But there are still 78 games left to go even if not. It’s way too early to press the alarm button.

It’s also difficult draw any real conclusions for this Hawks team, but I’ll try anyway from a statistical point of view. Let’s touch on a few points of emphasis I noticed four games in.

Pace and three-point rate check-in

What kind of team are the Atlanta Hawks, really?

Well, some things are hard to tease out with such a small sample size of the season. However, pace and three-point rate are two things that stabilize quite early on from year-to-year.

The Hawks pace over the past two seasons has been juiced by their high turnover rates on defense, giving them plenty opportunities to score in transition. As of the end of play Tuesday, their defensive turnover rate (TOV%) is 17.9, good for second in the association. Or in other words, out of every 100 defensive possessions, they are forcing around 18 turnovers.

Advertisement

This has led them to being a top 10 team in pace (102.5 possessions per 48 minutes) so far this season — wholly unsurprising considering their quick-paced teams of late.

A lot of this is driven by the Great Barrier Thief, Dyson Daniels, who has 14 steals (!) in four games which leads the NBA. He’s also leading the NBA in total deflections (26) and deflections per game (6.5). Those opportunities quite often lead to Alexander-Walker flaring to the wing for open threes or Jalen Johnson run out dunks.

As for the three-point rate, the Hawks are putting up 44.6% of their field goal attempts from behind the arc, slightly up from last season’s 42.9% rate. Both marks had them 11th in the NBA respectively.

The offense is built to move the ball and seek high value shots like catch-and-shoot threes — but oddly those attempts aren’t coming from the corner to this point. The Hawks have the 27th corner…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/early-season-trends-analysis-110000538.html

Author :

Publish date : 2026-10-28 11:00:00

Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.