Atlanta Hawks drop 4th straight game, fall to the Bulls 91-86

In a battle of rebuilding teams, the Chicago Bulls defeated the Atlanta Hawks Thursday night 91-86.

The Bulls were without starters Bobby Portis (suspension), Nikola Mirotic (injury), Zach Lavine (injury) and replacement Paul Zipser (injury). The Hawks were also missing major cogs, including their best player Dennis Schröder (who would’ve feasted on the thin interior defense of the Bulls), starter Ersan Ilyasova.

With so many absences, this was going to be a bit of an exploratory affair for both teams – and it showed early on, with only 13 combined points being scored in the first 5:09 of play.

John Collins entered the game early and had a savage block on his fellow first-rounder Lauri Markkanen. Both players had good games, but Markkanen actually outshone Collins on this night, despite the disrespectful block.

Markkanen received more minutes than Collins, which helped, but Markkanen did have the stones to hit the game winning three in the 4^th quarter to put the game out of reach for the Hawks. Markkanen finished with 14 points and 13 rebounds, and he looked spry driving to the rim and off the dribble as well. The Bulls took a lot of heat for drafting him with the pick from the Jimmy Butler trade, but he looks like a solid offensive player.

Collins looked good, with many vicious dunk attempts broken up by fouls or rim protection. When he lands one of those, the Hawks bench will erupt, minds will melt and basketball Twitter will be set ablaze with hot takes and reactions. Just wait.

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The starters for the Hawks were thoroughly outplayed by the Bulls starters, with all Bulls starters managing a positive rating in the plus/minus metric – Robin Lopez (or “Machine Gun Lopez” according to Hawks commentator Bob Rathbun) led the way with a +12, truly looking like the best player on the floor for much of the game.

All Hawks players were negative in plus/minus, except for Kent Bazemore with a meager +3. Malcolm Delaney (-15) had a clunker of a game starting in the place of Dennis Schröder, though he was certainly putting in effort on the defensive end. His shot just was not falling.

Taurean Prince, after a showcase game against the Nets, was pretty anonymous here – playing 28 minutes and scoring 3 points on 1 of 7 shooting. Mike Muscala had a pretty nice game with 14 points on 5 of 12 shooting to go along with 10 rebounds, including 4 of the offensive variety.

The offensive savior for the Hawks – who definitely needed one on this night – was Marco Belinelli.

Belinelli was hot, going 8 of 16 from the field (5 of 9 from three-point territory) to the tune of 23 points. He played 30 minutes off the bench, and was a +11.

Belinelli was the only reliable, consistent source of offense in this game, which is troubling, as I’m not sure the Hawks were looking to rely on the outside stroke of a streaky, 31-year old journeyman.

For certain, John Collins needs to get more playing time and under no circumstance should he have less minutes than Lauri Markkanen. Going into the game, Collins was leading all rookies with a 25.4 PER in 19.3 minutes of play.

Good things tend to happen when Collins plays, despite some rookie mistakes (fouling Jerian Grant on a 3-point attempt being his bonehead rookie move of the night).

Next: 3 takeaways from the Atlanta Hawks 104-93 loss to the Miami Heat

Hopefully we see a lot of Collins in Atlanta on Friday night, as the Hawks finally end their seemingly interminable 5-game road trip to start the season with a game against Paul Millsap, Nikola Jokic and the Denver Nuggets at 7:30 p.m. EST. The Hawks are back in the ATL, baby!