Dejounte Murray gets honest after Atlanta Hawks lose Game 1 vs Boston Celtics

It was fairly apparent from the outset that it just was not the Atlanta Hawks’ night.

“Not good,” Dejounte Murray said via the team’s official YouTube channel. “We lost. Wasn’t good enough.

Murray was describing his night on the floor which saw the one-time All-Star go for a team-high 24 points, eight rebounds, six assists, and three steals. But his comments are fitting for a Hawks team that outscored the Boston Celtics by 17 points in the second half and still lost by 15 points thanks to a sluggish start.

So what more does Murray think he could have done?

“Could have got guys the ball more. Obviously, I’m not a guy who focuses on making or missing shots but uh I don’t too much focus on how I play – I know I play hard. I’m going to continue to play hard, and that’s pretty much how I could put that”

If there was a knock against him, it’s that his 40% shooting night was highlighted by going 0–for-6 from beyond the arc.

But it was a universal issue for the Hawks who went 1-for-16 from deep in the first half while Boston went 9-for-16, outscoring them by 24 points from three-point range in a game decided by a 13-point margin. Asked if there was something the Hawks could do better to close the gap or if it was just “one of those nights”, Murray chose the latter.

“You got a bunch of confident guys here,” he said. “In the NBA Playoffs…you’re gonna have games where teams miss shots, and we happen to be that team tonight that missed shots and they were just hot making shots and that’s just what it was.”

The Hawks went 0-3 against the Celtics during the regular season including 0-2 under new head coach Quin Snyder after the All-Star break.

But Murray cited the Hawks’ confidence as reason for optimism heading into Game 2.

Trae Young suggests simple adjustment for Atlanta Hawks

“We got to get back to the film and make them the proper adjustments, the right adjustments going in,” Trae Young said during his postgame presser. “But also just carry this momentum that we had late in that second half and hopefully carry that over to the start of the game and not get down too much too early. So we got to figure out a better way to start the game and hopefully, we’ll make some more shots.”

Young was not immune to the poor shooting that befell the Hawks in the early going of this contest.

He finished the game with 16 points on 5-for-18 shooting including 1-for-5 from on threes.

Five of those games came in a disastrous playoff series against the Miami Heat last season.

Young shot 31% from deep during the Hawks’ run to the Eastern Conference Finals in 2021; still not great but far better than the 16.3% rate the graphic above points out.

“We just got to be better at shooting,” he said of Saturday’s struggles matter-of-factly. “And I think we will. I think we got some good looks. We just got to figure out how to get more of those good looks and shoot them with confidence.”

Young, trying not to give away too much of the gameplan against Boston, said that the Hawks wanted to force the Celtics into taking “tough 2s” but decried the Hawks’ inability to stop penetration into the lane and easy looks at the rim which forced Atlanta into overhelping to compensate resulting in open threes for Boston.

There’s a reason the Celtics represented the Eastern Conference in the NBA Finals last season and the Hawks experienced that, at least in the first half of this game.