The end (of the regular season).
The Atlanta Hawks concluded their 2024-25 regular season with a 117-105 victory over the Orlando Magic on Sunday afternoon at State Farm Arena. Terance Mann led the the Hawks with in scoring with 19 points while Keaton Wallace registered a triple-double of 15 points, 15 assists, and 11 rebounds. For the Magic, Anthony Black scored 20 points while Jett Howard added 16 points.
The Hawks and Magic are already locked into their respective seeds: the Hawks will face the Magic in Orlando on Tuesday in the Play-In Tournament. As such, this game held absolutely no consequence for either team, and both elected to rest their star players ahead of the showdown on Tuesday.
“Over the course of the last few day, both teams looked at this game a little differently,” said Hawks head coach Quin Snyder. “There’s an evolution of a game-plan that gets put in over a course of time.”
While Zaccharie Risacher and Mo Gueye maintained their starting roles in this spot, they only played nine and seven minutes respectively while Mann played a surprising 29 minutes. Outside of these three, the Hawks played their end of the bench players a ton in this game.
There’s not a whole lot to say about the game itself — the Hawks shot an efficient 54% from the field and 41% from three (hitting 17 in total) as they established a large lead over the Magic which was reeled in the third quarter before extending it to a game-high 20 points in the fourth quarter. As it’s a very different type of game to end the season, we’ll look at some of these performances to finish the season.
Keaton Wallace was one of the top performers in this game, post his first career triple-double: 15 points, 15 assists, and 11 rebounds. The 15 assists are arguably the most impressive element of this performance, with Wallace taking over point guard duties in this game.
In an odd moment late in the game, Wallace appeared as though he had secured his triple-double with his 10th rebound of the game, checked out, and then had a rebound chalked off leaving him with nine rebounds. Wallace checked back in, secured two more rebounds to re-earn his triple-double.
With Wallace under a two-way contract and being ineligible for the postseason as a result, Sunday afternoon’s involvement was his last game of the season — a fact Wallace was aware of heading into the game.
“I knew it was going to be my last game of the season,” said Wallace. “I wanted to come out and play hard and make sure we play the right way and get a dub. A lot of things went my way.”
Overall, Wallace didn’t pack the scoring punch you might have expected in this spot, but he certainly helped the Hawks organize their offense and in a game like this one where many players who haven’t played a lot together assemble his ability to facilitate the offense certainly paid dividends.
“The reason that he did it was because of the way we play,” said Snyder of Wallace postgame. “When you spend as much time as we have talking about playing with the pass, playing with pace, spacing, second actions, movement, all of those things on the offensive end. When you see a group come out and attack collectively, good things happen. That’s what I felt like occurred. It didn’t feel like he was hunting anything or doing anything extraordinary trying to put up some kind of production, he just fell into it. On the last game of the regular season, to feel that I think is good for our guys to understand that’s the work that they’ve put in.”
Terance Mann led the scoring effort with 19 points on an efficient 9-of-14 from the field, 14 of which came in the third quarter. It was odd to see Mann play as many as 29 minutes when he’s likely to feature in the rotation on Tuesday, but he picked his moments well in this spot and provided an experienced presence out on the court.
His rotation running-mate Risacher played just nine minutes. I’m a little surprised that Risacher played at all, but if he was to play…wouldn’t have this been a perfect spot to try let him score 40 points and sway voters for Rookie of the Year with another big scoring effort? An odd one when it comes to Risacher’s minutes in this one.
Elsewhere, Jacob Toppin was impressive in the 26 minutes he was given: 17 points on 6-of-12 shooting and 5-of-8 shooting from three. Five threes represents a game-high from any player, and you certainly would not have expected them to come from Toppin.
In the context of the game, it certainly mattered. The Hawks’ 17 threes were a key component in winning this game, so Toppin certainly played his part. As did Daeqwon Plowden, who hit three threes himself en route to 17 points off the bench himself in an extended run of 31 minutes. A perfect 5-of-5 shooting from the field from Vit Krejci helped the Hawks as seven of the Hawks’ nine available players scored in double-digits — only Risacher and Gueye did not score in double-digits.
“A lot of people stepped up tonight, it wasn’t just me,” said Wallace. “Dom had a good game, DQ played today, so everybody had a role to play, everybody stepped up and showed out.”
Overall, the Hawks end the season with a 40-42 record and finished eighth in the Eastern Conference after 82 games. There was a period where the Hawks were in the mix for an automatic playoff berth with Detroit, Indiana and Miami, but the Jalen Johnson injury put pay to any hopes the Hawks had of making the top-6. With the major roster changes around the trade deadline shortly after that injury, Snyder praised the Hawks for what they’ve accomplished this season.
“When you factor Jalen Johnson out of that — six out of our top seven guys at the end of last year, earlier this year — what this group has accomplished, it’s pretty impressive to finish the season with 40 wins given the change and the adversity they’ve gone through,” said Snyder postgame.
The regular season is over, but the Atlanta Hawks are not done yet. On Tuesday they’ll take on the Orlando Magic in the Play-In Tournament for the chance to advance as the seventh-seed and a series with the Boston Celtics.
Until next time!