Jalen Johnson’s struggles vs. Knicks could bode well in Hawks playoff series

He said Josh Hart was the driving force behind holding Johnson to an 8-of-19 shooting night with five turnovers in their final meeting on April 6. Johnson nearly triple-doubled (20 points, 12 assists, nine rebounds) against the Knicks on Dec. 27 but shot just 7-of-16 from the field.

“In our last game, Josh matched up with him a little bit more than OG. So it’s more of a team thing than anything else. In this league it’s very hard — especially when you’re talking about a great player like Jalen Johnson — it’s very hard to stop anybody one-on-one. And so your team defense has to be on point, and you just have to make guys work.

“And if you make them work, you hope the basketball gods are in your favor a little bit, and they end up missing some shots, as well.”

Hart said the Knicks can’t expect to magically replicate their in-season success against the Hawks in the playoffs. The Knicks beat the Hawks two times out of three, both wins by three-point margins and the loss by 12 in a. Jan. 2 game Karl-Anthony Towns sat due to injury.

“They had guys out. The regular season honestly doesn’t really matter when you look at it in terms of a scope like this, because you never know in the regular season, there’s a lot of things that you have. I don’t know if they were on back-to-backs, who’s in, who’s out, whatever it is.

“So you throw those [regular-season games] out the window and you just focus on the team and the personnel that they have right now: the tendencies, what they like to do, hone in on those kinds of things, and move forward with that.”

The Hawks are more than a one-trick pony. The move away from Young, who’s taken the ire of Knicks fans on the road with him to the nation’s capital, ushered in a more free-flowing style of play that runs through Johnson but extends throughout the rest of a deep and versatile Hawks roster. Johnson, for example, shot poorly from the field on April 6, but Nickeil Alexander-Walker made seven 3s on 11 attempts for 36 points and a three-point Knicks margin of victory despite just eight Atlanta bench points.

The Knicks won the season series, 2-1, against the Hawks, but each of their two victories came by three-point margins. Atlanta’s attack begins with Johnson, and the Knicks have some answers. They already have some solutions just two days out from the onset of their first-round playoff series.

“They’re a great team. It’s not a surprise [we barely won],” said Towns on Wednesday. “We had to fight to find a way to win at the end, but at the end of the day, it didn’t change what I thought. I knew they were a great team, and we’ve got to be ready.”