Saddiq Bey and the Hawks won Sunday doing what they do best.
Literally. The Hawks lead the NBA with 13.1 offensive rebounds per game.
Trailing by a point with a few seconds remaining, Trae Young drove past his defender, forcing Toronto to send an additional help defender in his direction. At that point, the Hawks starting frontcourt of Saddiq Bey, Clint Capela, and Jalen Johnson all converged on the rim. Trae floated up a layup that rimmed off, and Bey rose above the rim to push it back in with two hands.
"I try to just be the most multifaceted guy that I can be," Bey said afterward. "No one-trick pony."
A quick glance of the NBA's top-20 offensive rebounders this season shows that Bey is far from a one-trick pony. In fact, he is one of the most unique players in the NBA.
Capela leads the league in offensive rebounds by a wide margin, and he is putting together a historic season on the offensive glass, grabbing 19.0 percent of the Hawks' missed shots when he is on the floor – the sixth-best mark since offensive rebounding statistics began being tracked in the 1973-74 season and a feat made more impressive by the fact that he is doing it in the Era of the Three-Point Shot, with teams taking over a third of their shots from long distance – and, consequently, creating a number of rebounds that bounce high and hard over the bodies in the paint.
Onyeka Okongwu takes up the task when Capela goes to the bench for a rest. Okongwu's 111 offensive rebounds are perhaps even more impressive considering that he is one of two players (along with Andre Drummond) who play primarily off the bench, and at 6-foot-8, he is also the second-shortest player on the list. He is also the youngest.
And that brings us to Bey, one of the most unique players in the NBA. In a group full of centers and players taller than 6-foot-10, Bey is a three-point shooting wing and, at 6-foot-7, the shortest player. He has 80 three-point shots made this season, far more than any other player on this list, and, as a result, defenses have to respect his presence both on the perimeter and at the rim. He is the extra punch that makes the Hawks' offensive rebounding threat one of a kind.
At the same time, offensive rebounding is not without its perils. Sending multiple players to hunt for offensive rebounds sometimes means that there are fewer players tending to the transition defense. Head Coach Quin Snyder is content with his players crashing and/or getting back in transition defense.
Conversely, he uses the term 'purgatory' to describe the thing that he most wants to avoid. Crashing the glass is good. Getting back is good. Standing and watching for the result of a jump shot without either getting back or crashing is not. It is the middle ground of purgatory.
When the forwards crash, point guard Trae Young sometimes becomes a guard in the most literal sense, the one that existed when the term originated in the early 20th century to describe the players who stayed toward the back to defend their own goal like defensemen in hockey or fullbacks in soccer. Against the Raptors, Trae stopped a 3-on-1 fast break by taking a charge.
"A lot of people were asking me that, family members and some of the guys," Trae said about drawing a pair of Raptors offensive fouls Sunday after missing two games due to injury last week after trying to draw a similar charge. "I've just been trying to do a little bit of everything, and I know that is something I can do. I can't block shots up in the air and meet them at the rim, but I can take charges."
Even if the Hawks avoid purgatory as often as possible, and even if Trae and the other Hawks guards do their best in transition defense, some tradeoffs remain. When asked about the balance between offensive rebounding and transition defense a couple of weeks ago, Bey took a philosophical approach.
"I think that's something that we all kind of have to balance," he said. "You know, we're all competitive. We all play hard, so we all want to get that offensive rebound. Obviously, we don't want to give up the transition defense, but I think sometimes that it is something that rewards us, because when we all do go and we do get it, it's a benefit for us. Sometimes it is going to be that we're all going to go and sometimes we might give up transition points. So we're just trying to figure out at what points in the game (we can crash). You just read the game, like if it's later in the game, and we can't really give up an easy bucket, then that's when you have to know, 'Alright, we need to get back.' Usually early in the game, we feel like we've been dominating on that end, and I just read it."
Then Bey broke into a mischievous grin that let slip his preferred modus operandi, the one where he chases the ball faster and more relentlessly than the players around him.
"You have to have a better feel, especially me, because I like going every time."