NEW YORK – In his first time on the stage that is the NBA playoffs, Trae Young was already the star of the show.
And just like an actor on nearby Broadway, the Atlanta Hawks point guard closed his impressive debut series with a bow – after making a long 3-pointer in the final minute at Madison Square Garden.
“Leading up to this game, I know where we are, I know there’s a bunch of shows around this city, and I know what they do when the show is over,” Young said.
Young closed it with 36 points and nine assists as the Hawks beat the New York Knicks 103-89 on Wednesday night in Game 5.
Clint Capela backed up his confident words from a day earlier with 14 points and 15 rebounds for the fifth-seeded Hawks, who advanced to the Eastern Conference semifinals for the first time since 2016. Their series against the top-seeded Philadelphia 76ers begins Sunday.
Young never looked like a playoff rookie, hitting the winning shot with less than a second left in the opener and averaging 29.2 points and 9.8 assists in the series.
The profane chants toward the Hawks star continued Wednesday, though less frequently than in the first two games. Not that it mattered: Young was never rattled by the fans, one of whom was banned after spitting on Young in Game 2, and now he has silenced them for the summer.
“I texted him before the playoffs started and told him he’s built for this time of the season with the confidence he brings to the floor, his skill level for scoring the basketball and creating opportunities,” Hawks interim coach Nate McMillan said. “It’s really tough to game plan against him.”
Julius Randle had 23 points and 13 rebounds for the fourth-seeded Knicks to finish his disappointing first postseason. The NBA’s most improved player shot 8-for-21 from the field and finished 28-for-94 (29.8%) in the series.
Randle said he was proud of the team the Knicks were.
“It’s tough for me to process that right now the way things ended, but we’ll be back,” he said.
Randle led the Knicks to a 41-31 record in their first season under Tom Thibodeau, including a pair of 40-point games during a three-game sweep of Atlanta during the regular season. But the Hawks were by far the better team in this series, with only a poor second half of Game 2 keeping them from a sweep.
That continued a strong surge for the Hawks, who went 27-11 after March 1, when Lloyd Pierce was fired and replaced by McMillan.
They won the two games in Atlanta easily and returned to New York confident they could close it out. Capela downplayed the Knicks’ attempts to play physically, saying the Hawks could do that and also win the games.
Both coaches shrugged off the tougher talk, but it seemed clear the players’ emotions had risen. Words were exchanged after Taj Gibson’s flagrant foul on Atlanta’s De’Andre Hunter in the second quarter Wednesday, and players had to be separated at halftime after the Knicks’ Nerlens Noel and Atlanta’s Solomon Hill bumped into each other as the teams were exiting the floor.
Noel, Randle and Hill were given technical fouls. Young made a free throw on one of them before play began in the third quarter to give Atlanta a six-point lead.
Randle then made a 3-pointer to cut it to 53-50, but the Knicks made only four more baskets the rest of the quarter. Nine straight points by the Hawks made it 62-50 when Bogdan Bogdanovic hit a 3-pointer, snapping Atlanta’s 3-for-20 start behind the arc.
The margin remained at 12 after three quarters, when Randle had seven field goals but seven turnovers at that point.
The Knicks couldn’t make much of a dent in the final quarter, with even super fan director Spike Lee giving up and leaving with a little more than three minutes to go, and went weakly in their first postseason since 2013.
“It’s a great group of guys, top to bottom, and there’s as can be expected the disappointment of losing a playoff series, but also I think they know that they have given everything that they have,” Thibodeau said. “Once you do that, that’s all you can do.”
Hunter scored 15 points and John Collins had 13 for the Hawks.
RJ Barrett scored 17 for the Knicks, while veteran point guard Derrick Rose, moved into the starting lineup during the series, was just 3-for-11 for six points Wednesday.