After six straight losses and a players-only meeting, where do the Hawks go from here?

ATLANTA — The irony was hard to miss: The visiting coach in Atlanta on Saturday night was New York’s Mike Brown, who was fired by Sacramento exactly one year ago to the day after his team lost a fifth consecutive home game.

Welp.

Quin Snyder’s seat hasn’t been rumored to be hot, but the Hawks lost their fifth straight home game and sixth straight overall on Saturday, 128-125 to the Knicks, as Nickeil Alexander-Walkers’s 3-point attempt rattled out just before the buzzer. That this losing streak has coincided with the return of Trae Young for the last four games — something that theoretically should make the Hawks significantly better — only adds to the local angst about this team.

Instead of moving up in the East hierarchy, as many expected at the start of the season, Atlanta is stuck in extremely familiar territory: jousting with the Heat and Bulls for positioning in the play-in tournament. This home losing streak begin with two loses to Chicago, including one where the Hawks gave up a staggering 152 points. One way to prove you’re beyond playing your annual elimination game against the Bulls in April is to beat them in December.

Atlanta is now 15-18, in tenth place in the East, and the upcoming schedule offers few reprieves with games against the Thunder, Wolves and Knicks again. Eight of the next 10 games are on the road; eight of the next nine are against teams with winning records. A home game against New Orleans on Jan. 7 might be the only one in which the Hawks are favored. Yikes.

The Hawks haven’t always played badly in this stretch; they lost at the buzzer to a good Knicks team and were beaten by a phantom call in the second loss to the Bulls. The underlying stats still say they’re more an average team than a bad one – 16^th in offense, 17^th in defense, 18^th in Net Rating.

But they also face-planted in a winnable, rested game against Miami and played no defense in the first loss to the Bulls. And more importantly, the expectations were for more this year after acquiring Kristaps Porziņģis and Nickeil Alexander-Walker in the offseason.

That said, the feeling internally after Saturday’s game was slightly different than you might expect; Atlanta took encouragement after rallying from an 18-point deficit to briefly take the lead in the fourth quarter, coming on the heels a team meeting after the moribund loss to Miami the night before.

“We had a real sit-down with the whole crew and said we need to be better,” said Alexander-Walker, “and I think you can feel it in the game, in the stretch where we were able to kind of stop the bleeding, we fought.”

“I was proud of how we competed,” said Snyder. “You would like to get a win because that’s affirming of how you played, but we did the things we need to do to be successful”

“We told each other we need to be serious,” said Jalen Johnson. “A lot of guys spoke, I think it was a good sign.”

Snyder may have also finally landed on something that works rotationally after experimenting, mostly unsuccessfully, with his bench units for much of the year. He finally staggered Young and Johnson to keep one on the court at all times, avoiding some of the bench unit disasters that have plagued the Hawks in previous losses. Guards Keaton Wallace and Luke Kennard, who featured in some of the worst performing units and have a -11.5 per 100 net rating as a two-man unit, combined for just eight total minutes over the last two nights.

“We had more urgency, we were more dialed in,” said Onyeka Okongwu of the Hawks’ rally. The 6-foot-8 center had 31 points and 14 rebounds despite giving up many inches.

“We need to challenge ourselves to play a whole game and not go through lapses.”

Alas, the Hawks face a size deficit every night without the 7-3 Porziņģis, whose POTS syndrome has him sidelined and has only played 13 games this year. That and a season-ending injury to third center N’Faly Dante has left the Hawks bereft of size, an especially noticeable deficit against New York’s Karl-Anthony Towns and Mithcell Robinson. Atlanta is 27^th in Rebound Rate, ahead of only Milwaukee, Sacramento and Washington, and their nightly Ls in the possession battle have made for a burdensome math problem.

The flip side of the Hawks’ tough upcoming schedule is that it gets Charmin soft starting in February, with a surfeit of Charlottes and Washingtons on the docket and only ten road games after the All-Star break. It also offers more rest: Saturday was the Hawks’ league-leading 33^rd game and they only have four back-to-backs after Jan. 3. But they may be down so bad by then that it won’t matter.

The tough schedule also raises the stakes for what might be next for this franchise, whether at the trade deadline or in the offseason. Atlanta has to make its deadline decisions without the benefit of seeing how many wins its soft late schedule might yield. Meanwhile, Young’s return has yet to impact the bottom line while perhaps detracting some from the electric Johnson, especially late in games. Young’s $49 million player option looms as a major hinge point for the offseason.

Both Johnson and Young have also been guilty of glaring defensive gaffes. Here’s Young standing at the free-throw line while Miami runs out for a lay-up in Friday’s fourth quarter:

Meanwhile, when Snyder lamented after the Miami game that the Hawks would stop a driver and then get beat on a back cut, it wasn’t hard to identify what play was on his mind. Here’s Johnson falling asleep on the weak side, something that’s happened way too often this year in what has otherwise been an All-Star-caliber campaign:

Porziņģis, of course, is another giant question mark. He’s an All-Star-caliber weapon when available, but on an expiring $31 million deal that could end up being an important trade chip at the deadline.

Atlanta still owes its first-round pick this year to San Antonio from the Dejounte Murray trade, so they have no incentive for a fire sale. But if this team can’t escape the gravitational field of the play-in tournament for a fifth consecutive season, it raises important question for the front office as it tries to build around a young core, a likely high lottery pick from New Orleans or Milwaukee and … it remains to be seen what else.