How exactly have Hawks won two games?

Atlanta coach Larry Drew talked Tuesday afternoon about how his team needed to play desperate.

Maybe they thought he said disparate.

Communication failures aside, the elements fit so poorly on the Hawks and are so incompatible that it’s a wonder the Bulls have found a way to lose two games in this series.

Seriously, the locals did what they had to do in grabbing a 3-2 lead with a 95-83 victory Tuesday night at the UC, but aside from Derrick Rose doing his Derrick Rose thing, this series has featured some really ugly basketball.

“It’s not pretty sometimes, but we don’t need pretty,” said the Bulls’ Ronnie Brewer. “We play defense and rebound. That’s Bulls basketball.”

Credit the Bulls with playing a great defensive fourth quarter, outscoring Atlanta 26-15 and holding the Hawks to just 5 of 16 (31 percent) from the floor, and that was all it took to handle a strange Atlanta squad in a crucial Game 5.

The Hawks have been so unbelievably incongruent in their defeats that believing they’ve won six playoff games stretches the imagination.

Their big men want to play like point guards and essentially refuse to play with their backs to the basket against a Bulls team that’s vulnerable to size inside.

So while their bigs stand 20 feet from the bucket, so do their point guards, who are really shooting guards, while their coach is really losing his mind.

He’s asked them to stop taking terrible shots that result in long rebounds, which allows Rose to run.

And he’s asked them to get bodies on Rose, who is the only Bulls player with any chance to create offense in the half court.

He’s asked them to defend Rose on the pick-and-roll on defense.

And he’s asked them not to catch and hold on offense.

But the Hawks continue to fail on all accounts, and the Bulls say that’s because of their game plan.

“We take away their options by clogging the paint and not letting them get their layups and backdoor cuts like they got last game,” Brewer said. “The shot clock runs out on them and they get bad shots.”

That’s only a partial explanation. The other is that Atlanta is bad — and dumb.

The Bulls have won three games in this series the same way, by letting the Hawks shoot. They were 1-for-12 from beyond the arc Tuesday and are 5-for-31 (16 percent) in 3 defeats.

Asked if it is the nature of the NBA that you can’t stop a team from taking bad shots, Drew said, “I don’t know if it’s the nature, but I do know when it happens, it’s very clear and obvious.

“When we take bad shots you can see it in our body language. When we’re not executing our offense, when we don’t move the ball, we take ill-advised shots. In the fourth quarter, once again we lost our composure.”

The Bulls say it’s as a result of their good defense. The Hawks say it’s as a result of their bad offense.

Either way, the No. 1 seed in the East shouldn’t be struggling to put this team away, but now they need just a single victory Thursday or Sunday to advance to the conference finals.

“It seems like we’ve played a lot of games against each other already,” Rose said after scoring a game-high 33 points, including 11 in the decisive fourth quarter. “But we can’t get tired. That’s the biggest thing.

“We know they’re going to give us their all down there in Atlanta. If we come out and play our way, defense first, we can make things tough on them.”

The Hawks don’t really need any help with that.

brozner@dailyherald.com

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