Can the Dwight Howard Hawks sustain success?

What should we make of the Atlanta Hawks right now?

They started the season 9-2, outscoring their opponents by 9.5 points per game. On the way there, they became the first team this year to defeat the defending champion Cavaliers, and they did it in Cleveland. But the Hawks also fattened up on an easy early schedule, going 8-2 against opponents that currently have a combined winning percentage that would yield 34 victories a season.

The Hawks have lost six of seven games since that point — including the lone home game in that stretch, an 18-point blowout at the hands of the Pelicans — while being outscored by an average of 9.7 points per game. That stretch came against teams that have a combined winning percentage that would yield 44 victories a year.

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So Atlanta is now 10-8, on pace for 46 wins. They have a plus-2.1 point differential which is 11th-best in the league and which backs up their overall winning percentage. They got hot against some pretty bad teams and cooled off considerably against some pretty good ones (and the Golden State Warriors).

They’re still humming along with the NBA’s best defense, and even held Golden State to a scoring rate more than 10 points per 100 possessions worse than their season average in Monday’s loss. But they Hawks are also 23rd in offensive efficiency, and just a hair outside the bottom five overall. They’ve cleaned up the rebounding issues that plagued them the last two seasons — after ranking 23rd and 25th in defensive rebound rate during the last two years of the Horford Era, they’ve shot up to 10th this season — but new issues have cropped up to plague them on the other end.

The Hawks squad that featured Jeff Teague at the point and Al Horford at center ranked third and fourth in the NBA in drives per game the last two seasons, per NBA.com’s SportVU data; the Dennis Schroder-Dwight Howard squad ranks 14th. The teams from the last two years were about average at taking care of the ball; only the Philadelphia 76ers have turned the ball over on a greater share of their possessions than this year’s Hawks. After knocking down 39 and 37 percent of their catch-and-shoot 3s the last two years, the Hawks are way down at 34 percent so far this season.

Everything just seems a tiny bit off, and this is despite the fact that they’re getting Dwight’s best season in years. Despite averaging the fewest minutes per game of his career, Dwight is snaring more rebounds per game than at any time since the lockout season. He’s leading the league in offensive rebounding rate and creating a ton of extra possessions for the Hawks in the process. He’s posting steal, block, and defensive rebound rates nearly identical to his final seasons in Orlando. And yet the Hawks have actually been outscored with Howard on the floor, and both their offense and defense have been around five points per 100 possessions better when he’s sat.

Some of that is surely early-season noise, but some of it is also that the offense tends to short-circuit when Howard and Schroder share the court. The duo has played 393 minutes together and the Hawks have scored at a bottom-three rate during that time (96.2 points per 100 possessions), and for somewhat obvious reasons: Nobody is all that threatened by a pick-and-roll where the dive man can’t score outside the immediate area of the rim and the point guard can’t consistently make teams pay for not devoting an extra man to him when he comes around the screen.

Because the defense doesn’t feel threatened it doesn’t have to send aggressive help toward the paint, which means the ball doesn’t ping around the perimeter in the Hawks-y way we’ve become so familiar with over the last few years; and suddenly (for example) Kent Bazemore isn’t quite as open all the time and he starts making 30 percent of his 3s as opposed to 36 percent. Baze has made 10 of 19 triples with Dwight on the bench and only 11 of 51 with Dwight on the floor. Better performance without Dwight in the game is not exclusive to Bazemore, either. Seven different Hawks have played at least 100 minutes with Howard this season. Six of them have a better Net Rating when playing without Dwight than with him. The lone exception is Tim Hardaway Jr., who needs Dwight to cover for his poor defense more than anybody else.

The Hawks are a smart team with a smart coach and a smart front office, and the odds are they’ll find a way to figure out how to make things really click with Howard, who they need on the court in big moments to rebound and set screens and draw attention and protect the paint. They especially need him for potential matchups with big teams that can dominate the boards — like, say, the Cavaliers, who have knocked Atlanta out of the playoffs each of the last two seasons.

At this point of the season, there’s no obvious primary challenger to the Cavs’ Eastern Conference throne that is definitively better than the others. If the Hawks want to be that team, they’ll have to figure out a way to take advantage of Dwight’s strengths while also minimizing the way he amplifies some of the team’s weaknesses.