Atlanta Hawks head coach Quin Snyder admitted the Karl-Anthony Towns matchup in his team’s first-round Eastern Conference playoff series against the Knicks will be difficult for his undermanned team to handle.

“That’s a challenge for us right now,” said Snyder, whose Hawks lost backup center Jock Landale to an ankle injury for two weeks. “It’s a little bit of pick your poison, you know? How do you handle him on the post with a mismatch? Do you just guard him? How do you handle pick and roll? How do you handle him and Brunson on pick a roll? I think for us to be prepared for all those situations, you can adjust every time down the court. Obviously, we will be doing that. That’s no secret. That’s what, you know, great offensive players demand.”

Towns has averaged 28.1 points, 13.1 rebounds and 3.7 assists on 50% shooting from both the field and 3-point range in the seven times he’s played the Hawks since the 2024 trade with the Minnesota Timberwolves. This season, he had 36 points and 15 rebounds in a Dec. 27 victory, then another 21 points, 12 rebounds and six assists on 9-of-12 shooting from the field in the Knicks’ 98-95 victory on April 6.

The Hawks start Onyeka Okongwu at the five, but behind him, Atlanta is thin, with Tony Bradley and Mohamed Gueye as reserve bigs.

“We picked up Tony Bradley [who was on] our G-league team last year. Mo Gueye has been playing the five, which hasn’t been his primary position this year and then obviously spent time guarding [KAT],” Snyder said. “So hopefully we can do a better job guarding him than we have.

“There’s times where it’s good defense, better offense. One of the biggest things is we’ve got to keep him off the foul line. There’s some ways that he scored against us I think are real. Trying to focus on that and make him do something different. I say that he can do a lot of things that are different, so we’ll just lock in, try to make it work.”

Snyder knows Towns well. During his near decade-long stint at Utah Jazz head coach, he coached against Towns in 24 games, though the two never met in a playoff series. Towns averaged 22.6 points and 11.1 rebounds on 53% shooting from the field as a Timberwolf.

“He’s always just been a gifted scorer. I think the thing that maybe gets overlooked a little bit at times is his rebounding. That’s another layer to it, because even when you feel like you’ve impacted him and he doesn’t score, he’s on the glass,” he said. “The situations that he’s in [in New York] are a little different, especially the pick and roll with Brunson. That’s a layer that it’s hard to deal with when you have two players that are that gifted individually and then, when they’re connected as well, it presents more problems.”

Snyder said Towns’ elite 3-point shooting is the most difficult part of his game to guard.

“Like any player in the league, they get better as they’re in the league, but I think having him in trail as much as he is and the range that he has, those closeout situations — if they’re long, you think you’re on them and them [you realize they’re] seven feet tall, you’re not [on them],” the Hawks’ coach said. “Then you think you’ve done a good job at that, and he makes a quick read and jabs, shot fakes and goes around you.

“So do your best. But I think he’s gotten better.”

HAWKS DIDN’T PICK KNICKS

Snyder said the Hawks did not rest their stars in the season finale to intentionally land the Knicks in the first round of the playoffs.

“That was completely [bogus] — our focus was totally on us coming into [the season finale],” he said ahead of tipoff of Game 1 on Saturday.

Had the Hawks beaten the Miami Heat in their final game of the season, they would have earned the East’s No. 5 seed and a Round 1 matchup with the No. 4 Cleveland Cavaliers. Instead, the Hawks rested all of their main players as the Toronto Raptors defeated the Brooklyn Nets on the last day of the regular season. The scheduled loss for the Hawks penned-in a New York-Atlanta playoff series.

“If we were fortunate enough to be playing in the playoffs, I think that was the goal for us, and then to be healthy,” Snyder said. “We had lost Jock a short time prior to that, too. The focus for us was on our health. There was no easy matchup, and we weren’t concerned about that as much as we were ourselves.”