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 – 16th in offense, 17th in defense, 18th 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.”