NEW YORK (AP) -- In the end, the Atlanta Hawks simply ran out of healthy bodies. And that is not a good thing to happen to a team in the run-and-gun NBA. The Hawks went into their second-round playoff series against the New York Knicks undermanned, missing LaPhonso Ellis, who has been sidelined since mid-March with a hernia, and Alan Henderson, suffering from double vision and wearing a patch after being poked in the eye. This is like an automobile suddenly going from its six-cylinder configuration down to four. The pickup is reduced considerably. Then there was the schedule which demanded back-to-back games on Sunday and Monday, not a good arrangement in the best of circumstances and one that doomed a team playing with a short bench. ``You can't blame the schedule,'' said Dikembe Mutombo, who managed 11 points and took just six shots in Monday night's 79-66 loss that completed the Knicks' four-game sweep. ``Those things happen in pro sports. Those are things you have to live with.'' Still, it all seemed to catch up with arm-weary Atlanta which missed 15 straight shots in the second half, ending any chance it might have had against the deeper Knicks. That led to two records for shooting futility. In the second-round series, the Hawks scored 306 points, the lowest total for any NBA team in a four-game playoff. It broke the mark of 323 set by Cleveland against Indiana last year. Atlanta made just 101 of 320 field goal attempts, a 31.6 percentage that broke the record of 32.3 set by the Minneapolis Lakers against the Fort Wayne Pistons in 1955. At one point, the situation seemed to catch up with Steve Smith, who scored 14 points. ``I was frustrated,'' he said. ``We were losing. When you're a competitor, you don't want to lose. You don't want to get swept. You don't want to lose that way. But you've got to be professional about it; calm down a little bit and handle it.'' It marked the first time in the long coaching career of Lenny Wilkens that he has gone out of a best-of-7 series without winning at least one game. Wilkens is a Hall of Fame player and coach, the winningest coach in the history of the NBA. But the best bench boss in the world still needs some warm bodies to win games. ``It's hard to go against the Knicks if you don't have but six people,'' Wilkens said. ``We didn't have the bodies to bang with them.'' But he wasn't about to lean on the injuries as an explanation for the Hawks quick elimination. ``They were the better team,'' Wilkens said of the Knicks. ``They were much better than we were. They executed, they ran, they defended, they did all the right things.'' And the missing players? ``We didn't have those players going in,'' Wilkens said. ``I'm not making excuses. We didn't play well.'' Still, the injuries had an impact on Atlanta's season even before the playoffs. ``As soon as we got LaPhonso Ellis into the system, he got hurt,'' Wilkens said. ``Then Alan Henderson got hurt and after we got him back, he got hurt again.'' The tipoff to the Hawks' problems came in the first playoff series against Detroit. They won the first two games at home, each by 20 points, but then got blown out in Games 3 and 4 on the road. They scored just 63 points in Game 3, their lowest playoff total in franchise history. Uh-oh. The Hawks survived in Game 5, but it turned out to be only a temporary reprieve for Wilkens' beat-up basketball team. ``The first series, we did all right,'' Mutombo said. ``The second series, it didn't work. We couldn't get our rhythm going. It's tough to swallow.'' The situation was so serious that Atlanta was counting on anonymous second-year players like Chris Crawford and Ed Gray to rescue them. It worked only briefly. Did the Detroit series soften up the Hawks for the Knicks? ``It may have,'' Wilkens said. ``It's hard to say. Crawford separated his shoulder. That's hard. He didn't shoot well after that.'' Neither did the rest of the Hawks. -=-=- 