It's a simple game: Drive for the hoop and find an open teammate when the defense converges; throw the extra pass and hit a shooter in rhythm as he comes open.

"We saw what the Western teams did to us," Hawks guard Jason Terry said. "We saw how Phoenix sometimes throws seven passes before they shoot the ball."

Said Dion Glover: "We learned from the way the Clippers collapsed on us going to the basket, and we looked for each other."

So that's the formula. Play the game well and play it the right way, catch a good opponent when it's down. The result Wednesday night was a rollicking 111-79 triumph over Utah that was as satisfying as it was unexpected.

Jerry Sloan complained that his Jazz played "as though they don't want me here anymore." That could be a bad sign for Washington, his team's next opponent.

Karl Malone and John Stockton a combined 3-for-10 in the game. "You expect them to have that many shots in the first quarter," Terry said.

There were 8,558 fans in an arena that seats 19,445, and the Hawks gave them a show of energy and the speed which was missing from this franchise during two awful seasons. Improving to 2-5, Atlanta beat an opponent by 30 or more for the first time since Dec. 2, 1997, in Dallas, 112-79. The Hawks had not beaten the Jazz by anything like this since a 34-point triumph 23 years ago, when the franchise was in New Orleans.

Hawks coach Lon Kruger loved what he saw. "We were setting the tone and converting some stops into transition buckets going the other way. . . . Reef [Shareef Abdur-Rahim] and Dion, especially, set the tone there early."

The Atlanta connection combined for 38 points. Abdur-Rahim, still bothered slightly by a sore knee, but saying "It didn't hamper me," scored his 19 on 6 of 8 from the field, 7 of 8 from the line. Glover, his old high school teammate, started at small forward, sank four straight jumpers to start the game and finished 8-for-13 for 19 points with five assists.

Driving out the demons of an injury-fueled, four-game road losing streak, the Hawks buried Utah with a 45-17 surge around the halftime break, ending a seven-game losing streak to the Jazz that included a heart-wrenching defeat last week.

Hanno Mottola scored 10 with nine rebounds, six of them crucial to the Hawks' surge in an eight-minute stretch of the first half. Toni Kukoc, shooting 6-for-8, scored 13 off the bench in his liveliest performance this season as the Hawks shot a nifty .573 and outrebounded the Jazz 51-33.

Unable to win the game, Sloan tried to use it as a prod to goad his 3-6 team.

"They quit," he said. "I never had a team walk out on the floor in my life.

"You'll have to ask them why, but they stepped up there and quit."