MILWAUKEE -- Everything you’ve heard about the Atlanta Hawks’ appealing style of play -- the elegant motion, the silky shooting touch, the sharing of the basketball, the beautiful choreography -- not much of that was on display the first three quarters on Sunday afternoon in Milwaukee. What’s been less discussed this season, though, is the Hawks’ solid No. 6-ranked defense, behind which they locked down the Bucks for a 97-86 win.

“It was a complete turnaround [defensively], a lot better than the past few games,” Hawks forward Paul Millsap said. “The aggression was there. The discipline was there.”

Millsap made a distinction between effort and discipline, a variation on the old John Wooden trope, “Never mistake activity and achievement.” The Hawks aren’t a team predisposed to phoning it in. But in their recent spate of ugly losses, there’s been a lack of precision, which is death for a scheme that relies on being in the right place at the right time, Exhibit A being their 105-80 hemorrhaging at the hands of Toronto on Friday night.

“Last game we felt like there was no discipline,” Millsap said. “We have to have help. We have to have our big -- he’s got to be back there. We got to have guys rotating. We have to have guys boxing out.”

Al Horford and the Hawks applied enough defense to keep the East front-runners 6 1/2 games in the lead. Gary Dineen/NBAE/Getty Images

The Hawks nailed their coverages on Sunday and, even better, applied their smarts to shore up what could’ve been some real vulnerabilities. Case in point: One of the better defensive sequences of the night for Atlanta came in the second quarter when the Hawks left Dennis Schroder out on the floor to guard the bigger O.J. Mayo.

Sniffing the mismatch, the Bucks dumped the ball in to Mayo in the post against Schroder. In an instant, Hawks center Al Horford blitzed Mayo, pinning the Bucks guard against the end line. The Bucks aren’t dummies, and they did what any team worth its salt would do in that situation -- send the guy Horford was guarding, in this case beloved former Hawk Zaza Pachulia, on a basket cut.

But there was Mike Scott, hardly a nominee for defensive player of the year, sliding over from his assignment on the weak side to wedge himself between Pachulia and the rim. After Mayo kicked the ball out of the double-team to the perimeter, the grenade landed back in his hands with the shot clock expiring. Another Horford trap, with Mayo losing the ball out of bounds against the pressure.

The Hawks don’t run a lot of traps, which is why I asked Horford if that was a new coverage scheme triggered when Schroder was matched up against a bigger shooting guard. Turns out that was entirely Horford’s call.

“I saw an opportunity, and we can do that because I know my teammates will cover for me,” Horford said. “There’s a lot of trust.”

Just as the Hawks run a good amount of read-and-react offense, they're given the same kind of freedom to make intuitive, opportunistic decisions on the defensive end as they are in their vaunted offense. Most coaching staffs in the league won’t vest that kind of trust in their team, either because the sense is there isn’t a collective wherewithal to manage those kinds of decisions, or because they’re control freaks who prefer schemes with no room for errors in interpretation. Not so with the Hawks.

“That’s the beauty of our team -- trusting each other, not only on the offensive end, but the defensive end,” Hawks defensive stopper DeMarre Carroll said. “Our defense is just like our offense. Coach allows freedom.”

With freedom comes responsibility, and for the first time in a good while on Sunday, the Hawks played on a string -- “like Muppets,” said Carroll -- and accountability is fundamental to that process. Otherwise, for example, Pachulia is left alone under the basket, where Mayo finds him for an easy two. Therein lies the difference between good and bad defensive teams.

Even at 44-12, the Hawks aren’t without weaknesses. They struggle on the boards, ranking dead last in offensive rebounding percentage -- though, admittedly, Mike Budenholzer subscribes to the coaching school that preaches transition defense, even at the expense of the second-chance opportunities. But the Hawks rank only 23rd on the defensive glass, which is a cause for concern.

On Sunday, the Muppet Show cleaned up, collecting 77 percent of the Bucks’ misses and gobbling up more than a third of its own. In a game in which Atlanta was outshot from the field and equaled at the free throw line, the margin was crucial, as were the 24 Milwaukee turnovers the Hawks forced with plays like the Horford-Schroder trap.

After the game, the visitors locker room at the Bradley Center was cheery, as the Hawks rushed to catch a flight back to Atlanta, where they’ll take on Dallas on Wednesday night. In front of the locker of Kyle Korver, whose three 3-pointers during the first 150 seconds of the fourth quarter stretched a 2-point lead to 11, sat a large pizza. This for a fitness freak who carries boulders across the floor of the ocean during the offseason?

“Sometimes you just need the calories,” Korver said.