Mikal Bridges couldn’t help but smile, something that had largely gone missing in recent weeks.

The Nets’ star had just erupted for 38 points on a red-hot 14 of 26 shooting from the field and 5 of 10 from 3-point range in the team’s 114-102 win over the Hawks on Saturday afternoon at Barclays Center, bringing them — after beating the Hawks on Thursday in the first of two consecutive games between the teams — within two games of the No. 10 seed in the East and final play-in spot.

It followed prolonged shooting woes — one of the worst slumps of Bridges’ career — and concerning struggles for the Nets as a whole.

In the 10 games prior to the two-game set against the Hawks, Bridges averaged just 16.9 points on a dismal 39.5 percent from the field and 29.1 percent from behind the arc. The Nets went 2-8 in that stretch.

Then Bridges’ shot took a small step forward in Thursday’s win, scoring 15 points on 6 of 14 from the field and 3 of 9 from behind the arc before breaking through on Saturday.

He can thank the Hawks for making it easier on him and allowing him to find his groove again.

The Hawks mostly double-teamed and trapped Bridges on screens on Thursday, forcing the ball out of his hands and preventing him from finding open shots off the dribble.

But it resulted in the Nets’ secondary scorers finding ample open 3-point looks, and they torched the Hawks as a result.

So the Hawks switched to drop coverage — where the screener’s defender drops back behind the screener rather than stepping forward to the ball-handler — on Saturday, aiming to eliminate many of those kickout 3-pointers.

But it was exactly what Bridges wanted, and has been waiting for through his struggles.

And he feasted.

“The past three or four games it’s been a lot of blitzes and stuff, so I’m always mindful and prepared,” Bridges said after Saturday’s win. “But they were playing drop and it’s like ‘OK, I like that.’ They did that, and I was just trying to find it, trying to make the right play. But yeah, obviously, as a player who likes to score, getting blitzed, not getting blitzed, they changed it from the other day. It was nice.”

Against the drop coverage, Bridges had much more space to operate, particularly in the midrange. It also afforded him much more time to read the defense and get to an open look.

Bridges was also aided by the Nets’ vastly improved ball movement in the last two games.

Dennis Schroder, who has played in just nine games with the Nets after being acquired from the Raptors ahead of the trade deadline, is responsible for much of that ball movement, and he’s drawn praise from teammates as he gets settled into the new system.

Instead of trying to score in isolation, which often allows opponents to double-team him, Bridges often received the ball on the move on Saturday and was able to attack the defense when it was off-balance and scrambling.

And, less tangibly, interim head coach Kevin Ollie believes Bridges finally let the game come to him rather than forcing shots.

“When you forget about yourself, you find yourself, and that’s what I tell him,” Ollie said. “Like, ‘Sometimes, you just gotta forget about yourself, it’s not about you, Mikal,’ and he understands that, and that’s when you find yourself. He just got lost in playing defense, and then all the offense came to him. I just want my team to always understand that. Just get lost on the defensive end and the offense is gonna come. The ball is gonna find the hot player, and that’s what we did. We’re sharing the basketball now; it’s not sticking as much, and we want to keep that up.”

Bridges’ struggles had amplified discourse surrounding his ability to be a primary scorer on a team with playoff ambition, and whether or not he really is that level of star.

It certainly didn’t seep into the Nets’ locker room.

“There ain’t no chatter,” Cam Johnson said of Bridges. “All that stuff is background noise. He’s a professional. He shows up every day, doesn’t miss a practice, doesn’t miss a game, and people want to say something about that or say something about a couple of missed shots. … It didn’t bother him. He went out there and did his thing.”