Confronting my Feelings on the Hawks

Here's my latest at SB Nation, trying to explain why I can't get as excited as I should about the Hawks' surprisingly solid season.  As usual, I start babbling about sample sizes:

This is an instance where my sports ideology conflicts with my self-interest as a fan. My favorite sports are college football and European club soccer. One of the reasons for these preferences is the fact that these sports have meaningful regular seasons. College football's two-team playoff puts a premium on winning regular season games. In Europe, domestic championships are decided in the fairest way possible: each team plays each other team home and away and the team with the best record at the end is the winner.

The NBA doesn't have this structure. It has the conventional American pro sports model that annoys me: a long regular season, followed by a reset button and then a short tournament during which the long regular season is a total afterthought. However, because: (1) home court advantage matters so much; and (2) the better team tends to win in basketball because the large number of possessions reduces variance, the NBA doesn't lend itself to upsets. If my problem with the NFL and MLB is that undeserving teams like the St. Louis Cardinals and New York Giants can win multiple championships after merely decent regular seasons, then I should like the NBA. Even on the rare occasions where the NBA produces a surprise champion like Dallas last year, that team is usually a perennial contender that finally broke through from a slightly lower seed.

The NBA is pretty good at crowning a deserving champion, so where does that leave the Hawks? With the Braves and Falcons, we can be excited when they go into the playoffs because the MLB and NFL playoffs have turned into lotteries. The Hawks aren't buying a lottery ticket so much as they are facing a firing squad. As someone who tries to value the big sample over the small one, I should be enjoying the Hawks' solid regular season, but in a league where regular season success is dismissed, I find it hard to step outside of this mindset. Reduced to focusing on the postseason, I try to imagine a Black Swan world of highly improbable events, but with the Hawks, it is hard to make myself believe.

One factor that I didn't mention because it's somewhat trite is that I'm at the stage of life where I don't have as much leisure time as I used to.  For example, I got home yesterday at seven, had dinner with the wife and kids, helped give the boys their bath, read books to the younger, more rambunctious version of B&B Jr., and then had about an hour of free time before going to sleep.  I decided to watch Benfica-Chelsea instead of the Hawks game.  In my younger days, I would have had time for both.  In this instance, I chose to watch a game that had more riding on it.

Catching Up

Sorry for the lack of content in recent weeks, but between work and my posts at SB Nation's Atlanta site, time has been tight.  For those of you who don't visit the Atlanta page on a daily basis, hang your heads in shame ... and then click on the tab that I added to the right that goes directly to my profile there.  That has a fill list of what I have been posting, both in shorter and longer form.  Some highlights from the last few weeks:

My predictable gloating over the Saints' little bounty issue:

The last parallel between the Ohio State and New Orleans scandals is that both relate to the most pressing issues facing their respective sports. College football has been plagued in recent months with significant scandals involving major programs and improper benefits, leading many to question the continued viability of a sport that is built on a fiction. For instance, the 2010 national title game was contested between a team whose star quarterback's father was trying to sell his son to the highest bidder and an opponent currently under investigation for paying a runner in Texas to direct players to Eugene.

The biggest issue facing the NFL is the long-term health impact of the sport, a dilemma that leads to a plausible scenario in which the NFL no longer exists. Through a combination of: (1) the school firing its head coach and suspending several of its best players; and (2) the NCAA tacking on a one-year bowl ban, Ohio State has essentially had to give up two football seasons. That's the message that the NCAA and its members have to send to deter money finding its way to the players who generate it.

I don't pretend to know what is in Roger Goodell's holster in terms of potential punishments, but it is clear that he is going to have to bring the hammer down because the participation of Saints' coaches in the team's bounty system and the acquiescence of the head coach and general manager in that system touches on the biggest problem facing the league. Goodell has to ensure that current and future authority figures in the league see what happened to the Saints and take the lesson that they have to stamp out incentives to injure opposing players.

This is one of those instances where I am quite happy that Roger Goodell has given himself untrammeled power to punish league figures who "damage the shield," to quote that preposterous phrase that was bandied about by authority worshipers when Goodell was disciplining Ben Roethlisberger for tawdry conduct that did not lead to criminal charges.  Let's see him use that power when the wrongdoers are management instead of labor.  That, after all, is the big issue with the Saints scandal.  It's not that the Saints had a bounty system, as that appears to be something that happens every now and again in the NFL.  It's that this appears to be the first instance in which a defensive coordinator, a head coach, and a general manager all either participated or at least knew about the scheme and did nothing.

My predictable counter to Forbes labeling Atlanta as the most miserable sports city in America:

Forbes would never permit this terrible reasoning when evaluating companies. Financial reporting is (at least theoretically) based on reviewing the entirety of a company's record to make the best evaluations possible. That same rigor apparently does not apply to sports analysis, where we define disappointment based on a "small sample size important; big sample size unimportant" framework.

The point of sports is to provide us with entertainment. We all want an escape from the ennui of the working world and games provide us with exactly that. A team like the Braves during their heyday provided great entertainment, as they consistently won more than they lost. Day after day, we could rely on the Braves to make us happy by beating down the rest of the NL East. Losing a playoff series was a sad experience, but was it enough to overwhelm six months of happiness? No.

Personally, this has been a pretty good period to be an Atlanta sports fan.  How many other times in city history can we say that two of our teams - the Hawks and Falcons - are playoff regulars and the third - the Braves - are at least on the cusp and have a roster full of promising young players.  Maybe my expectations were beaten down by two of the city's three teams being so bad in the 80s when I was growing up, but this seems fine to me.  It's unfortunate that the Hawks have reached their ceiling at the second round of the playoffs and the Falcons can't win a playoff game, but as between playoff disappointment and finishing in last place every year, I'll take the former.

I also finished a post that I've been meaning to write for weeks on the decline of the ACC as a basketball conference.  I offered four potential explanations: conference expansion, bad coaches, the Big Dance killing the regular season, and the possibility that we are just seeing a statistical blip.  The decline of the ACC stands out for me because of the juxtaposition with SEC football.  The latter is as strong as ever, as population trends have dovetailed with the ability of athletic departments to monetize fan passion - and thereby build facilities and hire coaches that create a recruiting advantage - to put the SEC on top of college football.  Those same shifts in population should be helping the ACC in basketball, but they aren't.  That leads to a chicken-egg question: is fan intensity down in the ACC because the product is weaker or is the product weaker because fan intensity is down?

 

The Dwight Howard Pipedream

Two weeks ago, I started a post agreeing with Jeff Schultz that the Hawks should make a play for Dwight Howard and then, in the process of writing it, realized that Howard would never come here because he would end up in a situation that is worse than the one he was leaving in Orlando.  Here was my conclusion:

Additionally, Howard has to be thinking that the biggest obstacle to gaining a higher Q-rating is that he hasn't won a championship and has only made the Finals once.  He needs to go somewhere where he will win.  His issue in Orlando is the supporting cast.  Will it make sense for him to come here to play with Jeff Teague (a player whose promise is based on a six-game series against the Bulls last year), Joe Johnson (holder of one of the worst contracts in the NBA), Marvin Williams (average small forward who escapes being non-descript only because of his Draft position and the careers of the players taken after him), and a power forward to be named later?  And then you add in the fact that Atlanta Spirit has expressed an aversion to paying the luxury tax and in light of the team's revenues, they can't really be blamed, can they?  The end game could well be that Thorpe wants to send Howard to Atlanta, but can't make the trade happen because Howard refuses to agree to a potential extension with the Hawks.

Yesterday, Bill Simmons framed Howard's decision in the same way:

Put it this way: If I'm Dwight Howard, I'm thinking about titles and titles only. I don't care about money — that's coming, regardless. I don't care about weather — I have to live in whatever city for only eight months a year, and I'm traveling during that entire time, anyway. I don't care about "building my brand" and all that crap — if I don't start winning titles soon, my brand is going to be "the center who's much better than every other center but can't win a title." I care only about playing in a big city, finding a team that doesn't have to demolish itself to acquire me, finding one All-Star teammate who can make my life a little easier (the Duncan to my Robinson), and winning titles. Not title … titles. I want to come out of this decade with more rings than anyone else. I want to be remembered alongside Shaq, Moses and Hakeem, not Robinson and Ewing.

Tellingly, Simmons listed five destinations for Howard and Black Hollywood was nowhere in sight, except for a brief mention of the fact that the Hawks were able to beat the Magic last year with a "let Dwight get his; we need to make sure that the Magic shooters don't get theirs" strategy.  For instance, he pooh-poohs the prospect of Howard ending up on the Lakers because he would be playing with Kobe Bryant and a gutted roster.  Would Howard be any more likely to have a desire to play with Joe Johnson, Jeff Teague, Marvin Williams, and then a similarly gutted roster, only in this instance, you have Atlanta Spirit instead of Jerry Buss filling in the remainder?

Simmons' interest in stars going to play for the Bulls is interesting to me.  As he mentions, he wanted LeBron to go there and now he wants Howard to make the same decision.  This preference is to Simmons' credit, as a superpower in Chicago would be detrimental to the prospect of the Celtics winning a title in the next decade.  Simmons is often derided as a Boston homer and he does plenty of things to earn the label, but he is able to put that aside when he pines for Derrick Rose to have a superstar wing man like LeBron or Howard.  I think that there are two things going on here.  First, Simmons is more of a basketball fan than a Celtics fan and he would like to see a memorable team come together instead of the NBA's stars being isolated and surrounded by poor supporting casts.  Second, he wants that memorable team to play in uniforms that mean something and in an environment that makes for good TV.  The Bulls uniform evokes memories of the Jordan dynasty and the United Center has a great atmosphere when the team is good.

I have to admit that I feel the same way.  It's hard for me to reconcile my feelings about Major League Baseball with my current feelings about the NBA.  In baseball, I get very annoyed by the constant focus on the Red Sox and Yankees.  This annoyance extends to those two teams sucking up free agents left and right to cover for the failings of their own farm systems.  In basketball, I liked the idea of Chris Paul and Dwight Howard going to the Lakers because that team would be highly entertaining.  Again, I am going to point to two factors that drive my thinking.  First, basketball is a team game.  Like soccer, it's more interesting to watch great players play with one another because they bring one another to a higher level.  Baseball, on the other hand, is a game with a minimal amount of teamwork.  This makes baseball more conducive to reaching stat-based conclusions with confidence, but it also means that there is no great joy in watching superstars play with one another.  Mark Teixeira driving in A-Rod isn't the same thing as Messi finding Cesc with a defense-splitting pass or Paul hitting Howard with an alley-oop.  Second, I have a lifelong disdain for New York teams.  If the Knicks were the ones assembling a cache of talent, then I would be annoyed because Mike Lupica would be happy.  I don't feel the same "oh G-d, this is going to be intolerable" pangs with Chicago or Los Angeles.

Once Every Eight Years...

Michigan beats Ohio State and I agree with a "trade for this superstar" column from Jeff Schultz.  In this case, he wants the Hawks to acquire Dwight Howard.  His reasoning is that Howard is not going to re-sign with the Magic, so the Hawks should offer that the Magic pick any two players for Howard.  Schultz suggests scenarios that would involve Joe Johnson, which made me laugh out loud.  Otis Smith may not be the GM in the NBA, but having signed one of the worst deals in the league to acquire Rashard Lewis and then having to trade that stinker of a deal for the disaster that is the Gilbert Arenas contract, I seriously doubt that he is going to give a second thought to acquiring a similarly terrible deal.  The Joe Johnson contract was a terrible idea when it was signed and only looked worse last year as Johnson's scoring regressed (although John Hollinger points out that Johnson's reduced numbers were the result of fewer minutes and a slump shooting threes that does not seem repeatable($)).

Thorpe would be committing GM malpractice if he touched Johnson's deal, so the trade would almost have to be Howard for Al Horford and Josh Smith.  Rick Sund could only make the deal if he had the assurance that Howard is going to sign a long-term contract, but if Howard expresses interest in coming home and staying, then the trade makes sense.  It solves the eternal issue for the Hawks, which is that their two best front-court players are both natural power forwards.  (Hopefully, Thorpe won't notice that he's trading for that problem, or at a minimum, Smith and Horford - overlapping skills and all - are the best he can do in terms of a return for Howard.  Wouldn't he prefer that deal to one centered around Andrew Bynum and his various ailments?)  It also reboots the team, which is a major need right now.  Atlanta Spirit is in desperate need of something to change the narrative.  They are selling a team that has reached its absolute apex: the second round of the playoffs.  They are also the group that killed hockey in Atlanta.  Faced with the prospect of trotting out the same product to lukewarm response, they would love an energizing, marketable star.  There's one in Orlando.

The big question is whether Howard wants to come and stay.  To make his case, Schultz cites a New York Times piece on Atlanta's increasing prominence as a center of Black culture as a reason why Howard might come here as opposed to New York or Los Angeles.  I hope that Schultz is right about this, but Atlanta has had the Black Hollywood nickname for a long time without becoming a preferred destination for NBA players.  We have neither a winning tradition, nor a respected ownership group.  Additionally, Howard has played against the Hawks in the playoffs in front of less-than-full houses.  If fan intensity matters to him, then he isn't coming.

Additionally, Howard has to be thinking that the biggest obstacle to gaining a higher Q-rating is that he hasn't won a championship and has only made the Finals once.  He needs to go somewhere where he will win.  His issue in Orlando is the supporting cast.  Will it make sense for him to come here to play with Jeff Teague (a player whose promise is based on a six-game series against the Bulls last year), Joe Johnson (holder of one of the worst contracts in the NBA), Marvin Williams (average small forward who escapes being non-descript only because of his Draft position and the careers of the players taken after him), and a power forward to be named later?  And then you add in the fact that Atlanta Spirit has expressed an aversion to paying the luxury tax and in light of the team's revenues, they can't really be blamed, can they?  The end game could well be that Thorpe wants to send Howard to Atlanta, but can't make the trade happen because Howard refuses to agree to a potential extension with the Hawks.

In sum, I agree with Schultz's position, but the more I think about it, the more unrealistic it looks.

An NBA Owner Provides

And he does it even when he's not appreciated, or respected, or even loved. He simply bears up and he does it. Because he's an owner of a local basketball team.









The Hawks have been purchased by Gus Fring! I can hardly contain my excitement! I've been in a major Breaking Bad phase this summer as Mrs. B&B and I have ploughed through the first three seasons and asked ourselves the same question that we asked last summer when we were catching up on Mad Men: what took us so long? I have been ruminating on an "SEC Coaches as Breaking Bad characters" post (Gus is obviously Nick Saban, Bobby Petrino is Tortuga, Les Miles is Tuco, Houston Nutt is Saul Goodman, Mark Richt is Walter White [with 2007 Evil Richt as Heisenberg], etc.), but now, Atlanta Spirit has saved me the trouble by selling the team to a Latino restauranteur.* If only Alex Meruelo were from Chile instead of Cuba. Josh Smith might want to keep an eye out for boxcutters in the dressing room if he keep hoisting up 21-footers early in the shot clock.

* - Because a sample size of one tells me that people from Southern California can be prickly about analogies made for rhetorical or humorous purposes, let me make clear that I am not accusing Meruelo of being a psychopath like Gus Fring, nor am I making the claim that his other business interests include an industrial cleaning facility with a meth lab in the basement. I heard Pizza Loca and immediately thought of Pollos Hermanos.

As far as my actual opinion of the purchase, it sounds good. Anything is better than the irretrievably broken Atlanta Spirit. The Hawks might get some local goodwill as a result of a new ownership face. They can certainly use the boost after a disappointing year at the box office. I have little time for the idea that team ownbership requires one face. The Braves' solid performances over the past two years on mid-level payrolls illustrates that corporate ownership can be just fine. Conversely, the people who claim that they wish that the Braves had an Arthur Blank-style face of the franchise might consider that Jerry Jones and Dan Snyder are also the faces of their franchises. That said, Atlanta Spirit was a disaster, so Meruelo is a welcome addition. As long as he has the money to run the team without cutting corners, then I'm happy. The story that he started with one pizza restaurant when he was 21 and turned it into a business empire speaks well to his acumen.

Hopefully, that acumen has identified the Hawks as a neglected asset. For most of its history, the franchise has struggled to convert its place as Black Hollywood's home team into butts in the seats. Atlanta remains a good basketball town and a very good NBA market without being crazy about the Hawks. The roster is fairly good, outside of the colossal disaster that is Joe Johnson's contract. If Jeff Teague's playoff burst is not ephemeral, then the Hawks have a good starting lineup, a notch below Miami and Chicago, but not too shabby. The team lacked depth last year, which is a problem that an emotionally invested owner with a checkbook can remedy. Also, if a new labor deal has retroactive effect to erase (or at least ameliorate) insane agreements like the Johnson deal, then Meruelo will be in great shape. Mike's services will not be required.

The Silver Lining

I look forward to John Hollinger articles about the Hawks because Hollinger has a statistically-oriented approach and he’s that rarest of national writers who shows more than a passing interest in the local professional basketball collective.  Hollinger is typically pessimistic realistic about the Hawks and he has written some of the best criticism of Atlanta Spirit, so it was something of a surprise to see this title to his article the morning after the Hawks took their umpteenth whuppin’ of the season, thus ending an unexpectedly interesting playoff run. 

The main focus of Hollinger’s optimism is the fact that Jeff Teague emerged in the series against the Bulls.  The prospect of playing Derrick Rose brought the best out of Teague.  Whether Teague genuinely improved this spring or this ability has always been present and the Hawks haven’t mined that talent, we’ll never know.  Hollinger describes the possibilities that Teague now provides:

In doing so, this also opens up new options for the Hawks that we hardly saw all season. Atlanta can play Teague at the point, Kirk Hinrich at shooting guard and Joe Johnson at small forward -- a look that puts a top-notch scorer, a defensive ace and a penetrating, ball-pushing point guard on the court at once. Or the Hawks can roll with a Teague-Jamal Crawford-Johnson triumvirate (if Crawford returns) on the perimeter that even the defensive-minded Bulls struggled to match up against at times.

Every since Billy Knight first assembled this team, the vision was for a young, athletic team that could get up and down the floor and score in transition.  In part, the Hawks have never been good enough defensively to make that happen, but they have also lacked the right point guard to run.  Is Teague finally that guy?

Hollinger also points out that the possible move of the Thrashers to Winnipeg could have benefits for the Hawks in two respects:

Heck, even the hockey news might be good news for the Hawks. Sure, it’s not exactly positive for a city’s sports reputation when its history entails losing franchises to both Alberta and Manitoba, but the financial constraints that have limited some of the Hawks’ dealings in recent years could perhaps ease a bit if they can (A) unload the money pit called the Thrashers and (B) eliminate some of the competition for Hawks seats. (For the record, an owner I spoke with had nothing to add beyond “we’re looking for solutions” when asked about the rumored move of the NHL’s Thrashers to Winnipeg.)

I had always thought about the potential loss of the Thrashers as a negative for Atlanta Spirit because it lowers the value of their operating rights of Philips Arena to have one major tenant instead of two, but I can see the counter.  First, Atlanta Spirit will get an infusion of cash from the sale, which gives them the ability to spend on the Hawks this off-season.*  Second, they can focus all of their energies on one team.  (Whether that’s a good thing is another matter entirely.)  Third, Philips Arena is a cashcow for concerts, so maybe having more available dates will be a net positive.  Fourth, the owners will stop bleeding money on the hockey team.  They’re bleeding money because of their own mismanagement of the Thrashers, but to paraphrase William Munny, deserve’s got nothing to do with it.  This market is big and diverse enough to support both an NBA and NHL team, but if it has to choose between the two, I’ll take the NBA.  The city has an established African-American elite and middle class rivaled only by New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and DC.  It ought to have an NBA franchise for which making it to the sixth game of the conference semifinals isn’t a massive accomplishment.

* – The difference between the Hawks and Bulls wasn’t so much in the starting fives.  Chicago had the best player on the court, but the Hawks have a more balanced lineup.  The differences came in all of the accoutrements that a spendthrift owner will buy, namely a coveted head coach and quality pieces on the bench.  If the Hawks would have signed Tom Thibodeau last summer and the Bulls would have gone for the cheap, internal option, how would this series have played out?  As a practical matter, Thibodeau wouldn’t have been a stylistic change from Mike Woodson (although he’s obviously better at coaching defense) and therefore would have been an unlikely option (not to mention the fact that the Hawks wouldn’t have had the “come coach Derrick Rose” selling point), but the point remains that the Hawks went cheap on the coach.

Best of Three

Last night's performance by Josh Smith both encapsulates everything that I love about Smith and this Hawks team and also everything about him that drives me crazy about them. Smith was great in the fourth quarter. Look at his shot chart for the fourth quarter. He didn't take a shot outside of three feet from the hoop. It's probably unreasonable to expect that he will always been able to get so many shots from so close, but it's a worthwhile goal. When it's this obvious where Smith excels and where he struggles, how is it that a guy who just played his 573rd game in the NBA has to be reminded? Why can't he play like this all the time? I accept that the performance of athletes varies. Even the best players will have good games and bad games. That said, the gap between good and bad is SO pronounced for the Hawks generally and Smith specifically. How does Smith go from Mark Bradley writing with some justification:

As it is, Josh Smith at 25 is on his way to being one of the league’s least respected good players, and I hate that. He’s a nice guy, and he’s capable of so much more. If he would play to his strengths — and he has many — he would get his numbers without damaging his team.

With Smith at his best, the Hawks can take the Bulls. “We’ve got to be confident,” he said after Game 2, “and that team over there knows we know we can beat them.”

Then he laughed. “The media might not know. But that’s OK.”

Being a member of the media, I’m privy to press room conversations. I hear what famous writers say about the Hawks. And the first thing many of them say is, I’m sorry to report, “What is Josh Smith doing?” For that I have no answer.

to dominating the fourth quarter of a do-or-die playoff game against the team with the best record in the NBA, the MVP, and the Coach of the Year? Going forward, anything is possible for this team. They could get blown out in the last two games (I'm hardly the only one who watched the game on Friday night and said to myself "same old Hawks") or they could knock the Bulls out and then pose a threat in the NBA's final four.

Other random thoughts:

• Welcome to the series, Al Horford! Horford is my favorite Hawk, but he was killing the team in the first three games. The team has no chance to win if he doesn't win the matchup with his college teammate Joakim Noah. Through three games, the team's best player had scored 25 points total on 12 of 31 shooting and had shot a grand total of two free throws. Last night, he scored 20 on nine of 11 shooting and was a major part in the run that won the game in the fourth quarter.


• Far be it from me to criticize the reigning MVP, but Derrick Rose didn't make good decisions in the fourth quarter last night. He went from being a point guard to attempting an imitation of Allen Iverson, circa 2001. Rose ended up taking more shots than the rest of the Bulls' starting lineup combined. Carlos Boozer showed signs of life in the third quarter, but Rose barely looked his way in the fourth. Luol Deng also faded into the background. When the prospect of the Hawks in the Eastern Finals was a ludicrous proposition, I was prepared to root for the Bulls as an acceptable alternative to the Celtics and Heat, but if they are going to imitate the '01 Sixers, then I'll just root for a meteor.


• The crowd was great last night. That said, if the Hawks do somehow win Game Five, every Hawk fan who lived through the 80s with be thinking about one game when the teams come home: Game Six against the Celtics in 1987. Let's keep Cliff Levingston as far away from Philips as possible.

What Happens when a Jump-shooting Team Makes its Jumpers?

This.  The Hawks just stole home court advantage from a team that finished a mere 18 games ahead of it over the course of the regular season.  Were the Hawks merely coasting for most of the regular season, knowing all along that they have an extra gear and that their season would be dictated by their performance in April and May?  Viva the meaningless 82-game regular season!

Just about every writer who previewed the series, friend and foe alike, saw doom for the Hawks, especially with Kirk HInrich injured and the Hawks therefore having to look to secondary options to defend the presumptive league MVP.  So naturally, Jeff Teague, the player buried on the bench by Mike Woodson and Larry Drew, turned in the best performance of his young career.  Here is Bret LeGree describing Teague’s performance:

Given his lack of regular playing time over the past two seasons, Jeff Teague should probably be graded on a curve. But he needn't be. The 44:37 he played, the 10 points he scored on 11 shots (that 8 of those 11 came inside of 15 feet certainly contributed to the diverse offensive attack), the 5 assists he earned against a single turnover and the 27 shots Derrick Rose needed to score 24 points (even though the Bulls, as a whole, scored just as efficiently tonight against the Hawks as they did during the regular season) should earn the second-year point guard a passing grade on merit.

Peachtree Hoops agrees:

Can't say enough about Jeff Teague. Man was balling tonight. Again I have to mention that his efforts defensively ensured that, not only would somebody actually stay around Derrick Rose tonight, but that Johnson and Crawford did [not] have to die trying. He was 5-11, 2 rebounds, 5 assists, and a single turnover. And he only committed 2 fouls in 45 minutes. Derrick Rose drove at him, on him, shot through and over him, and never got to the free throw line. That's worth mentioning. Honestly, could Kirk Hinrich done better?

Also singing from the same hymnal/siddur, Mark Bradley cites Teague’s efforts in the run late in the third and early in the fourth to put the Hawks in charge:

Teague, who’d seen nine-plus minutes against Orlando, had gone 32 of Game 1’s first 36 minutes and had held his own against Rose. And he kept going. He was the floor when the Hawks broke it open — yes, you read that right — to start the fourth quarter. Johnson was hitting everything, and Zaza Pachulia was doing his grunt work in the lane, but none of this would have matter had Teague not held it all together.

Said Drew: “He did just a phenomenal job in running our team. And I could see our players trying to keep him motivated and stimulated. We thought we could get into the lane and cause some havoc.”

By the way, what does it say that the Chicago quotes after the game all cover a lack of intensity by the Bulls and then Larry Drew says that the veteran Hawks had to keep their rookie point guard “motivated and stimulated.”  If you can’t be fired up for game one of the NBA quarterfinals, then when can you be fired up?  And frankly, a series in which the Hawks reach the Eastern Conference finals for the first time on the strength of a good performance from Teague will feel very strange.  It will lead to all sorts of questions as to where was he for the rest of his career, as well as a query as to whether the Hawks’ brain trust has an irrational fear of playing its first round picks. 

Anyway, let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.  The Hawks have won a second-round game for the first time in 14 years and they have a real chance to knock out the NBA’s #1 seed.  Joe Johnson played like a guy who deserved the max deal that Atlanta Spirit bestowed upon him.  Jamal Crawford was money.  Josh Smith made a jumper.  The Hawks are up in the series without a big performance from their best player (Al Horford) and without Zaza turning in a vintage irritant in residence performance.  In other words, Larry Drew could have counter-measures when Tom Thibodeau makes defensive adjustments to stop Johnson and Crawford.  This could be interesting.

That was Great, Part One

I got a kick out of going for a run and listening to Bill Simmons' playoff preview podcast yesterday. Much of the discussion was about how great the Heat-Celtics and Bulls-Magic series would be in the East. Simmons was incredulous when John Hollinger gave the Hawks a chance against the Magic, even when Hollinger explained that Jason Collins gave the Hawks a chance because of his ability to get under Dwight Howard's skin. I'll admit that incredulity is the right response whenever Jason Collins is mentioned as the key to anything, but lo and behold, the regular season was not a fluke. The Hawks went 3-1 against the Magic in the season and are now up 3-1 in the playoffs.

Despite the regular season series, this playoff series is still jarring to me. The last Hawks game I attended was game three against the Magic last year. That game (combined with the resulting decisions to keep the roster intact by mortgaging the future for Joe Johnson and to promote Larry Drew to head coach) killed my affection for the team. Judging by attendance this year, I'm certainly not alone in that feeling. It's quite a turn of events to go from being swept by 101 points to being 3-1 and having been in charge for most or all of all four games. Again, I'm not the only one who has this feeling, as the crowds for games three and four have been outstanding. Hawks fans aren't consistent in our support, but if the team gives us a reason (like, say, winning game one in Orlando), we're perfectly capable of making Philips a hostile venue for a visitor.

(Related point: Joe Johnson had some nerve to criticize the fans after his woeful performance against the Magic last year. He evidently didn't learn his lesson because Ric Bucher relayed in a sideline report on Friday that Johnson told him that Johnson was hoping that there would be more Hawks fans than Magic fans at the game. I can say from first-hand experience that there were not a lot of Magic fans at the series last spring. The Magic fans might have seemed louder because it's hard to cheer when you're down 52-33 at the half.)

To me, the 180 degree reversal is down to three factors. First, as mentioned before, the Jason Collins effect is significant. Atlanta Spirit gets rightly criticized for not rounding out the roster with useful bench pieces, but Collins has proven himself to be useful against Orlando, so that's something. Second, Larry Drew's decision not to double-team Howard has been a good one. Mike Woodson had Collins available and never used him in this role, instead employing the double-teaming strategy that never worked against the Magic. Third, going from Mike Bibby to Kirk Hinrich has been a major improvement defensively. The Magic got open threes against the Hawks in part because of doubling Dwight and in part because Jameer Nelson could get into the lane at will. The latter avenue is now gone. Nelson's assist numbers in this year's series are almost the same as his numbers from last year, but his shooting percentage has dropped from .565 to .355. That seems relevant in a series in which most of the games have been tight.

Random Thoughts:

Just when I thought that I couldn't love Zaza any more, he goes and does this:



The leaning quasi-headbutt is a classic Euro soccer move. Jason Richardson never received the memo that the correct response would have been to throw himself to the floor as if hit by a cross-bow and then wait for the stretcher/blanket combo. I suspect that Zaza delivered three headbutts because he was so shocked at the lack of victim theatrics from Richardson after the first delivery. In the end, the Magic were denied their second-leading scorer for game four. The best part is that the whole fracas started because of a punk move by Howard, so the Hawks get to claim a piece of the moral high ground.

If Joe Johnson put on the worst contract-drive performance in last year's Orlando series, then Jamal Crawford is putting on one of the best. If the Hawks can re-up with Crawford for a reasonable price, then they should do so, but I suspect that the price is going too high with this performance. I suppose the decision will come down to how the Hawks finish out this series and then perform against the Bulls in round two. If the Hawks give a good account of themselves against the Bulls, then keeping the team together might make some sense. If not, then it will be clear that the Hawks simply had a hex on the Magic this year and a re-tool might be in the cards.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that the Hawks either take the Bulls to the limit or actually upset them and make the Eastern Conference Finals for the first time. This ought to be a great selling point for Atlanta Spirit to get the market re-engaged with the team. On the other hand, the Hawks will have performed at a high level in the playoffs after an uninspired regular season. So how do you sell tickets for next season when the lesson from this season is that nothing matters until the team turns on the jets in April?

How to Lose a Fan Base in Three Easy Steps

1. Build your team to contend in the East, then get swept in consecutive years in the second round of the playoffs, the latter sweep by record margins.

2. After having received definitive proof that your team is not in the top tier in the conference, sign a good player to superstar money, thus ensuring that you will keep trotting out the same team that was just humiliated in the playoffs.  For good measure, fire your coach and appoint his nice guy lieutenant, on whom the team will quit within a matter of months.

3. To ensure that your fans have the message that ownership has fully committed to a fatally flawed core, lose 15 of your first 36 home games in the following season.  Make sure to include blowout losses in all of the marquee games to guarantee that your fans get the message.  You know, losses like 114-81 to the Bulls, 106-85 to the Heat, and 101-87 to the Lakers.  Throw in a 100-59 loss to the Hornets just to remind your fans that you had the chance to draft Chris Paul and didn’t take it.

I started this blog in no small part because I was going to a fair number of Hawks games and I wanted to write about them.  In other words, I’m part of the Hawks’ target audience, so if they are losing me, they have major issues.  I’ve been wondering whether I’m unique in my place in life (busy at the office, wife and two small kids, strange attachment to a European soccer team that provides great emotional fulfillment), so I’ve been asking various friends who like basketball if they have the same feelings about the team.  To a man, everyone has echoed the same conclusion: the combination of the repudiating loss to the Magic, the re-signing of Joe Johnson, the hiring of Larry Drew, and the tepid performance this year (especially at home) has killed our interest in the team.  I’d like to be writing more about the Hawks to be a little truer to the title of this blog, which sits on top of the page taunting me as I write thousands of words about Barca, Michigan, and other sports topics that are not strictly Atlanta-themed.  I just can’t work up the interest.

I was reminded of the Hawks when I read Christopher Clark’s great piece at SB Nation defending Lakers fans against the taunt that they are bandwagon jumpers of the worst variety:

The Lakers have the most fair weather fans in all of sports.  Why?  Because Los Angeles is one of the entertainment capitals of the world.  If the Lakers suck, fans have a myriad of other fine options to more suitably distract themselves with.  As such, when the Lakers struggle, support for the team dwindles dramatically.  That couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that the team has missed the playoffs only five times in the 62 year history of the franchise, could it?

The Lakers have reached the NBA finals a staggering 31 times, averaging a Finals trip every two years.  They've won roughly 25 percent of the league's championships.  There are a whole bunch of reasons why, and a fair number of inherent advantages that allow it to be so, but a Laker fanbase which has made it clear that winning is important has to be part of the equation.  Jerry Buss is keenly aware of the price he will pay if the Lakers ever have a prolonged period of poor play, and it drives him to ensure the team reloads quickly.

So, the next time you accuse someone of being a fair weather fan, take a second to think about exactly what that means.  The Los Angeles Lakers might be the most fair weather fanbase on the planet, and I for one am proud to be one of them.  I don't suffer bad food, bad dish soap, or bad movies, so why in the hell would I suffer bad basketball?

Atlanta isn’t on LA’s level in terms of entertainment options, but like LA, it a major city with good weather and a host of options for one’s entertainment dollar.  Just like LA, fans in this city will not pay for a bad product.  Sadly, this incentive for ownership to put a quality product on the court has not led the Hawks to anything close to the Lakers’ history of success.  Still, Clark’s central point applies to the Hawks just as much as it applies to the Lakers.  Fans shouldn’t reward a team that has had a 12-month period like this Hawks franchise has had.

It’s the Losing, not the Lying

In a development that is entirely unsurprising, Atlanta Spirit is suing King & Spalding for malpractice, alleging that K&S made massive mistakes in drafting the agreement by which the entity would buy out Steve Belkin’s shares and then compounded the error in its representation of Atlanta Spirit in the litigation in Maryland against Belkin.  The suit is unsurprising because the source of the litigation was an ambiguously drafted provision in the sale agreement that allowed Belkin to try to control both of the appraisals for the value of his interest.  Atlanta Spirit ultimately prevailed on appeal in Maryland by convincing the Court of Appeals there that the appraisal provision was unenforceable.  The moment that happened, a malpractice claim was likely.  (Note: K&S will have plenty of defenses to the claim, one of which will be that, as the Maryland opinion notes, they had 30 hours to prepare a complex commercial document.  Another caveat: I’ve only followed this dispute through the media, so take my thoughts with a pound of salt.)

Atlanta Spirit’s Complaint makes for fascinating reading as a history of the legal wrangling regarding the ownership of the Hawks, Thrashers, and Philips Arena (albeit from the perspective of ownership).  One of the big issues that Atlanta Spirit faces is establishing damages.  OK, so K&S drafted a document with an imperfect provision regarding the determination of fair market value for the teams; what did that mean for you in terms of actual dollars and cents?  Atlanta Spirit’s claim is that they wanted to sell the Thrashers after the resolution of the 2004-05 lockout, at which point the competitive landscape would be better for a team like the Thrashers and the franchise’s value will be greater, but they were unable to do so because of the uncertainty as to who actually owned the teams: Belkin or the rest of Atlanta Spirit.  This is a somewhat embarrassing argument for the owners of a major pro franchise to make, but this is what happens when you air your grievances in the public litigation process.  Atlanta Spirit faced the same issue when it was litigating against Belkin in Maryland and had to put forward evidence regarding the vast sums that the teams were allegedly losing.  (Unrelated issue: this dispute illustrates the value of an arbitration clause in certain commercials contracts.  Atlanta Spirit would have been much better off if it could have fought with Belkin behind a wall of confidentiality.)

Naturally, Jeff Schultz has latched onto this argument to complain that we’ve been swindled by Atlanta Spirit.  Here’s his opening flourish:

They told you they cared. They lied.

They told you their biggest concern was putting out the best product for you, the fans. They lied.

They told you not to pay attention to any of those rumors of the Thrashers being for sale, although they eventually admitted begrudgingly that, yes, they were looking for “investors.” They lied.

The Atlanta Spirit is not looking for investors. They’re looking to sell the Thrashers. They’ve been looking to sell them for — ready for this? –six years.

Six . . . years.

Those are the caretakers of your franchise. Those are the ones who’ve pleaded with you since 2005 to support a mostly inferior product — and now they can’t figure out how they’ve burned so many bridges in this town why fans still feel too angry or worn down to show up for a pretty decent team. Reality never has been their strong suit.

This is hopelessly naive.  A decision to buy or sell a franchise is one of those topics about which we can fully expect owners to lie and with good reason.  If a team’s owners admit that they are looking to sell, then they immediately start to look desperate and their price goes down.  This is negotiation 101.  If I’m going to scalp tickets outside of a game, I want to create the impression that I’m not committed to getting into the stadium.  If I show up in team gear reeking of desperation, then a scalper is going to fleece me.  The apparent decision by Atlanta Spirit to lie about its intentions to sell the team is no different than a college coach denying that he’s considering leaving his program, a presidential candidate denying that he’s considering ending his campaign, or a president lying about surveillance flights over the Soviet Union.  If Schultz wants to be mad, then he ought to be mad at himself for assigning weight to the self-interested answers of Atlanta Spirit to questions that they could not answer honestly for perfectly legitimate reasons.

Schultz is absolutely correct in the conclusion of his column: “If Atlanta loses its second NHL franchise, it won’t be because the sport failed here. It will be because ownership and management failed.”  The reason why he’s correct has nothing to do with Atlanta Spirit claiming that it was trying to sell the team when it was, in fact, trying to do exactly that.  Rather, if hockey fails again in Atlanta, it will be because the team didn’t win nearly enough games to generate interest.  Atlanta fans will respond to a winner.  We turned out for the Hawks in the 80s, we turned out in droves for the Braves in the 90s, and now we’re selling out the Georgia Dome for every Falcons game.  Atlanta fans, unlike some fans elsewhere, will not pay for a bad product.  (This does not extend to our affection for our college football teams, whom we’ll pay to see even when they are 0-11.)  The Thrashers have made the playoffs once in eleven seasons and were promptly swept.  Let’s go out on a limb and say that that qualifies as a bad product.  Indeed, one of the first defenses that K&S will make regarding Atlanta Spirit’s damages is that its alleged malpractice didn’t cause a diminution in the value of the franchise; Don Waddell’s fumbling of the on-ice product is the proximate cause of the loss.  (K&S would also point to larger systemic factors, like the economic downturn and the NHL’s descent into irrelevance.  That said, they’ll try to resolve the case on legal grounds if at all possible.  They won’t want 12 jurors trying to make these complex analyses of market value.)  At this point, we would all be happy if Atlanta Spirit sold the team, but it’s not because they had the temerity to claim that they had no interest in doing so.    

The Hawks are 5-0. Do I Care?

When I started this blog, I wrote about the Hawks as much as any of Atlanta’s teams.  This made little sense when the team was 13-69 and seemingly headed to drafting Chris Paul.  It made more sense as the team gradually improved.  This fall, I’ve found it hard to get back into the Hawks, despite the fact that they are coming off of a 53-win season.  There are a couple reasons for this.  First, I was dispirited last year by the fact that this market didn’t respond to finally having a winner in the NBA.  The Hawks finished 18th in attendance despite putting a quality product on the floor.  After years of defending basketball fans in this city by saying that they would support a winner and fans who support a loser send the wrong message to ownership, it hurt to see plenty of empty seats when the Hawks finally produced a winner.  (And yes, I see the contradiction in a post in which I complain about not feeling connected to the Hawks because other people don’t feel connected to the Hawks.)  The lesson I took from last year is that this is a good basketball market and a good NBA market (the ratings for the NBA playoffs are consistently strong here), but it isn’t a good Hawks market.  We’re like a town in Spain where all of the locals support Real Madrid or Barca instead of the local team.

The second source of my ennui is the Hawks’ performance in the playoffs last year.  The performance against the Bucks was ugly.  I can’t get the fourth quarter of game five out of my head, when the Hawks got clobbered by a short-handed Bucks team and seemingly pissed away the season.  The team did fight back to win games six and seven, but the overriding question was why the Hawks were even in the position to have to fight against a Bucks team without Andrew Bogut.  Then, the performance against the Magic was embarrassing.  The Hawks had built for five years towards that series: a second-round tilt against one of the three favorites in the East.  The team barely showed up.  I went to game three and left at the end of the third quarter with a rancid taste in my mouth.  That taste lasted for the entire offseason.

The third reason why I’m having a hard time getting back into the local pro basketball collective is that it doesn’t seem to have a future.  The response of management to the embarrassing playoff exit was to re-sign Joe Johnson to a massive contract, thus cementing in place a nucleus that had just failed on the big stage.  Maybe Atlanta Spirit and Rick Sund made the best of a collection of bad options, but it is hard to get excited knowing that we are going to see the same collection of players for the next several years after that collection reached a nadir against the Magic.  Maybe the team will keep growing together, but there is an overriding feeling that we are set of for repeated disappointment with the team’s bete noire – the Magic – in the same division to deliver more punishment four times per year.  The fact that the Heat assembled their mega-squad in the Southeast division is also a problem.  It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Hawks are condemned for eternity to third-place finishes (and that assumes that the John Wall-led Wizards don’t rise up).

The Michael from 2005 would have punched 2010 Michael in the face for being less than enthusiastic about a Hawks teams that has made the second round of the playoffs twice and had the #3 seed last spring.  2005 Michael was excited when Section 317 got free burritos because the team on the court was rarely competitive.  Put another way, I feel a little guilty about my sense of ho-hum about these Hawks.  Still, the pervading sense that the Hawks have no chance against the Magic and Heat is dispiriting.  When the Hawks were good in the second half of the 80s, the town was excited by the team not only because Nique & company were fun to watch, but also because they had a chance of competing with the Celtics and Pistons.  The ‘94 Hawks were less pleasing to watch, but they had a chance of winning the NBA title.  The late 90s Hawks were never going to beat the Bulls, but there was always the hope that they would be in position to win the East after Jordan retired.  (Hence the disappointment after the sweep at the hands of the Knicks in ‘99 and the resulting decision to blow the team up.  That rebuilding process lasted until this current group of Hawks matured.  Come to think of it, Atlanta Spirit’s decision to keep this team together makes sense if you use the last decade as a guide.)  This team is as good as those three iterations of the Hawks, but the combination of the struggles against the Magic and the Heat putting a top team together is dispiriting because it removes the hope (illusion?) that this Hawks team can play into June.

So, here we are.  The Hawks are 5-0.  Their victims are collectively 5-12 in their games against the Hawks and it’s not as if the Hawks have been beating their opponents like drums.  The next two games – at Minnesota and home against Phoenix – are both winnable.  That would make the Hawks 7-0 for their first trip to Orlando.  That game will be very important, at least for my level of interest in the team.  I want to see this core show something that they haven’t shown before.  A good performance against the Magic would qualify. 

Nicky Santoro, Hawks Fan

My thoughts on the Joe Johnson contract:

Nicky: What the f*** is that supposed to mean? "He will be ejected from any casino in Las Vegas. And the casinos can be fined as much as ... every time he shows up." You believe this s***?

Ace: Yeah, I believe it. You got banned.

Nicky: "Because of notorious and unsavory reputation..." Motherf***er! Is there any way around this?"

Ace: No, there's no way.

Nicky: Let's say, for instance I wanna go in a restaurant, which happens to be in the casino to get one of those sandwiches I like?

Ace: Forget it. You can't even set foot in the parking lot. That's how serious it is.

Nicky: In other words, I'm f***ed.

Ace: In so many words, yes.

No Mo' Joe

If you can't tell, I haven't been paying a whole lot of attention to sports outside of the World Cup right now, so with free agency one minute old, I am going to outsource the explanations for why the Hawks should not attempt to sign Joe Johnson to a max deal. Here is Hoopinion:

Don't offer Joe Johnson $125 million over 6 years unless you're absolutely sure he's not going to accept the offer and even then only offer Joe Johnson $125 million over 6 years if you're preoccupied with managing perceptions rather than winning basketball games.

Signing Joe Johnson to a max deal will necessitate making future decisions based on finances rather than basketball all in the pursuit of keeping hope alive for the opportunity to get beaten soundly in the second-round. Pushing up against the luxury tax in the short-term and sacrificing future cap flexibility throughout the prime of the careers of Josh Smith and Al Horford so as not to lose a player who, good though he is and has been, projects to be the team's third-best player before the half this hypothetical contract expires is not in the best interests of the franchise.

And here is Peachtree Hoops:

It's become clear, in all of these conversations, that Joe is a fallback plan piece, a Plan B or C, to all these teams that have cleared a path for the real big hitters of this free agency forum. Michael Wilbon, during the course of free agent discussion on ESPN's Pardon the Interruption, mentioned that Johnson "isn't a #1", but as a #3, he'd be great! Wilbon is not alone around the league on this assessment.

Wonderful. So now, as the Hawks maintain that they will do all they can to resign Johnson, it stands to mention that the Hawks might end up mortgaging the next six seasons for a player who is better suited as a second or third option on a team today, at 29 years old, but get paid like a #1, and be paid that way until he's 34. Scary.

Joe is/has been a great player, but has always been miscast as some sort of superstar, even in star-starved Atlanta. His numbers, beyond All-Star game count, has never proven that reputation out. He's a great shot maker, plays a very physical brand of basketball, but it seems the rest of the league and those who watch the NBA is getting around to the same conclusions as Bird Watchers have....Joe is not a max player, doesn't quite rise to the level of a top-shelf free agent, candidate, and is, at best a fallback plan for a team that has the financial resources to swallow an above market contact well beyond the years of peak performance.

There was consensus in the USMNT blogosphere that starting Ricardo Clark and Robbie Findley was a bad idea; there is consensus in the Hawks' blogosphere that spending max money on Joe Johnson is a bad idea. This is not an overreaction to the Orlando debacle. Joe has been an asset to this franchise. He has played hard, scored a pile of points, worked his tail off on defense, and taken the team as far as he could. I'll always have affection for him for taking the team from 13 wins the year before his arrival to 53 this year. The Hawks got his best years. However, spending $119M for a player who has logged a ton of minutes at a position that sees players fall off a cliff around 31 or 32 is terrible business. Let the Knicks make that mistake.

Happy Thoughts

I took my three-year old Sam to his first Hawks game on Saturday. The 5 p.m. start time worked with his nap schedule and a friend at work was not using his tickets, so away we went. Thank goodness that Sam was my companion because otherwise, I would have had to dwell on the fact that the Hawks couldn't be bothered to try. In a do-or-die game. In the conference semi-finals. Against a division rival.

If I would have been 100% focused on the game, then I would have been bothered by Joe Johnson going three for 15 from the floor. Or Josh Smith standing in the corner with his head in the clouds while Matt Barnes rebounded his own miss, paused, realized that no one was guarding him, and then sashayed to the hoop for a lay-up. Or the Hawks openly ignoring Mike Woodson during timeouts. There's only so much caring that I can do when the Hawks are down ten at the end of one quarter and 19 at the end of two. Instead, Sam and I paid attention to the important things, like Harry the Hawk's movement through the arena. Or the use of the Sesame Street theme during musical chairs. Or playing peek-a-boo with our rally towels. ("Now You Know" takes on a whole different meaning after a performance like that.) We played catch with a basketball in the team store at halftime. And after the game, Sam was enthralled by a horse pulling a carriage next to Centennial Olympic Park. I suppose it's a metaphor for modern sports that a three-year old and his dad can have a great time at a game while tuning out what was going on on the court.

As for the Hawks, we all need to take a breather, let this series come to its inevitably ugly conclusion, and then evaluate where this team can go. I've never been a Mike Woodson hater. Despite the fact that his teams have never shown much organization on offense, it's hard to argue with the consistent improvement on an annual basis. If I'm big on favoring conclusions based on the big sample size as opposed to the small one, then I can't conclude that Woodson is a bad coach when the Hawks won 53 games this year (the fifth highest total in franchise history). However, it sure looks to me like the team has tuned him out. Woodson said this week that he can't coach effort, which to me is a damning admission. Maybe Woodson isn't to blame for the limp effort that the Hawks have put forward in this series, but he is the easiest piece to change in an attempt to get more effort from these players in the future.

Hollinger v. Bradley

John Hollinger has the Clubber Lang prediction for the Hawks against the Magic:

I'm trying to come up with a statistical indicator to favor Atlanta, and I'm drawing a blank. Orlando has home-court advantage, led the NBA in point differential and crushed Charlotte in four games in the first round despite having "Foul On You" nailed to the bench for all but 26.5 minutes a game. Meanwhile, the Hawks did little to encourage supporters by struggling past an injury-depleted Milwaukee squad in Round 1.

Moreover, the head-to-head history over the past two years is pretty one-sided. Atlanta won at Orlando on opening day of the 2008-09 season by 14 points, but since then it has been all Orlando. The Magic have won six of the past seven games, including wins by 17, 18, 32 and 34. Atlanta's only win in that span was by two points at the buzzer.

As a result, all 10 of our experts have the Magic winning, and only Chad Ford has the series going the distance. The glass-barely-wet view for Atlantans is that at least they aren't down 1-0 yet, unlike the Jazz and Celtics. I would strongly suggest the Hawks win the opener Tuesday, especially since that's probably their best shot to steal one given the rust Orlando should have from an eight-day layoff.

And Hollinger makes this point in the context of an article in which he describes the fact that teams with the homecourt advantage have a terrific record in the second round of the playoffs. So, with pretty much every factor pointing to a Magic victory, Mark Bradley is predicting glory:

My first inclination was to take Magic in six, but something about this matchup leads me to think it’ll go the distance. And where would the weight of expectation in such a Game 7 fall? Not on the Hawks.

The Milwaukee series was strange: The Hawks went from too loose to too tight to almost gone. But they made it through, and they see real opportunity in Round 2. So do I. Hawks in seven.

Bradley, who normally has a good sense for basketball match-ups, does not make a compelling case. His argument is that the Hawks can defend Dwight Howard without doubling him because Al Horford is an above-average big man. However, Bradley completely misses why Howard is a great player. Howard has a negligible offensive game. The Magic didn't have the second-best record in the NBA because of Howard's 18.3 points per game; they had it because they are the best defensive team in basketball and Howard's shot-blocking and rebounding are the largest reason why. Horford's skill is not going to prevent Howard from owning the glass or stopping the Hawks from scoring in the lane. Moreover, Orlando's success at shooting the three doesn't come only from opponents doubling Howard in the post, as evidenced by Howard's meager 1.8 assists per game and his reputation as a poor passer. Orlando gets open threes because they run a good offense, they have multiple threats, and they have a point guard who can find shooters. Who thinks that Mike Bibby can keep Jameer Nelson out of the lane? Right.

If Horford's presence gave the Hawks a match-up advantage against the Magic, then why have our friends in Orlando owned us for the past two seasons? Methinks Bradley is succumbing to his tendency to be too positive about the local teams. The Hawks' appearance in the Eastern Finals is going to go right next to the Braves' 2008 division title and Georgia's 2008 national title on the mantelpiece.

Two other thoughts on the local professional basketball collective:

1. With LeBron looking gimpy and the Lakers looking old, the stakes for the Hawks have gone up if they can somehow win this series. An upset over the Magic and "why not us?" will be a legitimate sentiment.

2. I still feel conflicted on the Hawks' rally against the Bucks. I'll freely admit that I gave them little chance to stave off elimination last Friday night. Instead, the team responded with two comfortable wins. The Hawks showed some serious backbone in coming back from what looked like a season-crushing loss in Game Five. Full marks to the team for doing so. On the other hand, if they were capable of beating the Bucks with such ease, then how the hell did they allow themselves to be pushed to the brink in the first place? Did Milwaukee come back to earth and give the Hawks the space to rise from the grave? Is this team capable of being great when they focus, thus making their wandering eye the reason why they aren't a true title contender?

Please Care More

If I wrote anything about the Hawks this morning, it would probably be a string of obscenities and name-calling. Thus, I'm going to outsource the analysis. Here's Mark Bradley:

How does Ersan Ilyasova will himself to dominate the final four minutes of an NBA playoff game?

“Just a lack of concentration,” Jamal Crawford said afterward.

But how do you not concentrate with a season on the line?

Said Crawford: “I honestly don’t know.”

I don’t, either. And neither does Mike Woodson or Rick Sund or James Naismith. It’s the great imponderable of a series that beggars belief. The Milwaukee Bucks are playing without their MVP; the Hawks won seven more games in the regular season and have all hands on deck, and they’re 48 minutes from elimination and perhaps a coaching search.

I keep wanting to believe the Hawks can still win this series, but I no longer have any basis for it. Game 5 was the worst moment in Hawks history since the loss — also to an undermanned Milwaukee team, also in Game 5 — at the old Omni in 1989. I was on hand for both, and the one of 21 years ago was the beginning of the end for Mike Fratello. For Mike Woodson, this Game 5 could be the end, period.

I remember that loss to the Bucks in 1989. It was the most frustrating loss that I can remember as a Hawks fan. The Hawks had staved off elimination in overtime on the road in Game Four and then blew the series at home in Game Five with the Bucks running some sort of bizarre weave that the Hawks couldn't stop. The loss in 1989 was the end of an era for the team, as they dismantled the group that had been pushing the Celtics and Pistons for several years. Last night's loss could be the same in terms of a sea change. Does Joe Johnson really want to come back to a team that has colossal mental lapses like this one does, especially when he can be a second fiddle to LeBron or Wade?

Peachtree Hoops also smells the end:

So yes, there are real coaching issues with this loss that point back to prior problems we have seen all season long. There are player performances that raise questions about team building blocks and ceiling. And there are actual blogging points to discuss as the team moves forward in a series that is far from over. But tonight? Tonight I mourn. I mourn 13 win seasons and player development. I mourn a free agent from Phoenix that took a chance on a city and a seven game series that made that city come alive. I mourn unlimited upside and player development and I mourn coaching question marks and franchise players. Because for this set of players, the unknown is over. The ceiling has been reached. And no words or box scores or analysis make that easier to take. Because it is just sad, but you can know I am sad right there with you.

Last night was definitely the end of something for me. I went to the draft party when the Hawks took Marvin Williams over Chris Paul. I went to ten games the year we won 13 and 20 games the year we won 26. I watched this team grow from the worst in the NBA into a 53-win team. If the Hawks would have hit the ceiling against LeBron or the Magic, I would have accepted that Knight and Sund had created a very good team that couldn't quite get over the hump. I have a harder time accepting losing to a demonstrably inferior team because a core group that has been together for years can't keep their heads together in the biggest games of the year.

The Atlanta Sports Anthem

Why opine on the facts that the Hawks can't play defense and the Braves can't score? Anything that I'd be saying, Neil can say twice as good.

Message Sent

Mark Bradley is bullish on the Hawks after a dominating win over the defending champs:

The consensus holds that the Hawks are doomed to lose either to Cleveland or Orlando in Round 2, but if you’re the Cavs or the Magic do you really want to see this team in a best-of-seven? The Hawks finally broke through against Orlando last week, and they’ll have another chance at LeBron’s crew in Cleveland on Friday. And is there any better fortification for a trip to Quicken Loans Arena than a 17-point drubbing of the defending champions?

The Hawks are 5-5 against the other three elite teams in the East. They are 6-4 against the top five teams in the West. This Hawks team has shown this year that they can compete with the elite teams in the NBA. I wouldn't bet my mortgage on the Hawks beating the Cavs or Magic in a seven game series, but that's because those are the two teams against which the Hawks have struggled the most. It's odd to say this because the West is significantly better than the East, but I'd feel better about the Hawks's odds if they were in the Western Conference playoffs.

John Hollinger notes that the Hawks took a step towards the #3 seed in the East:

For Atlanta, meanwhile, this was a big win in the race for the third seed in the Eastern Conference -- a race they must win outright since Boston, as a division champion, would get the nod in a tiebreaker despite Atlanta's winning all four games between the clubs.

Fortunately for the Hawks, it may not come down to that. While they face near-certain defeat in Cleveland on Friday, they play only two winning teams in the six games that follow before a season-ending game against a Cavs squad that probably will feature the likes of Jawad Williams and Danny Green instead of LeBron James.

Combined with Boston's loss to Oklahoma City, it puts the Hawks a game ahead of the Celtics, and Boston must also face Cleveland this weekend.

Given the Hawks' struggles against the Magic, the three seed isn't much better in terms of a second round opponent. However, avoiding the suddenly torrid Bucks would be nice. I'd be more interested in a series against Milwaukee than I would another slog against the Heat, but I'd rather play Miami.

Don't Blame Me

Der Wife and I went out on Saturday night. I watched the first six minutes of the Hawks-Magic game, at the end of which the local basketball collective led 16-6. When I got out of the shower and had finished primping, the Hawks were down 55-46. I watched for a few more minutes, during which time the Hawks cut the deficit to 57-54. We then headed out and the Hawks were thrashed for the rest of the evening. Thus, I have little to say about the game other than that Al Horford is an all-star, but he isn't a true center, so the Hawks cannot handle the Magic in any way, shape, or form.

The question becomes whether there is a center on the market who can give the Hawks a fighting chance against Howard. And if there is such a character, do the Hawks deploy a big lineup against Orlando with Horford and Josh Smith at the forward spots? That's an awfully weak-shooting front line. The alternative is to rotate Horford and Josh Smith at the four while keeping Marvin Williams at the three, but then you are cutting the minutes of two of your best players. Maybe there is no solution other than hoping to avoid Orlando in the playoffs.