Sunday, April 20, 2008
Sports
Still No Love
Hawks fly into playoffs, but critics squawk on
CREDIT: Scott Cunningham/NBAE via Getty Images
We’ve got our eyes on the prize,” says the Hawks’ Josh Smith about his team’s postseason hopes. “Nobody gave Golden State a shot” last year.
By Michael Mahan
Success breeds contempt. The Lakers, the Yankees, the Cowboys. You either like them or loathe them. Some teams you just love to hate.
And then there’s the Atlanta Hawks, the team this city loves to hate on.
Yes, their ?-? record marked their ninth straight losing season. Yes, they are the lowest seed in the Eastern Conference and are expected to accomplish next to nothing in the postseason. Yes, the organization’s lack of accomplishments from the ownership and the general manager to the coaching staff and the players has been scorned publicly and privately by many. Still, the fact is, the Hawks did make the playoffs last week, ending the NBA’s longest playoff drought at eight years.
But for many local basketball fans, sports media and Internet bloggers, the Hawks are still a punch line, synonymous with losing, going nowhere fast. The team’s goal since preseason has been to make the playoffs, and now that they’ve done it, well … it just isn’t enough to please some people.
“Everybody has their opinion,” NBA Rookie of the Year candidate Al Horford tells The Sunday Paper. “When I came in it was, ‘you’re not going to make the playoffs.’ Now we’re in playoffs, [and] it’s ‘you’re going to get swept.’ The way I look at it is, we’re going to give it the best we’ve got. I think we all love proving people wrong. Anything is possible.”
Difficult short and long term futures
The Hawks’ first-round opponents in the best-of-seven series are the Boston Celtics, the NBA’s best regular-season team, who beat the Hawks by double digits in each of their three meetings this season. This will not be an easy task for Atlanta. The position the Hawks find themselves in is snugly fitted between a rock and a hard place. If simply making the playoffs isn’t dazzling anyone, then maybe playing competitively while stealing a couple of games from the mighty Celtics would suffice?
Maybe. But either way, the offseason will bring some important management decisions, most notably the contract status of general manager Billy Knight, head coach Mike Woodson and forwards Josh Smith and Josh Childress. The team, which doesn’t appear realistically close to winning a world championship in the near future, also doesn’t have a first-round draft pick to work with.
Outside of Joe Johnson and Mike Bibby, the Hawks have next to nothing in postseason experience on the roster, and gaining such should prove beneficial. Last year, the Orlando Magic snapped a three-year playoff drought, and were swept out in the first round of the playoffs by Detroit. Management then made some key offseason moves, and this year the Magic finished as the No. 3 seed in the Eastern Conference.
Then there’s Boston, which after winning just 24 games a year made several key acquisitions both prior to and during the season to finish the year with ? victories—the largest turnaround in NBA history. The Celtics, one of those franchises opposing fans love to hate, seem poised for a run at another world championship. And with 16 NBA titles in their history, the Celtics boast a nationwide fan base who have made their presence felt in Philips Arena this season and will do so again this week.
Happy to have a shot
As for the fickle fans in Atlanta, Smith is equally unmoved. “Most of the people saying that [the Hawks will get swept] are probably not from here, so it doesn’t matter,” he says. “We’ve got our eyes on the prize. Nobody gave Golden State a shot [last year].”
Yes, the Warriors were the darlings of last spring’s postseason, upsetting the Western Conference’s top-seeded Dallas Mavericks as, like the Hawks this year, a No. 8 seed. But that Golden State team owned Dallas in the regular season, peaked at the right time, was very talented and was led by a proven NBA coach who schemed a perfect game plan. Atlanta has none of those advantages over the exceedingly well-rounded Celtics. If Atlanta performs poorly in the series, their skeptics will feel validated.
For Bibby, staying focused on the task at hand and ignoring the doubters is crucial. “We’re not worried about what anybody says,” he tells SP. “We’re trying to stay together as a team. A lot of people don’t expect us to do any damage in the playoffs, so we have nothing to lose. We have to play loose.’’
Childress addresses the naysayers more directly. “The people out there saying that, they’re a joke. We’re out here battling our butts off, trying to do something this franchise hasn’t done in many, many years. We don’t need those types of people around. We appreciate the true fans that are happy for us, and happy we’re in this position.”
But all too many Atlantans, after watching this franchise mostly flounder for four decades, have already counted the Hawks out. Simply making the playoffs would have been a modest goal for most franchises, but not for a team that hasn’t been there in nearly a decade. Even so, now that they’ve achieved that goal, the Hawks find themselves where they have always been. Disregarded. Unnoticed. Unloved. SP