Yesterday,
an article of mine about the Atlanta Hawks playing the Golden State Warriors
went up at Hardwood Paroxysm (thanks
to Ian Levy). I didn’t really think much of it. Whenever I guest post
somewhere, the article goes up, a couple tweets and retweets occur, and then I
usually don’t hear anything else about the piece. Like most writers or aspiring
writers, I’m already working on something else. But yesterday was different.
The good people of Atlanta, or at least the good people of Atlanta on Twitter,
did not, at least from what I could tell, enjoy the article or my opinions.
On the
one hand, I was glad people even looked at something I had written—as I always am.
On the other hand, I was surprised, maybe even taken aback by the negative
comments. After all, I didn’t think I’d written a negative article on the
Hawks, but an impression of what a good basketball team looked like while
playing a great basketball team. The Hawks are not playing at the level they
did last year, but to say that is not to say they are a bad basketball team.
They are indeed a good one. They could make some noise in the playoffs. They
could also go quietly.
While
their defense is much improved and statistically one of the tops in the league,
their offense is not the same. They are also still figuring out some quirks in
their rotation. Do they play Jeff Teague at point guard down the stretch or
hand the reins over to his backup Dennis Schröder? Against the Warriors, they
opted for Schröder, as they have in other games of late. Is this stretch of the
season a microcosm of what the coaching staff will opt for the rest of the
season and on into the playoffs? Or, will they still be tinkering?
I ask
these questions because the Hawks are often discussed as a finished product. As
they won sixty games last season, it became popular to question whether they
were as good as their record suggested. Such questions are kind of silly. If a
team can win sixty games, the team is sixty wins good. Then again, the regular
season is not the playoffs. Perhaps the question, when such things occur,
should be whether or not the team can win in the playoffs like it has or did
in the regular season. This argument is largely about semantics. It returns to
the idea that the Hawks are good, but not quite good enough. It also makes them
more interesting than the idea that they can be defined solely by a system.
In other
words, the Atlanta Hawks are something besides a machine. And a heckuva lot more interesting, too.
Teague
and Schröder are a lot of fun to watch with the ball. They play like X-wing
fighters crashing a party at the Death Star. Sometimes this is awesome.
Sometimes they fly too fast and too reckless for the team’s own good. Kent
Bazemore is still figuring out what it takes to be a starter for a team that
may or may not be elite. He’s a guy figuring it out, pushing against the
boundaries of his talent. That’s fun to watch. And then there’s the frontline
tandem of Paul Millsap and Al Horford. The undersized Millsap does a bit of
everything. Al Horford and his broad shoulders are the anchors to the much
improved defense. He is also an offensive player with a portfolio of diverse
skills, even if he does often shirk and shrug his talents.
I have
always had a soft spot for the Atlanta Hawks. The first NBA games I ever
attended were in the old Omni. The kids I went to elementary and middle school
with were torn between Michael Jordan and Dominique Wilkins. My first memories
of sports writing involve digging through the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for the sports section and unearthing
the secrets of Dikembe Mutombo’s finger wag. I wanted Aland Henderson and
Tyrone Corbin to be the missing pieces. I loved the name Mookie Blaylock.
I would
never claim to be a die hard Atlanta Hawks fan. I have always had amorphous NBA
loyalties. But it was weird yesterday when a handful of Hawks fans thought the
article was “trash” or horribly written. Maybe it was the word “counterfeit”
that set everybody off. After all, such a word is often read as “fraud,” but I meant
it with a wink. These Hawks remind me of John Falstaff, a man who fakes his own
death. I’m not sure there’s a more southern character in all of Shakespeare’s
writing. There also may not be one more beloved. But Shakespeare isn’t
inherently southern, so I discussed opossums playing dead. To be fraudulent is
as southern as Brer Rabbit and the briar patch. To accept or embrace the fraud
is as real as it gets.
These
Hawks aren’t as mechanically flawless as a system. But they do appear to be on
a rather predictable arc. They’re just good enough,
trying to get better, and that’s painfully fun to watch, but, believe me, the
pain will surface. This can’t end well, at least not this year. Hence, there’s something rotten in the Hawks of Atlanta. I mean that as a compliment.
Bryan Harvey tweets
@LawnChairBoys, mostly about basketball and books.
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