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The Atlanta Hawks? Gone till November.
It’s just fine to wonder if the 2014-15 Atlanta Hawks were merely a regular-season wonder. A team to take advantage of your weary outfit on a Monday night in January after you flew in from playing in Miami on Friday and Orlando on Saturday, and possibly enjoyed a little too much of Atlanta on a Sunday night “off.” It’s OK to slough off any comparisons to the 2004 Detroit Pistons, a team with three killer All-Stars and a point man in Chauncey Billups who could take over games with just 12 field-goal attempts to his name. It’s OK to worry.
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It’s also just fine to point out that this team is another player away. A little “health” away. A little, “can we run the same sets with the same enthusiasm in May that we did in January, please?”-away.
It’s also important to remember that the Atlanta Hawks weren’t supposed to be here this quickly. Reminding Hawk fans that anything over 45 wins and a second-round bow out was gravy won’t make the team’s frustrating 2015 playoff showing go down any easier, but gravy is delicious and the Hawks gave Atlanta a fine full regular season of basketball, and three good months’ worth of absolutely dominant basketball over the winter.
The team’s abrupt and somewhat cruel playoff turn won’t change any of that, but it will threaten things. Atlanta started off its hoped-for championship run with a game against the Brooklyn Nets, a sham of an outfit built with little care and heaps of unearned basketball money. In Game 1, ATL raced out to an early double-digit lead in the first of what felt like four blowout wins against a sub-.500 Nets team that will give up on a game after a few cross stares, as we all wondered just how this group from Brooklyn managed to make the postseason while Russell Westbrook watched from home.
The Nets came back, though. They didn’t win, but they kept it close. The same thing happened in Game 2. Then Brooklyn actually acquitted itself on its home court, taking two contests before eventually falling in six games. There was no shame in letting an improving Washington Wizards squad take you to six games either, but not with John Wall having missed three of those contests before returning to play two more with one hand. Just one blowout win in four conquests for ATL against Washington, with it only coming with the team’s backs against the wall in Game 2, already down 0-1 in the series.
Then LeBron hit.
In six days, the Hawks went from owning home-court advantage against a thin Cavalier team working with a cramping LeBron James and limping (he had six days in between contests, but struggled badly in Game 1 with myriad leg injuries) Kyrie Irving to being done for the season. Cleveland destroyed the Hawks. They baited them into fights, staredowns and terrible play. They revealed Jeff Teague to be a sub-star, and forced us to wonder about Paul Millsap’s durability. It was swift and, at times, embarrassing.
The ball didn’t move. They didn’t hit open shots they usually make, and they didn’t hit the contested shots they often made in the regular season. There were poor closeouts and too many possessions – against three defenses that can be either middling or quite good at times – that were given up on far too early in the shot clock. For those of us who enjoyed that winter, it would be hard to convince anyone that just hopped on board that Atlanta won 60 regular-season games, and at one point 19 in a row.
Gravy, to be sure, but damn.
Atlanta didn’t set out to be starless. The team chased down Chris Paul and Dwight Howard in years’ past as free-agent signees, and Joe Johnson was dealt only because of his ridiculous contract. The reason shamed absentee general manager Danny Ferry isn’t around is because he attempted to sign former All-Star Luol Deng – a wonderful guy who played well this season, but whose production is about to fall off a cliff because of heavy minutes, the sort of big name that Miami Heat president Pat Riley loves to throw big money at.
With that in place, none of this takes away from the work Ferry has put together in working up this roster full of very good players on incredibly reasonable contracts.
Teague may have disappointed routinely in the playoffs, but he’s an All-Star at $8 million a year on a deal that doesn’t move up as the years move along. Millsap was an All-Star at less than eight figures this season. Korver makes around the league’s average salary and his per-year cash amount declines next season. Shelvin Mack, Dennis Schroeder and Kent Bazemore will combine to make $6.1 million 2015-16, around the league’s average salary. All three at times acted as the tipping point in several Hawk wins this season.
Millsap will be a free agent this year and, at age 30, he may not be likely to go for the sort of shorter contracts that would allow him to load up for a massive 2016 payday. He’ll have earned every bit of what the Hawks will offer him, but he’s also going to have to prove quite a bit next season as he recovers from expected shoulder surgery – Paul was a gamer who returned too early after an early spring shoulder injury that sadly robbed him of too much in the postseason. At the max, at his size, in his early 30s? Here’s hoping it works out.
One would hope we won’t hear any Chicago Bulls-styled post-playoff leak of DeMarre Carroll needing some invasive procedure to repair what we all assumed was going to be a badly torn up knee in the wake of his Game 1 plant and fall. He was playing fantastic playoff basketball before that injury, a continuation of a very good regular season that saw his usage rise and turnovers drop. A Jimmy Butler-like ascension at age 29 next season isn’t in the cards, but that won’t mean he won’t be worth an eight-figure payday after making $2.4 million this year.
Re-sign those two, and the team will have some wiggle room underneath the cap (presuming it renounces veteran Elton Brand, which those of us born in the early 1980s just aren’t ready for) before it matches what will likely be more than a few offers for Pero Antic as he enters restricted free agency. Antic has his charms and works hard, but he completely dropped out of the rotation in the playoffs and he took a ridiculous amount of three-pointers this year for a “stretch” big that shot 30 percent from deep. He’ll be 33 by training camp.
The Hawks will also have the No. 15 pick in June's draft because the Nets are the worst.
(We also do not know how Thabo Sefolosha will respond to what we’re merely stuck to calling now a “non-basketball injury.” We don’t know the extent of his ligament damage, or how he’ll recovery from a broken fibula – not typically an NBA injury. We’re saving our vitriol, and we have quite a bit in reserve, for now.)
Following that, the Hawks will just serve as another member of an unending series of teams both good, bad and mediocre that will look forward to 2016 – when any amount of 2015 free-agent work will be rendered immaterial no matter how much teams might overpay.
The Hawks haven’t earned the right to be dispirited, to work through the 2015-16 regular season as if they’re the Thunder or Clippers or Bulls or any other team that routinely goes at it hard as championship contenders from October until spring before falling short due to any combination of bad luck, nasty injuries, fine opponents or bad ball at the worst time. The team’s resident star, Al Horford, has been around since 2007 and the core was set in place in 2013, but this was the team’s first full year of getting it right. They can’t get mopey right now, and that will be the summer challenge.
If the regular-season pattern works the same magic again in 2015-16, then the obvious eventual challenge will be to figure out just how to get it all right when the pressure and expectations hit. Let’s cross that bridge when we get to it, once the snow melts all over again.
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is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops
