“Alright, stop… collaborate, and LISTEN!”
This is YOUR time! Yes, you Atlanta Hawks fans hiding over there, I’m talking to y’all.
You have been among the most skeptical, critical, naysaying fans out there in the Atlanta sports universe. Technically, you are fans, just from afar. You have been waiting, over the course of nearly a decade, to be proven wrong. That wait is over.
I know you’re all out there. I see you all around town. You are right there, in line outside Fat Matt’s, stewing in bumper-to-bumper traffic, standing on the MARTA platform, on the treadmills at LA Fitness. And the rolling of your eyes upon mere sight of any diehard Hawks supporter is a dead-giveaway, a telltale sign. Bravos, Falcons, UGA/Tech, United fans don’t engender that auto-reaction in their own town. Only the presence of openly, outwardly supportive Hawks fans has that effect on you.
You don’t even have to be pressed to offer up that you haven’t gone all-in on these Hawks since Mike Woodson’s fruitless playoff era began in earnest. Why would anyone, you asked, pin their NBA title hopes on a team headlined by time-sucking Joe Johnson?
Why, you’d question, are we waiting around for young Josh Smith to morph into Muscly Shawn Kemp, when we can all see he’s hell-bound for a Fat Shawn Kemp career? Do we really think past-his-prime Kyle Korver burrowing through a baker’s dozen screens just to get halfway open is The Move? Giving Jeff Teague the keys to the offense is supposed to work out any better? Have you seen his layups? It is 2013: why is John Co… oop, sorry, that was a flash-forward… why is Al Horford still wasting your time and mine, hopelessly out of position at center?
Maybe you hung around the arena just long enough to watch the Hawks try to make a Finals MVP out of Brandon Jennings, or to see this team shatter a playoff blown-out record, vow, “Never Again!”, only to break their own record in humiliating fashion just one season later. You, long before many others, tired of witnessing opponents just waltzing into Atlanta arenas, like some Amazon Key courier, and having their way with the hosts come playoff-time. You pulled a Seinfeld, rose up out your seat, grabbed your Playbill, bounced, and haven’t darkened the arena doors since.
You weren’t all that perturbed when the hotshot GM tried his hand at Dice Clay stand-up on a hot mic, when his owners then broke out in a “Nobody Speak”-style brawl (Killer Mike 'n El-P, that plug's for you) with one another, and nearly speared their own fans in the process. Your season tickets were never at risk… they hadn’t been purchased in ages, anyway.
No, you weren’t satisfied with killing your hard-earned free time being humored by wayward live-bird mascots, fat-guy trampoline dunkers, broke-legged A-Town dancers, broke-legged Skyhawks, and even more reliably broken shot clocks. You ride MARTA, so you already get to see Harry the Hawk’s antics, no costumes required, every commute day. The prospect of merrily singing along to “No Hands” and “My Neck, My Back,” somehow set to organ, doesn’t move your meter.
Unlike the latter-day Hawks executives, no, you are not gonna be out here blowing your duckets on “perpetual mediocrity,” a concept that shares its initials with Paul Millsap. Replacing Horford with Great Value Dwight Howard isn’t drawing you downtown, either.
Skeptical Hawks Fans, I say to you… Trust The Recess!
You, Skeptical Hawks Fan, are a Championship or Bust Gal/Guy. After years of collective dithering, your Atlanta Hawks (1-4) are finally entering in the Bust phase of the Recess, and they need you. All of you. In the arena, s’il vous plait. There are more than enough of you to fill up this leaner, meaner Philips Arena every single night, especially home openers on Friday nights, like today’s affair versus the Denver Nuggets (7:30 PM Eastern, you know where it is on TV, but put down the dadgum remote and get on down here).
Millsap is now a Nugget, Dwight’s a Hornet, Thabo’s a Jazz-hand just like Joe, Ivan’s on an off-ramp in Manila somewhere, Pero’s jab-stepping in Jabstepistan, Kyle’s a Cav, Smoove’s a Pelican, Al is a… who cares what Al is, really? The vestiges of postseason heads-up-our-own-buttsiness are almost all in distant lands now. There are no super-duper-stars blazing a path to The Finals around here, and that’s okay, because we didn’t lose any.
There are Nets fans still waiting to cash in on their “I was there for 12-70!” buttons. Dubs fans were packing dusty old Oracle Arena for Donyell Marshall, Corey Maggette and Andris Biedrins, long before some tykes from Davidson College and Washington State were coming down the pike to turn their fortunes around. Just to have a chance at a high school kid from Akron, Cleveland suffered through drafting the likes of Trajan Langdon, DeSagana Diop, Brendan Haywood, and Dajuan Wagner. They cycled through a Danny Ferry era (as a player) that was way worse than ours.
You are going to be those fans, the ground-floor fans that can say you were there, in person, through the suckier stages of 82-game seasons. You’re not going to be That Gal/Guy showing up all late, in facepaint and feathers, only after we finally get a legitimate contender in the building. Get in there now, get in line early for the Topgolf and the courtside Mai Tais, before it gets all trendy.
We are fully in the Recess phase, and GM Travis Schlenk and coach Mike Budenholzer are setting sail. Dennis Schröder is your commodore leading the way out on these treacherous seas, and for now, he’s got Kent Bazemore, Mike Muscala, and Ersan Ilyasova all pulling oars in varying directions. Don’t you want to humblebrag, someday, that you were there for Luke Babbitt and Malcolm Delaney?
But here’s the thing. To a man, the players sure shouldn’t strive to see Schlenk’s ship sink (say that five times, fast), and you shouldn’t either. The bedrock for the Hawks’ bounceback was built in Brookhaven and opened this past week. Player Development is what’s hot in these streets. While some teams are constantly hunting for finished-product talents, the Hawks are working with raw materials. The new brass is convinced that they can Build-A-Bear their way to championship basketball, and they need you, Skeptical Fans, to be sold on that premise of a promise.
When Schröder, John Collins, and Taurean Prince peer up into the stands, they need to see that all the time spent getting chewed out in practice by Coach Bud, having every pick-and-roll and Eurostep through the lane nitpicked by P3 geeks, getting poked and prodded by people in white Emory labcoats, is all worth the trouble.
They don’t need to see Johnny Come Lately Fan or some godforsaken Wisconsin transplant rocking a Greek Freak jersey, now that it’s all trendy. They don’t need to see a foldout seat, with an unwanted rally towel draped over it, where your keyster is supposed to reside. You fans are the difference between players fueling their desire to develop themselves, with a mindset aimed at achieving greatness right here, and players merely seat-warming, in anticipation of draft choices hopefully not named, Acie, Shelden, Chills, and Marvin, someday arriving to supplant them.
Millsap is the latest to join other NBA teams duped into the idea that Poach-a-Hawk-and-Stir is a surefire way to insta-compete for NBA titles. While it is a bit premature, the perception that Sap, in place of Danilo Gallinari, could convert an outfit featuring Nikola Jokic and Gary Harris into a defensively competent unit may not have been fully thought through. Like the mountain range, it has been a Rocky start.
Millsap (team-high 15.5 PPG; zero steals through his first four games) is still getting acclimated, and starters like Jokic and forward Wilson Chandler (33.3 FG%) have yet to figure out how to mesh with their All-Star teammate. Of the Nuggets’ eight two-man lineups (min. 75 minutes played together) Harris+Jokic is the only tandem with a positive net rating, and even that is a tenuous +0.1. (Jokic+Millsap minus-7.8; Harris+Sap minus-11.3; Chandler+Sap minus-12.8).
For Denver (1-3), their sole win thus far involved holding the woeful Kings under 80 points. Otherwise, Jokic and the Nuggets have suffered through getting rim-runned at turns by Rudy Gobert, Marcin Gortat, and Howard (combined 17-for-23 FGs).
Despite committing seven turnovers, Dwight had 15-and-19 as his host Hornets pulled away from the Nuggs early on Wednesday night, Charlotte prevailing 110-93. It was a performance for Dwight eerily similar to his Hornets’ other victory, registering 20-and-15 despite 6 TOs along the way to last week’s 109-91 win over the visiting Hawks.
Tonight should be an ideal game to get Dewayne Dedmon (career-low 43.3 FG%) back on track in the Atlanta offense. Jokic (13.5 PPG, 10.3 RPG, 5.0 APG, 4 consecutive made 3FGs) can high-post-pass his way into a triple-double in his sleep. But his inability to keep up with even inertial centers in transition, or to stop low-post players from doing to him what he does to them, gets the Denver defense discombobulated easily. Get down the court, keep the ball high, and get Dedmon to the rim on these Nuggets (NBA-low 2.0 blocks per-48; 65.5 opponent restricted-area FG%), who thrive when their opponents settle for dueling halfcourt sets.
His last name begins with an ‘M’. His last name ends in ‘y.’ The second letter is a ‘u’. Those were the clues Nuggets coach Mike Malone offered up to reporters throughout the preseason, about which of his young point guards would be named the starter. The dust finally settled, and the winner, Jamal Murray, has rewarded his coach by starting out shooting 29.8 FG% (incl. 10.5 3FG%, on nearly five attempts per game). Murray’s clunkers have left the runner-up, trade-target Emmanuel Mudiay, looking like Jamal Crawford out there (33.3 FG%, incl. 30.8 2FG%).
Malone may have to give Will Barton (3.5 APG, 1.0 TOs/game, 36.4 3FG%) a fresh look in the starting lineup. In the meantime, either Schröder (11.1 3FG%, 20.0 2FG attempts/game; questionable to play, sprained ankle) and Delaney can get well/better at the expense of Denver’s defensively unsound backcourt, or vice versa. Schröder (early career-low 8.6 TO%) and Atlanta’s point guards have done a decent job to this point in suppressing turnovers of their own making, particularly given the high volume of Hawks offensive possessions that don’t amount to much else.
The dreaded Sense of Urgency is already mile-high for the Nuggets, still in the middle of a four-game East Coast road swing. “It’s a must-win for us,” Millsap advised reporters ahead of tonight’s clash. “Our team is struggling, and we have to get back on the right page.” This is supposed to be the Nuggets’ Ascension phase, where their five-season playoff drought will draw to a close.
Comparatively, during the Hawks’ Recession era, it is so nice not having to couch random early-season contests in the frame of “must-wins,” in order to keep some playoff-appearance streak alive. But a recession can easily slip into a depression without the proper supports around. And that is where you, Skeptical Hawks Fans, come in. For just a little while, Atlanta needs you to become Pragmatic Hawks Ticket-Buyers.
This is YOUR time. After so many years of standing on the sidelines, the next 41 home games have you in mind. With you, and friends, cheering on the developing young talents no matter the score, tonight’s scrub may someday become an integral part of tomorrow’s title-contending rotation. You can still sit on your hands the entire season, if you want. Just do a lot of that sitting in these arena seats.
Ladies and gents, there are avocado-topped barbeque cricket tacos at The Highlight Factory with your names on them, hot and ready. No, filet mignon is not on the menu yet. Stop all the questioning, get in your seats, and get to chompin’!
Let’s Go Hawks!
~lw3
