I know this is where we're supposed to pat them on the back and say, "Heck of a season, guys." (And it was a heck of a regular season.) But I'm disappointed in the Hawks, who ought to be disappointed in themselves.
For all the post-sweep talk about this being only the second season this bunch has been together, five more years with these same players might never yield a better chance than the one just flubbed. The Hawks had homecourt advantage through the Eastern Conference finals. They caught sub-.500 Brooklyn in Round 1, Washington without its best player for half of Round 2 and Cleveland without two of its Big Three for half of Round 3.
We can say the Hawks were injured, and they were. But in Game 2 they started four 2015 All-Stars to Cleveland's one and were beaten by 12 points at home. They started three All-Stars to the Cavaliers' two in Game 4 and were beaten by 30. The Hawks went 8-8 in the postseason against teams they defeated 10 times in 12 tries during the regular season.
Yes, the playoffs are different. They shouldn't have been that different, though. Opponents found a way to negate the all-for-one offense -- if you don't let Kyle Korver beat you, there's a chance no other Hawk will -- and the Hawks couldn't recalibrate. For all the splendid work done here by Mike Budenholzer, the NBA's newly minted coach of the year was outflanked in all three rounds.
Over the past month, the Hawks looked confused in a way they never did from Thanksgiving through Easter. As Korver conceded during the Washington series, during the regular season all teams weren't always "engaged." Beyond the 82nd game, there's only one opponent to scout. The pace-and-space offense isn't easy to contain if the totality of your preparation is a morning shootaround; it's not the same if P&S is all you're seeing for a week.
The Hawks never really got going in the postseason, and nothing Budenholzer tried made much of a difference. "That's the beauty of our offense," Korver had said. "When we're clicking, we're all dangerous." Turned out the opposite was likewise true: When one's not clicking, nobody is as good.
With Korver neutralized, the spacing got skewed. The post-up game wasn't as effective because there was less room underneath. With the ball not moving, Jeff Teague -- the man who controls it the most -- soon became the only option, and he wound up shooting too much. (He averaged 14.9 shots, most among Hawks, in 16 playoff games; he'd averaged 12.2, third-most among Hawks, during the regular season.)
It was no coincidence that the Hawks' best postseason game -- the series clincher in Brooklyn -- saw Teague make 13 assists without scoring a point. In the closing blowout in Cleveland, he had 17 points and one assist. By the end, the sleek offense had been rendered such a clunker that nobody looked right: Two days after being ejected, Al Horford managed two points and two rebounds.
You might say that the Hawks were done in Game 2 when Korver was lost to injury, but they were close to done already. They were in the process of falling behind 2-0 against a visitor playing without Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love. Reality had descended. More troubling was how readily the Hawks allowed it to descend.
The Hawks spent the latter half of the Eastern finals whining about an undrafted Aussie. Horford was ejected -- and deserved the ejection -- for throwing an elbow at Matthew Dellavedova in Game 3. The Dellavedova play that first irked the Hawks was the dive that led to Korver's sprained ankle, but watch the video and you'll see that Dellavedova lost the ball and was desperate to get it back. He made what every coach in both hemispheres would laud as a Hustle Play.
The worst thing about the Hawks in postseason wasn't that they didn't play very well; it was that they didn't always play with maximum effort. (When your final act is a 30-point loss, you can't say you left it all on the floor.) That's the truly sobering part: Had the No. 1 seed tried as hard in the Eastern Conference finals as Dellavedova, it might actually have won a game.
Sports on 05/28/2015