Often teams that lose in the Conference Finals spend the nights of their warm summers in cold sweats, lamenting what could have been. If one play, one moment had broken differently, could that have changed everything?
The 2012 Spurs are still wondering how Kendrick Perkins and Serge Ibaka went 18 for 20 in Game 4 of the Western Conference Finals that year, and Steve Nash will spend eternity cursing Jason Richardson in his nightmares, ruing his inability to box out Ron Artest at the Game 5 buzzer in 2010.
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The 2015 Atlanta Hawks won’t have that same lament, or at least they shouldn’t. They got smoked. The Hawks were outscored by 53 points in the Eastern Conference Finals and were virtually non-competitive in three out of the four games against Cleveland. A 60-win season burned in the hell of Tristan Thompson’s offensive rebounds and the Hawks were mere spectators to their demise; hovering above their carcass like the umlauts in ‘Dennis Schröder’.
For huge chunks of the season, Atlanta looked like they were going to further dispel the ‘you can’t make the Finals without a superstar’ notion as a myth. They were the bizarro-2004 Pistons, so well-oiled, drilled and cohesive that they could compensate for their lack of a singular transcendent talent. Where that Pistons team grinded with ironclad defence, the Hawks prospered with a symphony of offence.
Their violins got smashed at some stage though, and in the playoffs the Hawks tried to make Mozart out of bass guitars. It didn’t work. Atlanta’s offensive rating dropped from 106.2 and sixth in the league during regular season to a below mediocre 101.0 in the playoffs, a mark that would have ranked 22nd during the regular year, a slither in front of the woeful Lakers.
All season pundits cautioned that the Hawks would be exposed in the playoffs, that their ball movement would come to a halt and they’d have no superstar to bail them out. So, was their offensive collapse a vindication of this assessment? The short answer is ‘no’, the long answer is ‘well, yeah, sort of’.
Without an elite offensive talent, the margin for error in the playoffs is reduced to almost nothing. A superstar player is a cheat code in the post-season, someone that makes everything infinitely more navigable. Just look at the gravity that LeBron James commands on offence.
The mere presence of LeBron forces an entire defensive scheme to shift and the margins for offensive error become so much greater. When he has the ball on the perimeter you need an individual defender with the speed to stay in front of him and the strength to potentially handle him in the post. The other four defenders are perpetually cognisant of his presence, having to account for the possibility that at any given moment he could drive, shoot, pass or turn into a dragon and eat Westeros.
Defenders shade toward him, conceding passing lanes to shooters, or they stay at home and risk his wrath upon the rim. Guarding a LeBron, Steph Curry or James Harden is just an exercise in choosing the slowest, least painful way to die. These superstars are a nervous breakdown waiting to happen for the defence, and just as importantly, a structural breakdown too.
At full strength, Atlanta can almost replicate the LeBron effect across their team through discipline, selflessness and a diversity of talent. Kyle Korver’s shooting, Jeff Teague’s driving, Paul Millsap’s post-game, Al Horford’s pick and pops… the sum of those dangerous parts creates an imposing LeBron-like integer. But if that whole is divided into fractions, everything can collapse like a house of cards.
With Millsap, DeMarre Carroll and Horford banged up (or ejected), Teague and Korver slumping before the latter’s injury, and the NYPD doing Cleveland a solid by taking out Thabo Sefolosha, we saw just how rickety the foundations of that house were. It was a steep fall from 60 wins and the #1 seed to Shelvin Mack and Mike Scott taking the biggest shots of your season.
Are the Hawks proof that you can’t win without a superstar? The answer is no, largely because that idea has already been disproven. Detroit won the 2004 title with Chauncey Billups as their best player, someone who shot 41.5 per cent for his career and made one All-NBA second team. If Rasheed Wallace had spent more time with treadmills than Krispy Kremes then the 2010 Celtics likely get a few rebounds in Game 7 against the Lakers and win the title without a single player making an All-NBA team that year.
It’s not that you can’t win a title without a superstar, it’s just that the margin for error to do so becomes incredibly slim. The 2013 57-win Nuggets fell apart when Danilo Gallinari tore his ACL. The 2012 Celtics couldn’t withstand a gimpy Ray Allen hobbling his way to 10.7 points a game on 30 per cent shooting from three in the playoffs. Conversely, LeBron’s Heat could handle Chris Bosh going scoreless in Game 7 of the 2013 Finals and having Pau Gasol meant that the Lakers could win the title with Kobe Bryant going 6-24. That’s the difference.
At full strength, I think the Hawks could have made the Finals. There was a big enough sample size during the regular season to suggest that they were, at some stage at least, the real deal. You don’t back into 60 wins. At the same time though, the Cavs were even more banged up than them, missing Kevin Love and Kyrie Irving and playing with a wounded LeBron and Iman Shumpert. The difference was that Cleveland still had enough of James to make them whole, whereas the Hawks were divided into lonely, punchless fractions.
As devastatingly and abruptly as their post-season ended, there’s a strong case to be made for the Hawks to just run back the same team next season. Pre-All Star break Atlanta was clearly the second best team in the league by net rating. Horford and Millsap are stars still in their primes, Carroll is only 28, Korver’s skillset should age like a fine wine, and Teague has significant upside. The Hawks should overpay to re-sign Millsap and Carroll if they have to, those contracts will look a lot kinder once the cap skyrockets in 2016.
Yes, running it back continues to limit the Hawks’ margin of error, and in turn their title chances, to razor thin levels. But given their market and history there’s no viable alternative, and in a league where only one out of 30 teams ultimately wins, the margin of error is already exceedingly slim for everyone else too.
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