This blog has moved! Yes, already!
As of Thursday, Feb. 12, this little blog has relocated to a new home on AJC.com. It’s the same newspaper, the same Web site and the same writer (feel free to groan) — there’s just a new URL.
New features: Bigger type, more graphics, comments that load 10 times faster and a larger and more recent photo that makes me look pretty doggone old. I think you’ll like it (the blog, not the photo). But I am, as we know too well, often wrong.
Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > May > 03
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Hawks a dangerous team in Game 7
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
(Editor’s note: Mark Bradley will be blogging live during Sunday’s Game 7 from courtside in Boston. Follow his comments as the game unfolds and provide your own thoughts as you watch on TV.)
Boston — Game 6, start of the fourth quarter, Hawks down three: The Celtics knock the ball from Mike Bibby, and the possession seems a botch. But Bibby regains the orb and shovels it to Marvin Williams, the Marvin Williams who has never been Chris Paul and who has rarely been the slightest bit assertive.
And Marvin Williams, wonder of wonders, ducks his head and barges into the lane and lifts an off-balance floater that nonetheless bears the stamp of authority, and the shot drops and a guy sitting half an arena away says to himself, “They’re gonna win.”
The gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe had a song, “Strange Things Happening Every Day.” With the Hawks, stranger things happen every minute. Marvin gets bold and scores 18 points on a night when Joe Johnson manages but two in the first 30 minutes. Josh Childress flies after a Bibby miss at the tail of the third quarter, and the tip hops on the rim once … twice … and drops through after the buzzer.
Al Horford doesn’t play in the second quarter, and the Hawks outscore the NBA’s best team 29-18, getting a massive boost from Zaza Pachulia, recently described in this space as the worst player in the world. What does it say when Zaza, who did next to nothing all season, leaves an imprint on the regal C’s by staring down Kevin Garnett in Game 3 and then scoring nine vital points in Game 6?
And what does it say when the Celtics, inside the final 70 seconds, defend Johnson expertly, James Posey pressuring every dribble and the 6-foot-11 Garnett, the league’s Defensive Player of the Year, swooping as Johnson rises to shoot … and still this killing 3-pointer sails true?
It says the Celtics should be very afraid.
In all of sports, there’s nothing so dangerous as a team that by all rights shouldn’t belong but has convinced itself otherwise. Think of the Braves in September of 1991. Think of the Georgia Bulldogs in the SEC tournament. Now think of these Hawks, 37-45 in the regular season but 3-3 against the No. 1 seed in the crucible of postseason play. Think of a team that trailed the Lakers by 41 points in a first half in February scoring on 17 consecutive possessions in May.
“We put it on them to stop us,” Josh Childress said after Game 6, “and they couldn’t do it.”
A franchise that did little right for a decade is doing everything expertly. Mike Woodson is mixing and matching his lineups — he deployed Horford and Pachulia as a tandem in Game 6 and has been using Childress at point guard and has even given Solomon Jones and Acie Law IV key minutes — in an inspired way. Philips Arena, long a friendly venue for visitors, has become a fortress. And the city that made a sport of lampooning the Hawks watches now with equal parts admiration and disbelief. Are these really our blundering Hawks? And do they have any chance in Game 7?
The answers: Yes and yes.
The Celtics will be pilloried forever if they lose Sunday. In the first three games here, the Hawks never gave themselves a chance to make the Green gag. (They haven’t yet won a quarter in TD Banknorth Garden, going 0-for-12.) Should they keep it close today — the belief is that they will — the panic reflex will be triggered in the home side, which was supposed to have won this series a week ago.
In the grand scheme, the Hawks have won already. They have done in one week what they couldn’t do in a decade of wheel-spinning. They’ve become a presence. They’re no longer the Hawks of J.R. Rider and Cal Bowdler, the Hawks who couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time; these are the Hawks who have taken the mighty Celtics to the limit, who have risen to their long-deferred moment and bounded beyond.
They’ve taken us on one wild ride, and nothing says it has to end just yet. The Hawks might just pull this off, parquet or no parquet. Strange things are happening every day.
Permalink | Comments (52) | Post your comment | Categories: Hawks/NBA
Hawks stand on cusp of history
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Are you believing this?
You and I mightn’t be. The snooty Celtics surely aren’t. But the Hawks, for reasons unknown and unknowable, act as if they aren’t one bit surprised.
They’re not surprised at having felled the NBA’s best team three times in seven days. They’re not stunned that this psycho series is headed for a Game 7 on Sunday. They’re shocking the world, but they’re not shocked.
“We aren’t the ones who doubted,” Mike Bibby said. “You guys [the media] doubted.”
“Every single person in this locker room,” Josh Childress said, “knew how good we are.”
It was midway through the third quarter of Friday’s Game 6 when the realization began to take hold: The Hawks haven’t just caught a bolt of lightning — they’ve become lightning itself. How else to describe the dizzying sensation of seeing the playoff qualifier with the worst record stare into the face of the league’s stoutest defensive club and score on …
Are you believing this?
Seventeen consecutive possessions.
Seventeen possessions over eight astonishing minutes that saw the Hawks pull from eight points down to two ahead. Boston couldn’t stop them. If they missed a shot, they seized the rebound and scored on a follow. The regal C’s, possessor of a basketball tradition like no other, couldn’t do one single thing to blunt an opponent it was supposed to sweep.
What we’ve seen this last week is a team that has wandered long in the desert find itself at sudden last. What we saw Friday night in a frothing Philips Arena was the No. 8 seed look into the widening eyes of the overwhelming favorite and see weakness and fear.
Like the posse in pursuit of Butch and Sundance — or, if you’re of a more literary bent, Inspector Javert on the heels of Jean Valjean — the newly indomitable Hawks keep coming. And the wear is clearly showing on the older Celtics, who were, after all, supposed to have won this thing in a canter.
They nursed a lead for three quarters in Game 6, but in the end they came unstuck again. Paul Pierce, their captain and leading scorer, fouled out with 4:44 left and got a technical to boot. Even when Boston had a chance to tie inside the final seven seconds, Rajon Rondo seemed not to know how to count. He dribbled forever and finally took a shot that had less chance than Cliff Levingston’s running lefty hook had for the Hawks in that Game 6 against the Celtics 20 years ago.
That Game 6, and the subsequent epic Game 7 loss, marked the crest of the high-bounding Hawks of Dominique and Doc and Spud, the team that could get so far and no further. These new Hawks seem not to recognize any limitations. They say they’ve known all along how good they were, but how could they have known?
“We work hard like everybody else,” Childress said, “and now preparation is meeting opportunity. We’ve got confidence, and with a young team confidence can be a blessing and a curse. Once we get to thinking we can do anything, we do do anything.”
In one careening week a feckless franchise has erased a decade of failure. People who wouldn’t be caught dead at a Hawks game are now packing the arena and wearing white “Shock The World” T-shirts and screaming so loud as to unnerve a visitor that figured it had seen and heard everything.
“It’s definitely a dream,” Josh Smith said. “I was watching ESPN today and people were saying we were going to get knocked out today. We like to keep proving people wrong.”
They’ll get another chance Sunday in Boston. Having already rocked the basketball realm, they stand now on the cusp of history. This was supposed to be the biggest mismatch of the postseason, but these amazing Hawks stand one game from making it the biggest NBA upset ever.
We mightn’t be believing this, but they are. They absolutely are.
Permalink | Comments (111) | Post your comment | Categories: Hawks/NBA
