AJC > Sports > Hawks > Blog > Archives > 2008 > March > 05
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Whiplash!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
NEW ORLEANS - Are the Warriors still running?
I think I suffered a mild case of whiplash watching them race up and down the floor at Philips Arena in their win over the Hawks.
They never slowed down Tuesday night. There was a plastic container full of 5-hour energy in their locker room before the game. And apparently they are overdosing on the stuff. Because they ran the Hawks off the floor like nothing I’ve seen.
I thought Stephen Jackson summed it up best when he said the Warriors “play at that pace in their sleep.”
The Dallas Mavericks, when they were the best team in the regular season, couldn’t beat the Warriors at that run-n-gun game in a first-round playoff series. So I figured the Hawks would have a hard time doing it (I know they’d beaten the Warriors four straight times, but that was before they were in the late-season throws of a Western Conference playoff chase).
There were plenty of hard lessons to be learned from this game for the Hawks, mainly that it’s not a bad thing to empty your bench most nights (some dude named C.J. Watson got into the game for the Warriors. I honestly had never heard of the cat. I had to google him to find out the details).
The Hawks tried to slow things down in the second half in a futile attempt to work the Warriors over inside with their post-up game. Huge mistake. But one that should provide the Hawks a blueprint for how they can work against teams that don’t want to run with them (not the Hornets tonight, though, because Chris Paul will shred the Hawks if they try and run with them).
What I took most from this game is that the Warriors played their big guns big minutes but they didn’t rely on them to carry the offense the entire time. The Hawks have become far too reliant on Joe Johnson over the past two years and now they’re going to him when they don’t always have to. Sure, he was on fire in the first half Tuesday, but going to him relentlessly in the second half played right into the Warriors’ plans.
That allowed them to key on one guy on the defensive end and then unleash their demons on the Hawks in transition. And notice that nobody has priority over anyone else with the Warriors. Baron Davis has the same freedom to freelance as Stephen Jackson or Monta Ellis.
It makes it virtually impossible to design a defense to shut the Warriors down. The Hawks might want to take some notes so they can open their offense up in ways like that.
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