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Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Calm before the storm
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
HAWKSVILLE - This silence is nerve wracking.
Waiting around for the Hawks to kick off the 2008-09 season against their favorite Southeast Division foe (it seems like the Hawks and Orlando have played twice a week since training camp started) has been almost as painful as waiting for all of September to get training camp going.
Love ‘em or hate ‘em, there is something reassuring about the Hawks’ season kicking off.
They’ve been our punching bag the past few years. They’ve been our blankie, our favorite slippers, our lucky sweats or whatever other pet object you treat like a wet food stamp only to go back to it again and again expecting it to fit just the way we like.
If you let the Hawks tell it, though, they’re done being our victims. That playoff series with Boston last spring was just the beginning, not the end of an (the Billy Knight) era.
So our days of abusing them, even in jest, might be over.
“We’ve taken our lumps the past few years and that’s cool,” Hawks captain Joe Johnson said. “But we’re not going back to where we were. We’re not running in place any more. We’re chasing more than what we’ve accomplished so far. We’re tired of watching somebody else do what we want to do. So we’re going to fight for our spot.”
That spot Johnson mentioned is the Hawks’ spot in the Eastern Conference food chain. After being guppies for years, the Hawks believe they are moving up. Only time will tell - and what better test is there than the Hawks’ opening stretch that includes 10 of their first 16 games on the road?
At least one pundit, Scoop Jackson of ESPN.com’s Page 2, seems to believe. Jackson picked the Hawks to win the division (the only member of the Worldwide Leader’s pundit brigade to pick a team other than Orlando for the top spot).
There are cautionary tales for the Hawks to learn from, teams that experienced a little bit of postseason magic and assumed they were on the road to redemption, only to be slapped back to reality the following season.
Golden State didn’t make the playoffs a year after knocking off Dallas in the first round. And that Chicago team that everyone thought served notice by dispatching Miami two years ago bottomed out last season and are basically in yet another rebuilding mode.
So why should anyone believe the Hawks are headed for anything more than a one-hit wonder playoff trip and then back to their permanent seat at the geek table?
“The difference between us and some of these other teams is that we’ve really done this the slow and painful way and never strayed from that course,” said Hawks forward Josh Smith, the lone player remaining from the 2004-05 season, Mike Woodson’s first at the helm of this team. “That’s one of the things about doing some the hard way, it always lasts. The quick fix never lasts.”
If a 106-222 regular season mark the past four years is considered the “hard way,” the Hawks are the league champs in that category.
Few teams have endured a more dizzying array of bad draft picks (Shelden Williams anyone?), puzzling trades (everyone’s still waiting for those Gary Payton Hawks jerseys to go one sale), botched free agent signings (in their defense, Speedy Claxton did have severe injury issues and Josh Childress got a groundbreaking offer from Olympiacos), off-court drama Hollywood screenwriters couldn’t dream up (let’s not revisit the ownership squabble), stunning drama (Jason Collier’s family remains in our prayers) and just about any other crazy thing that could happen to a team during a four-year stretch fit for the Twilight Zone.
To their credit, the Hawks have come through all of it in relatively decent shape. The roster is as balanced as it’s been in years. The salary structure is solid, with the ability to get better with a few moves here and there over the next couple of seasons. They rekindled some of the love with their fans by putting on as good a home playoff show as any team (other than the Celtics) during the postseason.
Perhaps most stunning is that the Hawks gone from a punch line around the league to an actual topic of discussion in places as far away as Los Angeles, where Lakers coach Phil Jackson was actually asked about the Hawks during one of his training camp media scrums.
“Usually, it’s tough to carry that over,” Jackson said when asked if he thought the Hawks would be able to capture some of that same playoff magic this season. “It’s something that solidifies in the post-season. They have a awful lot of young guys who are all searching for pecking order there. But they got a start.”
Man, even the Zen-Master thinks the Hawks might have stumbled on to something.
Maybe times really are a changing.
