AJC > Sports > Hawks > Blog > Archives > 2008 > December > 12
Friday, December 12, 2008
Heatin’ up
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
MIAMI - Whatever cushion the Hawks think they built up with their hot start is quickly coming unraveled with what could be their latest four-game swoon of this still young season - lose to the Fighting Dwyane Wade’s here tonight and that’s two four-game losing streaks in the span of seven weeks.
That seems highly unusual for a winning team in the NBA.
That seems highly unusual for a team that has, for the most part, played some pretty complete basketball throughout the fist month and a half of this season.
Yet the Hawks are stuck in this polarizing matrix where they can’t seem to find the consistency that carried them earlier this season.
They’re going to face a player tonight in Wade that won’t allow his team’s focus to waiver the way the Hawks has of late.
Wade, who aside from LeBron James (Saturday’s dinner date at Philips Arena) is playing as well as any player on the planet right now, simply won’t allow it.
If the Hawks come skipping out on that floor tonight and take a few punches early, they’ll be on their backs quickly.
While the Wade’s team isn’t the most talented, they play beautifully off of their leader. And they’ll follow his lead if he smells blood early and tries to the choke the Hawks out before halftime.
These teams understand that the Hawks are capable of turning up the tempo whenever they get ready to (the Mavericks, Spurs and Rockets all saw it). If you let the Hawks get up a head of steam, it’ll be a long night. Because when they’re playing well, they’ve got the athletes, the shooters and the ability to run you off the floor (you might remember that from early last month when they were doing it routinely).
The common denominator during that period, however, was community basketball. Everyone was involved in the offense, the defense was swarming and the energy level was off the charts.
Somewhere in the time since then all three of those things have gone missing, sometimes all three have gone missing at the same time (the perfect recipe for disaster).
The Hawks can’t afford that type of power outage going forward. The season’s taken a crucial turn. The next three weeks leads into the three weeks after that and so and so forth.
Stumble now and see how long it takes to get up.
