A year ago this time both Hawks coach Mike Woodson and his Boston counterpart Doc Rivers were singing the blues.

Who could blame them?

Their teams, two of the youngest in the NBA, had combined for a jaw-dropping 108 losses and neither coach was guaranteed any relief; the draft was still weeks off when Woodson and Rivers saw each other at a volleyball tournament in Florida in which their daughters were playing.

"It's funny, he was just like me," Woodson said Friday after his team wrapped up their preparations for tonight's Game 3 showdown with the Rivers' Celtics, who own a 2-0 lead over the Hawks in their Eastern Conference playoff series. "You've got a young team and you realize how tough it is to win at a high level like that. Not that we were running from it, because you realize what you're trying to build. But it's tough."

Rivers isn't singing anything but happy songs these days, what with the Celtics' summer of blockbuster, franchise-changing trades that helped engineer one of the greatest reversals of fortune the league has seen.

The Hawks went from 13 to 37 victories in four years. The Celtics went from 24 to a league-best 66 in a year, the greatest single-season turnaround in league history.

One team put its future on layaway while the other paid cash, up front.

"There's no question that when you want to make major moves in this league you can make them," said Hawks captain and All-Star Joe Johnson, "if you're willing to take the risk's that come with it. They shook their franchise up from top to bottom and paid the price to bring in some big-name veterans, and now the rest of us have to deal with these guys, for a least the foreseeable future."

The contrasting methods in building, or rebuilding if you will, couldn't be more extreme. While the Hawks have chosen the oft-times painful approach of tearing down and rebuilding via the draft, the Celtics chose a more radical go-for-broke approach.

Al Horford and Acie Law IV were the Hawks' summer prizes, two lottery picks snagged in the 2007 draft. Rivers got All-Stars Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen in trades — the former in a five-player, two-draft pick blockbuster that stands as the biggest NBA trade for one player — to go with All-Star forward Paul Pierce.

"Hey," Woodson said, "they got a deal done. Plain and simple. And when you make major moves like that, they've got to work. And if they don't work, somebody's tail is on the line. But in their case it's panned out. It's panned out big time."

The Celtics' Big Three all made the Eastern Conference All-Star team. Garnett has won the Defensive Player of the Year award and is a contender for MVP. Rivers is a strong candidate for Coach of the Year, and Celtics' general manager Danny Ainge is the clubhouse leader for Executive of the Year; he also added veterans Sam Cassell and P.J. Brown to the roster after the February trade deadline.

The Hawks, meanwhile, aren't certain of anything other than the two home playoff games they'll host Saturday night and Monday.

Woodson's job status remains a mystery, as does that of his boss, general manager Billy Knight. The Hawks' entire basketball-operations staff is operating on contracts that end June 30.

Had they opted for a similar cash-on-delivery plan, there might not be so many questions that need to be answered.

"We certainly have had conversations throughout these years we've been building to take that bunny hop and certainly had talks with teams about acquiring a dominant player [like Garnett], and obviously none of them have worked out," Knight said.

"And we're not adverse to talking about doing something that would drastically improve us. ... For us, it hasn't been worked out yet and hasn't come to fruition the way it has for Boston. It worked out well for them at that particular time that they were able to take a giant step like that. Believe me, if we could have done something like that, maybe we would have."

Last offseason, the Hawks were linked to rumors involving Garnett, Pau Gasol, Amare Stoudemire and other big-time players believed to be on the trading block at one time or another during the summer. In the end, though, they chose to go into training camp with the same cast they had last season, along with Horford and Law.

The Hawks saved themselves from the sticker shock of adding one or two additional All-Stars — the Celtics' $56.1 million price tag for Garnett, Pierce and Allen is just about equal to the Hawks' entire payroll of $56.2 million — but they also squeaked into the playoffs in the eighth and final spot.

The Celtics paid to reach the top, staring down the risk and then reaping the reward.

"There's always a risk that it won't work," Knight said of all the major deals that have gone down since last summer. "But you know that the players that were involved, the type of people they are, being in that situation, you know those were deals that probably were going to work and were worth doing."