With 15 games remaining, the Hawks stand — this according to John Hollinger’s playoff odds, as posted on ESPN.com — an 88.3 percent chance of qualifying for postseason. They lead the New York Knicks by three games for eighth place in the Eastern Conference. They trail the Washington Wizards by three games for the sixth spot.
Why 88.3 percent is close to a lock: Nine of those final 15 games will be staged at Philips Arena, where the Hawks are 20-12. That’s the fourth-best home record among Eastern teams.
Why 88.3 percent isn’t quite a lock: Ten of those 15 will be played against teams at/above .500, and the Hawks are a horrid 9-25 against such opposition.
Bottom line: Even if many among us would prefer that the Hawks missed the playoffs and landed instead in the draft lottery, probability insists that they’ll play beyond the 82nd game. Their postseason opponent stands to be either Indiana or Miami. Neither has been playing well. Both are still a darn sight better than the 31-36 Hawks.
“They’re both really good teams,” forward DeMarre Carroll said, speaking after the Hawks’ loss to sub-.500 New Orleans on Friday. “Miami is the back-to-back champ. Indiana is up-and-coming.”
Just as it would be hard for the Hawks to miss the playoffs, it would be tough for them to do better than the No. 7 or 8 seed. Rising to No. 6 would mean they would face Toronto — the Hawks beat the Raptors in overtime here Tuesday and play them in Ontario on Sunday — or Chicago (or possibly Brooklyn) in Round 1. They would stand a chance against one of those lesser lights. But against the Pacers, who eliminated the Hawks last season, or the Heat, who haven’t lost a playoff series since 2011?
Sliver-of-hope department: Indiana is 5-5 over its past 10 games, while Miami is 4-6. Much of this can be ascribed to March being the dog days of the long NBA season. Still, the Pacers went six weeks without a victory over an opponent with a winning record before beating Chicago on Friday, and Miami, with the league’s oldest roster, is showing its age.
What have the Hawks been showing? With Al Horford lost for the season, they can’t stand any more absences. The excellent forward Paul Millsap recently missed five games with a bruised knee, and the Hawks went 1-4. The great shooter Kyle Korver sat out Friday’s game with back spasms, and the Hawks lost. With a full complement of players (Horford not included), the Hawks aren’t terrible. They’re so not-terrible as to be a nuisance.
They’re good shooters, ranking 11th in field-goal percentage and fifth in 3-point percentage. They’re able and willing passers, ranking second in assists. But they’re looser with the ball than they should be — 19th in turnovers — and they’re substandard on defense (19th in opposing points, 22nd in opposing field-goal percentage). They’re truly awful at rebounding (27th in rebound percentage).
The deficiencies were evident Friday. The Hawks made 16 turnovers, off which New Orleans scored 22 points. They were outrebounded 40-34. They yielded 67 second-half points, 42 in the fourth quarter. “At the end of the third quarter and the start of the fourth, we didn’t execute on defense,” coach Mike Budenholzer said.
One thing working for the Hawks is Budenholzer. They’ve taken nicely to his offense. They get open jumpers off ball movement and layups off backdoor cuts. They rarely fail to get a good shot off dead balls. And the way we know that this rookie coach has had an effect is the quarter-by-quarter scoring: On the season, the Hawks have been outscored in the first, second and fourth quarters; they’ve outpointed the opposition by an average of 1.3 points in third. See, Budenholzer uses halftime to tweak.
It would be no great surprise if such tweaking enabled the Hawks to steal a road playoff game against Indiana or Miami — not that the Pacers’ Frank Vogel or the Heat’s Erik Spoelstra are empty chairs — or that they could take another game back at Philips. But that’s when reality figures to descend, same as it did last spring. The Pacers and Hawks were tied going back to Indianapolis for Game 5, whereupon the better side buckled down. The series ended with Game 6.
On the record, those Hawks were better than this weakened crew. (Though Budenholzer represents an upgrade over Larry Drew.) If a team with Millsap, Korver and Jeff Teague cannot be completely dismissed, neither should we expect a Round 1 against Indiana or Miami to last beyond six games.
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