As night fell on our city, we Atlantans could be forgiven for pinching ourselves. We’ve seen some big doings here — five World Series, four Final Fours, two Super Bowls, one Olympiad — but this was new. The NBA’s Eastern Conference finals had come to the A-T-L, and the only way that happens is for the local team to have become good enough to play for the Eastern Conference title.
Our local team had. Overcoming decades of civic indifference and years of clownish ownership, the Hawks had gotten where they’d never been. Wednesday’s Game 1 had a bit of the feel of Game 3 of the 1991 World Series, the feeling that something we weren’t sure we’d ever see had come, finally and blissfully, to pass.
As for the game itself: Can we talk about something else?
The Hawks started well enough. Then they came unstuck. (We’ve seen that before in big games from various Atlanta teams, have we not.) They watched Cleveland sub J.R. Smith — and “watch” is proper verb; no defender did anything to trouble him — sink eight 3-point shots and score 28 points in 35 minutes. Their pace-and-space offense, often a thing of beauty, blew a gasket. They made 61.1 percent of their shots in the first quarter; they made 39 percent thereafter.
For the second consecutive series, the Hawks yielded homecourt advantage in Game 1, which is as fast as it can be ceded. They managed to overcome Washington by winning four of the next five, but John Wall didn’t play in three of those. Spotting Cleveland a 1-nil lead is far more problematic, and the way the Cavaliers composed themselves Wednesday — they were the aggressor from the second quarter on — was mightily impressive.
To their credit, the Hawks made another late run, this one fashioned after DeMarre Carroll, the man mostly charged with guarding LeBron James, went down with a knee injury with 4:59 to play. And it was James who drove past Paul Millsap for the clinching dunk. The final score was 97-89.
Cleveland’s defense plan appeared to be: Let Jeff Teague have all he can eat. The point guard scored 27 points but made only four assists — the Hawks as a team had just 19 — and the longer it went the more the Hawks’ offense became one rushed jumper after another, and this isn’t a team that usually rushes jumpers.
Ahead 26-20 after one quarter, the Hawks were tied at the half and down by seven after three. That’s when Smith, who’d already scored 19 points, went nuts. Cleveland’s first four possessions of the fourth quarter: Smith trey, Smith trey, Smith lob to Tristan Thompson for a dunk, Smith trey. That pushed the lead to 18 points. The Hawks would slice it to four, but then LeBron flashed past Millsap and Game 1 was gone.
He was shooting over Kyle Korver and Kent Bazemore and whomever the Hawks tried to run at him, but it’s hard to run two men at J.R. Smith if James is on the court. We’ve seen Korver do similar things to opponents (though not recently); this night we saw Korver’s team get Korver’ed.
Asked what the Cavs did to spring Smith, coach David Blatt said: “We got him the ball. People who know him know that when he gets hot, he gets smokin’ hot.”
Said Hawks coach Mike Budenholzer: “He did make a handful of tough shots.”
By way of contrast, Budenzholzer’s team made it hard on itself. Korver made two treys but had the same trouble shaking Iman Shumpert that he’d had against Washington’s Bradley Beal. Millsap missed eight of 11 shots. Dennis Schroder missed eight of 10. Between them, point guards Teague and Schroder took 34 of the Hawks’ 77 shots, which is too many if your intent is to share the ball.
Budenholzer: “We’ll go back and look at the film. Sometimes things aren’t as bad as you think they are; sometimes they are.”
On that hazy note, Game 1 of the Eastern Conference finals slipped into history. A shimmering night wound up a blob, and Carroll’s injury — Budenholzer called it a knee sprain and said an MRI would be taken Thursday — cast a chill over everything.
In sum, it was a lousy game for the local club, but it was only one game. Better not lose Game 2, though.
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