There can be no excuses now. A franchise that has never graced the Eastern Conference finals — when the team was new to Atlanta, it played in the Western Division finals twice, losing to the Lakers both times — has the clearest path imaginable.
Washington has seen its best player diagnosed with fractures in his hand and wrist. It would be a wonder — and surely a long-term health risk — if John Wall works another minute in this series. Assuming he doesn’t, there’s no way the top-seeded Hawks should lose another game, let alone three, to the Wizards.
If you’re a fan of competition, Wall’s injury is a major downer. If you’re a fan of the Hawks, you have to be smiling, albeit on the inside. (Smiling outwardly over another’s misfortune is crass.) A team for which the postseason stars never align — well, not since Bob Pettit scored 50 points for the St. Louis Hawks in the clinching Game 6 of the 1958 NBA Finals — is seeing the heavenly bodies fall, one by one, into formation.
The fifth-seeded Wizards upset Toronto, the only Eastern team to hold a winning record against the Hawks. In winning Game 1 of Round 2, Washington went a long way toward losing the series: A hard fall left the flashing Wall with as many fractures as fingers on his left hand, and the Wizards without Wall, as noted by Michael Lee of the Washington Post, are 10-40 the past five seasons. (To their credit, they played pretty well without him in Game 2 — and lost by 16.)
A series that started badly for the Hawks, who allowed the 38-win Nets to drag Round 1 to six stressful games as the Wizards were resting, could be done and dusted by Game 5. That would surely give the Hawks a chance to sit back and watch the Cavaliers and Bulls pelt one another through what will almost certainly be a seven-game set, and Cleveland already has lost Kevin Love, the third (and least) of a new tailored-for-LeBron Big Three, for the duration.
But that’s getting ahead of the game, as it were. Unless they mess up in a way no Hawks have messed up — and there aren’t many ways the Hawks haven’t messed up — this team should go where no Atlanta NBA entry has gone. The Hawks have played in the Eastern semis 15 times — four of those times, they didn’t have to win a round to get there — and only twice have they even taken a series lead. Once was in 2011, when they stole Game 1 in Chicago. (They’d lose in six.)
The other was exponentially more excruciating: In 1988 they won Game 5 in the old Boston Garden to grab a 3-2 lead. One victory from the Eastern finals, they played nervously and lost Game 6 at the old Omni by two points, their final shot taken not by Dominique Wilkins or Doc Rivers but by the right-handed Cliff Levingston, whose running lefty hook didn’t graze the rim. They played beautifully two days later in Boston but fell again, losing by two points despite Wilkins’ 47.
Only one other time have the Hawks stood one game from the Eastern finals. That was in 1979, when Hubie Brown’s 46-win team surged from a 3-1 deficit to force Game 7 against the defending champion Bullets, as the Wizards were then known. John Drew scored 24 points that Sunday in Landover, Md., and sub Terry Furlow had 21, but the Bullets won 100-94. Elvin Hayes and Bob Dandridge had 68 of the 100.
The Eastern Conference semis are where the Hawks have done their worst. (Worse even than in the draft lottery.) Counting the first two games of this series, their record in this round is 21-61. From 1997 through 2010, they lost 15 consecutive games in the Eastern semis, the average margin of defeat being 17.1 points. Twelve of the 15 losses were by double figures; the closest — the closest, mind you — was seven points.
When these Hawks dropped Game 1 to Washington at home, it was possible to fear the worst. It’s hard to imagine anything worse happening to them than what befell Wall and the Wizards. The coast is clear. It’s the Eastern finals or bust. And for this best-of-all-Hawks teams, going bust against this weakened opponent is too awful to contemplate.
