Hawks altering the superstar model

The power of one — sometimes two; OK, occasionally three — is absolute in the NBA, so the theory goes. It is the Copernican truth of this universe: Championship teams revolve around the bright sun of superstardom.

They will testify to that model in Miami, in Boston, Los Angeles and Chicago. Yes, even in San Antonio, that outpost of selflessness, where Tim Duncan may try to deny it with his shunning of the spotlight, but he and Tony Parker and even Manu Ginobili have proved a rather dazzling package deal.

So, what to make of the prospects of these Hawks, who are ripping off outrageous winning streaks while seemingly featuring a different player every night? Indeed, over one seven-game stretch earlier this season, seven Hawks led the team in scoring. When the NBA tried to decide which Hawk to credit for an undefeated January, it gave up and awarded the entire starting five the Eastern Conference Player of the Month. There is no hint of the superstar paradigm to this way of doing business.

Of course, first one must try to corral such a free-range term as superstar. And on this some will quibble.

“I think we have a few marquee guys here,” Hawks center Al Horford said. “We play as a team. Some guys could do more, but they don’t because they know we have to be better as a team.”

“I think we have great players. I think it’s important we appreciate how good our guys are,” Horford’s coach, Mike Budenholzer, said.

That established, he added: “(Playing) as a team, that’s kind of our path; that’s our mission.”

One rival coach has some pretty loose standards. “If you’re an All-Star, you’re a superstar,” the Oklahoma Thunder’s Scott Brooks contended. If that’s so then the Hawks’ locker room is overflowing with otherworldly talent. Horford, Jeff Teague and Paul Millsap all were invited to the big no-defense convention in New York.

That definition seems a little broad. After all, Wally Szczerbiak was an All Star.

So let’s proceed under the more commonly held belief that a superstar is that singular player who can carry a team on demand in the last minute of the seventh game of a series. The player who comes to town and fills your arena just as certainly as Springsteen. His is the personality so large that it does not require a whole name — MJ, Magic, Larry, Kobe, LeBron to mention a few. Atlanta had one, Dominique (Wilkins, if we must supply a surname), even if he wasn’t enough to lift the Hawks to the mountaintop. Those are the type of players for whom the postseason was made. The rarest of the rare, the Hope diamond in the Zales display case.

The Hawks clearly don’t have that guy. “There definitely are times during a game when you need someone to stand up and make a play. I think what we’re trying to do is make it possible for a lot of people to be that guy,” guard Kyle Korver said.

Might this be a season in which balance trumps name recognition and system overwhelms the individual? Even if that turns out to be an aberration, who cares, as long as your team is the aberrant one? They’ll still hold a parade for an anomaly.

There does seem to be a bit of a shift toward spreading around the responsibility. It may be worth noting here that the three division leaders with the best winning percentage at midweek — Golden State, the Hawks and Memphis — were the only three division leaders with as many as five players with a double-digit scoring average.

“You don’t have to be a dynasty team to actually pop up and get one (championship), and this could be a year where the league is ripe for that to happen,” said Jalen Rose, an ESPN analyst.

“This possibly could be a year for a team like the Atlanta Hawks to try to seize the moment,” he said.

Forever, it seemed, the Hawks were met with the proposition that they’d never win big without a big-name player. And poor Atlanta, it was the town where superstars loved to visit, maybe pick up a few pair of shoes at Friedman’s, but didn’t want to stay long enough to look over a contract. Why would any player worth his McDonald’s ad want to come here?

Then, almost overnight, the Hawks became hyper-relevant regardless of that, popularizing the faceless arts of ball movement and defense. Proudly, almost evangelistically, they began alerting the world to another way to win.

“Give me four or five really good players over one superstar. I will take that any day,” Millsap told the Washington Post.

“As in everything in life, there are lots of different ways to do things. And in basketball, or sports, there are lots of different ways to win and have success,” Budenholzer told his increasingly crowded pregame media gathering.

“Obviously, having a superstar is something that has worked for a lot of teams and organizations,” the coach added, “but I think there are a handful of examples where teams have had great success and won without the so-called superstar.”

There are a couple of examples through recent history that the Hawks can glom onto, the most recent being the 2003-04 championship Detroit Pistons. They had a big defensive presence (Ben Wallace) and some shimmering on-court intelligence (Chauncey Billups), but no star who could be judged super.

Reaching further back, how about those 1978-79 Seattle SuperSonics of a young Dennis Johnson, Gus Williams and Jack Sikma? They had seven players with double-figures scoring averages.