It’s not about talent. Cleveland may have the best player in this series, and this league, and this corner of the universe, but that’s not why the Hawks found themselves down by 20 points in the third quarter of a home playoff game Friday night, and it’s certainly not why they’ve lost the first two games of this maiden voyage to the Eastern Conference finals.
They look like they have nothing left.
Their legs don’t move. The ball doesn’t move. They lose a game, tell themselves and everybody else they need to play better, smarter and with more effort, but those words don’t penetrate their limbs or craniums.
Bad sign.
“It burns man. It burns,” Kent Bazemore said late Friday night after the Hawks’ 94-82 loss to Cleveland. “It makes you angry to get your butt kicked like that. Especially this time of the year. And at home. As a man, you’ve got to have the pride to go out there and stand up for yourself in front of your home fans and put up a bigger fight than that.”
Because they didn’t.
There is a line between quitting and what happened Friday night. Hawks’ players didn’t quit. They just appeared to hit a wall, physically and mentally, and gave a weak attempt to fight through it. That’s not to diminish the accomplishments of LeBron James (30 points, nine rebounds, 11 assists), Tristan Thompson (16 rebounds, two blocks) or the Cavaliers in general. But the Hawks’ just didn’t put up much resistance.
This a team running on fumes, and the prospects for improvement took a hit Saturday. It was announced that Kyle Korver suffered a serious ankle sprain Friday and is out for the remainder of the postseason, which in the Hawks’ case may be only two more games, anyway.
“Injuries are such a big part of our league and a big part of the playoffs,” Hawks coach Mike Budenholzer said. “Everybody has to deal with them and we’re not any different. You have to get your mind right. The guys who are healthy and available have to get ready to go play a basketball game.”
The problem being: The Hawks were coming off a Game 1 loss, faced a relative must-win situation in Game 2 and were humiliated by an opponent missing its starting point guard (Kyrie Irving) and starting power forward (Kevin Love).
DeMarre Carroll played on a bad knee, and looked like it. Paul Millsap hasn’t been the same since a late-season shoulder injury. Jeff Teague is playing on a wonky ankle. Thabo Sefolosha — disabled by New York police.
The training staff is running low on ice and duct tape.
If this is the breakdown moment, there were warning signs. The Hawks’ inconsistent play down the stretch of the season and in the first two rounds of the playoffs suggested the problem was more than a sudden lack of rhythm or forgetting to move the ball.
Fatigue affects everything. It leads one of the NBA’s best shooting teams to suddenly go 10-for-49 (20.4 percent) from outside the 3-point arc in the first two games of this series. The Hawks are shooting 32.6 percent in 3-pointers in the playoffs after ranking second during the season at 38 percent.
Korver: 49.2 percent in the regular season, 39.7 percent in the Brooklyn playoff series, 30.8 percent (16-for-52) in the eight games that followed.
The Hawks were 33-2 in one stretch this season. That level of domination never was expected in the playoffs, but the first two playoff series against Brooklyn and Washington were struggles.
This team has provided far more success and entertainment than anybody anticipated. So this isn’t the time for a verbal dismembering. It’s more of a painful reality check.
When asked about the team’s offensive regression in the playoffs, Al Horford said, “In a playoff series, teams get to study their opponents, and our playoffs have been a grind. The biggest difference for us is we have to know who we are. We need to move the ball. There’s no way around it. … If we’re not moving the ball we’re not giving ourselves much of a chance.”
Is fatigue playing a role?
“That’s a possibility. But we’re in this position and we have to be able to push through that. It’s definitely challenging. I’m not going to make excuses, but that definitely plays a factor.”
They’re running low on healthy bodies. And hope.
