The Hawks had four starters who played in the All-Star game this year, and the other guy is the one who leads them in scoring in the playoffs. There are times when statistical analysis can be misleading and pointless, and then there are times when it hits you over the head like one of those oversized cartoon mallets.
“Yeah, I think other teams look at me last,” DeMarre Carroll said. “We’ve got four All-Stars, and I’m just known as the defensive catalyst. That kind of allows me to slip in under the radar, and that’s fine with me.”
Carroll is a microcosm of this Hawks team. They slipped under everybody’s radar this season to go 60-22. They’ve won two rounds of playoffs for the first time since the pre-alley-oop days of 1958, when dinosaurs and set-shooters roamed the earth.
The Eastern Conference playoffs open Wednesday night. The Hawks face LeBron James and less significant Cavaliers.
I’m not suggesting Kyrie Irving or anybody else awarded a Cleveland uniform for this season can’t play. But if you take away LeBron James, you are left with an amusement: Godzilla without a head.
If the Hawks lost a starter, they probably would mutate like a regenerating member of the animal kingdom — a salamander, a compost worm, a fiction-writing New England Patriots attorney.
The Hawks have had four leading scorers in their eight playoff wins. DeMarre Carroll, who generally is considered their fifth scoring option after Paul Millsap, Jeff Teague, Al Horford and Kyle Korver — leads them in playoff scoring at 17.1 points per game.
Millsap, Teague, Horford, Korver and Dennis Schroder are averaging between 10.1 and 15.7 points per game. It’s basketball socialism.
This isn’t a new story line for the Hawks. But one significant thing changes in the Eastern Conference finals: They’re going against the world’s greatest player. The default position of most media and fans nationally is that the Hawks’ sum won’t be greater than one LeBron because, well, that just wouldn’t be good for TV ratings.
“It feels like we’ve been on trial for a while,” Korver said. “We’ve been getting asked this question a lot. We’re not here trying to sell the world. This is just who we are, and this is how we have to play to win. This gives us our best chance of winning.”
The Cavaliers have something the Hawks don’t: a player who will always get the ball at the end of the game, even when his misguided coach believes it’s a good idea to call a play for somebody else.
But the Hawks had three different heroes down the stretch in consecutive wins over Washington in the second round — an aggressive and driving Teague in Game 4 with 26 points and eight assists; a physical Horford in Game 5 with 23 points, 11 rebounds, five blocks and a put-back in the final second to win it; a slashing Carroll in the clinching Game 6, twice being set up for layups by Teague down the stretch.
Korver isn’t a fan of the word “heroes.” He repeated it in mocking tones when it was used in a question the other day to describe the Hawks’ changing cast of … (that word).
“There’s only so many elite superstars,” he said. “The rest of us have to figure out how to win. This is how we do it. We feel like this is a good way to play, a fun way to play. This is who we are. We’ve all taken turns taking shots at the end, and it’s probably going to continue to be that way, obviously.”
Carroll likens his play to a “junkyard dog,” which is good because he’s expected to be the primary defender against James and may need to resort to biting his ankles. If Carroll is fatigued and his offensive numbers take a hit, there will be a reason.
“What do you think of when you think of a junkyard dog?” Carroll said. “You don’t think of anything all pretty. You think of a junkyard. Dirt. My uncle always told me, ‘Don’t play like you have a chip on your shoulder. Play like you have a log on your shoulder.’ That’s what I do. I love the challenge. I love opportunities.”
The Hawks have both — challenge and opportunity. They’ve been quieting skeptics for seven months. What’s another round?
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