McMillan’s lifted the Hawks, now can they lift him to playoff win?

“I don’t get into what’s written because I don’t read it,” he said, adopting an age-old coach’s tact. “Last year that was the Pacers. I’ve been with the Hawks now for a season. I don’t look back on stuff like that,” he said. “My focus is on the opportunity that we have going into this year’s team.”

The problem here is that numbers often fail to account for the nuances.

His Pacers teams, after all, would face the considerable obstacle of LeBron James early in his tenure. They were swept by James’ Cleveland team in 2017, losing four games by a combined 16 points. All three of his Pacers playoff wins came against those same Cavs the next year, falling just one short, after star Paul George had leveraged his way out of town.

The sweeps the following two seasons – once to Boston, then to Miami – had major injury components. Leading scorer Victor Oladipo missed the end of the ’19 season and still wasn’t right while in the bubble of 2020, where the Pacers also were without All-Star big man Domantas Sabonis. Those mitigations weren’t enough for Indiana, which fired a coach with a 183-136 regular-season record there. (Career, he is 688-599 in the regular season – good, proud work).

It is important to note that his postseason record with the Hawks is still 0-0. Although, they are underdogs to the fourth-seeded Knicks, who swept the Hawks in three regular-season games. So, yes, another uphill assignment for McMillan.

The Hawks enter their first postseason since 2017 accompanied by a tricky little hypothetical question: Would they be here at all had they not made the mid-course correction of replacing Lloyd Pierce with McMillan?

Out of respect to Pierce, no one answers that directly. But as Bogdan Bogdanovic, the free agent who got healthy and got real relevant under McMillan’s watch put it, “You see the results. You can’t hide anything on the court, you can’t hide nothing. The coaching was a crucial part of our success.

“There are a lot of teams talented in the league, but they are not under control. He did that. He put a little control into this team.”

No hiding this: The Hawks were 14-20 when Pierce was let go at the beginning of March. And they are 27-11 since moving McMillan in as the interim replacement. The before-and-after picture is startling.

A team that continually fell back in the fourth quarter began finishing with panache, behind McMillan’s daily reminder of, “Believe.”

He’s a coach who considers the relationship with the point guard to be paramount – “You are connected with your entire team, but your guards, those are the guys that you want to have that special connection with,” McMillan said this week. “They need to understand how we need to play and make sure they establish that on both ends of the floor.” Toward that end, most important, he seems to have the ear of Trae Young.

General manager Travis Schlenk pointed to the value of McMillan’s strong and consistent messaging, his experience lending his words added credibility. As well as some effective on-court tweaks – “Changing some of the plays to fit some of our players’ skill sets a little bit better,” as the GM put it.

“It really got guys confident, got guys believing in what we were trying to do,” Schlenk said. Um, that would seem to be pretty much a coach’s basic duty.

Forward John Collins mentioned another McMillan mantra: Calm, cool and connected. “Those three words,” Collins said, “are how we’re supposed to attack the game, how we’re supposed to approach it every day when we come to the gym.”

Forward De’Andre Hunter found in McMillan a coach he could connect with on multiple levels. “I feel that’s the best thing for me – he’s genuine, easy to talk to, about basketball or anything,” he said.

“I learned a lot of things from Nate, but one I will always remember: Don’t settle. To never settle for a shot, for a drive, for a defensive possession, for anything. To try to be 100% every time. Don’t relax and play soft,” Bogdanovic said.

It has been a beautiful 38-game relationship. And now they are taking it to the next level, where the bulk of this young team has never been.

All the good and the bad of McMillan’s playoff experience will come into play now. That predates his work as a coach, back to when there was NBA basketball in Seattle and one ultimate team-oriented guard was so popular there he was known as Mr. Sonic. McMillan played in his first playoff game in 1987, 11 years before Trae Young was born.

Back then, he was a noted practitioner of the more hands-on style of defense, a two-time member of the NBA all-defensive team. McMillan allowed himself a moment this week to think about how he would have guarded Young under those rules. And smiled. “I’m going to beat him up, I need to grab him,” he said. “To think that I can keep this waterbug in front of me with his range – nah. I mean you got to guard this guy when he crosses half court.”

But some of the traits of toughness he brought to the floor are timeless. They still relate to modern ball. They still would translate well to any given postseason.

McMillan proudly self-scouts McMillan, circa 1986-98: “A guy who put his nose in everything. My focus was as the guy that defended, organized the team, a guy who sacrificed some things to make that team connected out there.

“I wasn’t a guy who pouted about minutes or rotation or shots or points or any of that (he averaged 5.9 points per game yet was so valuable in so many other ways he lasted 12 seasons with the same team).

“Defense was my strength, and I tried to stay with that. Assisting was another (6.1 per game), playing with the ball and getting the ball to our scorers. Really a glue guy, that coach on the floor that was connected to the head coach.”

Schlenk takes no credit for bringing McMillan onboard as an assistant. That was all Pierce, he said, the young coach looking for an experienced voice in his right ear, one who sowed the seed of his own replacement. “I didn’t meet Nate until he was already here as an assistant coach,” the GM said.

McMillan, 56, reportedly was hesitant about taking over for the man who brought him on and would have been fine just sitting out this season decompressing from two nearly unbroken decades working the bench.

Yet here he finds himself involved in a particularly long job interview and hip deep in another postseason. There has been no discussion of making his Hawks job more lasting, Schlenk said. Nor does he say how the Hawks postseason performance will reflect on McMillan’s status.

“To this point, short of me telling him he’s doing a great job, we haven’t had any in-depth conversations,” Schlenk said. “That’s the way Nate wants to do it as well.”

To recap: The past doesn’t seem to matter, and the future doesn’t seem pressing. All that leaves is the now -- and another dive into the rip currents of the playoffs.