Welp, Atlanta is done like dinner. All in all, a disappointing series. But an underrated performance by Coach Blatt. He's done a lot to get Cleveland working defensively.
Yeah, Blatt's had an extremely good showing this postseason. I think Ty Lue has also been a big part of it. To a lot of basketball insiders, the Cavs coaching staff has spent the playoffs dispelling a lot of the "well it's just LeBron" talk from late in the regular season.
I've been telling people at work that the Hawks were an aberration, a total fluke occurrence caused by the lack of talent in the east and the Hawks just slipped into power void the Cavs didn't fill till they got the team in ship shape. Who wants to bet that Atlanta misses the playoffs next year?
Nah. The Hawks are a good team, they just had a couple of problems.
The biggest issue is that Budenholzer is an excellent system coach - great at training up his guys to execute in a certain way. He created an extremely good, beautiful offense during the regular season. That's got value; it's got a
lot of value. You don't stumble into the 1 seed in an entire conference by accident. That win streak wasn't an accident either. But you don't need to be a good in-game tactician in the regular season, when everybody plays everybody and few teams have the ability to develop specific game plans for specific opponents. In the playoffs, on the other hand, any potential weakness is ruthlessly exposed by opposing scouts, assistants, and coaches. Teams live and die by in-series and in-game adjustments. The Cavs were able to adjust their game plan appropriately to the Hawks, and the Hawks weren't able to do the same to the Cavs.
That doesn't undervalue the system that the Hawks built, nor does it undervalue the players that they have. Korver, Carroll, Teague, Millsap, and Horford are a fantastic starting five, and used properly they can tear up more or less any defense. They just needed to adjust to the Cavs better.
There was also a fair amount of luck involved in the Cavs wins. LeBron's post-up game was remarkable for a number of reasons: 1. nobody else in the league could have executed it at the level he did with the Hawks banging with him down low every play, 2. he was utterly exhausted by it (remember how Game 3 ended?) and played great anyway, and 3. when he kicked out to his teammates, they were unusually efficient at converting their threes. Smith, Delly, and Shump weren't exactly lights-out, but they were reasonably close, and that's a lot better at three-shooting than they'd been for most of the season (or their careers, frankly). On the other side of the ball, the Hawks simply could not convert open three-point looks. For the series, they shot, like, 30% from 3 with no defenders within 4 feet. That's ridiculous, and it's nothing like the way they performed for most of the season (to put it lightly).
And finally, the Hawks bench was atrocious. The playoffs are where that stuff gets exposed; the Clippers were an even more egregious example, but the Hawks weren't far off. When the likes of Kent Bazemore are playing big minutes in the Eastern Finals, something's wrong. Most of the fault for that lies with Atlanta's front office (although putting together that starting five was impressive so you kind of have to give them a bit of a pass), but a significant amount lies with other people. Like the NYPD, who broke Thabo Sefolosha's leg. No big deal, he was just their
only decent bench player, a valuable three-and-D contributor who'd seen lots of playoff minutes with the Thunder. Who else was there? Schröder was a horrendous shooter and indifferent on defense, Antic couldn't defend anybody in the post (or post up himself) which got
badly exposed by LeBron, and...Mike Scott? Shelvin Mack? Mike Muscala?
Really?
Anyway, all that stuff is fixable. I'd be surprised if these Hawks completely fell apart next year, especially in this tire fire of an Eastern Conference. Something really bizarre would have to happen.
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