Hawks deal with greater expectations

[DrReality]

Hawks deal with greater expectationsBy Sekou Smith

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Marvin Williams knows a thing or two about dealing with great expectations.

.During his freshman season at North Carolina, it wasn’t uncommon for Williams to be greeted with a standing ovation in class the morning after a big win, even if he showed up a minute or two late.

But after a loss, complete silence the next morning. And don't dare be late. "It was chilling. The professor would call you out, ‘You're late, Mr. Williams,'" the Hawks' forward said. "You could walk in there late after a loss if you wanted to, but it wasn't going to be pretty. That's just the way it goes when people expect you to win championships. It's all or nothing."

While realistic external expectations for the Hawks this season fall something short of a championship -- the defending champion Lakers retain that distinction with training camps kicking off around the league Tuesday -- they are higher than they've been in years.

After years as a NBA afterthought, the Hawks are firmly entrenched as a playoff contender. All five starters and eight of the top nine players return from last season's Eastern Conference semifinals team, a group that piled up 47 wins en route to the franchise's best regular and postseason in over a decade.

Veteran additions Jamal Crawford, Joe Smith and Jason Collins are expected to help fill the gaps, along with rookie point guard Jeff Teague, rounding out a roster that has made a steady climb up the Eastern Conference food chain the past five seasons.

"We've made our case on the floor," said sixth-year forward Josh Smith, the longest-tenured member of the team. "We haven't been able to hype our way into anything. So anything we've earned, wins, respect or whatever else, has come the hard way. We worked for it."

The rest of the league appears to have taken notice as well.

The Hawks have seven national TV games this season, equaling their haul over the last 11 years. And when the conversation turns to contenders in the Eastern Conference, the Hawks are the first team mentioned after the holy trinity of Cleveland, Boston and Orlando.

"There's no doubt, you have the big three and then the Hawks," said former Hawks All-Star and now NBA TV analyst Steve Smith. "On paper, you see Toronto and say they've gotten better. And you see Washington's gotten healthy, so you assume they've improved. And there's Chicago, Miami and Detroit that everyone expects to be in the mix. The difference is you have to see all those other teams on the floor before you are sure. The Hawks are coming back intact. And that's something you can't overlook in this league.

"You expect them to make the playoffs now as opposed to wondering if they can overcome their deficiencies and whatever drama was lurking to try and get there."

For Williams, it's a complete turnaround from what he experienced during his rookie season with the Hawks, when he, Joe Johnson and Zaza Pachulia joined a team coming off a 13-win season.

"It's definitely different, but we did it the hard way, the right way," Williams said. "We teased the city a couple years ago with that series against Boston, and the only thing on our minds last year was getting back to the playoffs again so we could take another step. We did that by beating Miami and then playing Cleveland in the second round. Now I think this city expects us to be a contender this year, to come back and take another step. And we should expect that too.

"There's no sense of playing if you don't have those kind of expectations and if you don't believe it down in your bones that you've got a chance to be one of those special teams. We know we're one of those teams."

Just being in the conversation is a startling change for the Hawks and many of their fans, most of whom have lived through the tumult of the past decade, which included dreadful season after dreadful season and more recently the off-the-court glare of an ownership dispute, and the subsequent franchise dysfunction, that played out like a soap opera.

For lifelong Hawks fans and North Springs High graduate Matthew Scherer, it made the move to Philadelphia a difficult one, at first.

"In the past, Philly fans didn’t even mention the Hawks when they talked about the teams the Sixers might have to go through to get to the playoffs," Scherer said. "But now, all of a sudden, it's not ‘can the Hawks catch us?' It's ‘can we catch the Hawks?' It really is pretty amazing how much expectations have changed in the last year."

Further proof can be found in the spike in interest the franchise has seen at the gate and from a ticket sales standpoint.

Attendance has risen for seven straight seasons, and ticket sales growth is up 21 percent from last year, best in the NBA, according to Hawks vice president of ticket sales and services Brendan Donohue. In addition to the 18 sellouts from last season, the Hawks recorded the second-highest attendance total (a total of 686,688 fans came through the turnstiles) in team history.

Hawks coach Mike Woodson admitted that his sixth team is his best, at least on paper. The challenge is putting it all together on the floor between now and the regular season opener against Indiana on Oct. 28.

"It's really no different than how we did it last year," Woodson said. "The system is in place, in terms of how we want to play. We want to score more points, we want to rebound better and be a better defensive team. But everybody wants to do that.

"So it's really about all these new guys buying in the way Mo Evans and Flip Murray did last year. That's how you keep building on what we've started here is integrating your new players into the fabric of what's already in place and pushing for that next step."