Official Game Thread: Wizards at Hawks

[lethalweapon3]

“Quinning is a Habit.”

 

Friends that know me best would tell you that I have low standards. On multiple fronts. But maybe no more than that as an Atlanta Sports fan. Maybe.

With that said, I warmly welcome Quin Snyder to our Atlanta Hawks Basketball Club. Hi, Coach!

Your desk with the ergonomic chair is over here, the water fountain’s around the corner to the left. Men’s powder room is to the right, K-Cups are in the break room a few doors down the hall.

First order of business on the to-do list is to win us another Southeast Division title. Here’s your clipboard, and your stapler. Just holler if you need anything else!

As an everyday Atlantan, I don’t rattle much over the brass ring of championship contention. Get me in the vicinity, repeatedly, and let the chips fall where they may, and my cardiologist gets time to hang out with the Maytag repairman. The best way of getting me content, as a Hawks fan, is being able to say, no matter how filthy the Dirty South Division gets, we’re the cleanest of the bunch.

That’s not enough in this day and age to secure a first-round homecourt advantage in the NBA Playoffs. For now, though, another Play-In hosting or two would go a long way to extract the bitter out of the sweet.

Nate McMillan will always hold a place, however special, in Hawk fans hearts. That’s because he will always have a spot on our consolidated division championships banner in State Farm Arena. 2020-21, Atlanta Hawks, champions of Pat Riley’s Southeast Division.

Contrast and compare the fates of the Hawks and their divisional opponents tonight, the long-awaited Washington Wizards (7:30 PM Eastern, Bally Sports Southeast and 92.9 FM in ATL, NBC Sports Washington). Roughly a decade of blather about The Best Backcourt in The East, penciled in year-over-year as a championship contender throughout the Teens due to the presence of Bradley Beal and, at the time, John Wall.

What does Washington have to show for it? One half as many division titles as Atlanta’s two, since being gifted with Lottery luck and a spry Wall in 2010.

The Hawks have been to two ECFs, under two completely different regimes, since bidding adieu to Mike Woodson after a 53-win season ended fruitlessly in the second round of 2010’s Playoffs. Six playoff-series victories in that time, with a couple of the newfangled Play-In wins to boot, to three series wins for Washington, the Wiz and Hawks by my recollection trading one apiece.

And, yes, we are still talking about 1979 as the last time a Bullizards team eclipsed 50 wins in a regular season. Relatively, Atlanta assistant GM Kyle Korver’s 60-win season feels like yesterday.

Korver wound up on one of the Utah Jazz’s 50-win seasons while playing under Snyder in 2019, and he probably had more than just a hot hand in the ongoings of the past week. Coach Quin didn’t bring any gold balls to Salt Lake, and neither did any of his predecessors. But since 2017, the Jazz clubs registered a minimum 50-win pace in four of Snyder’s last six seasons at the helm, the exceptions being a 48-win season in 2018, and a 49-win season last year.

He also gave Utah some division banners to cherish in his wake. Three in the past six seasons, including the last two titles in a Northwest Division that had reigning two-time MVP Nikola Jokic around the way in Denver.

Unless you’re occasionally giving up 175 points with Kawhi and PG playing on your behalf, coaches bearing championship rings won’t be sitting around waiting for the phone to ring anytime soon. Quin’s as good a coaching option as any NBA team is going to snare in the middle of a season, and one hopes the Hawks’ players, if not the plurality of their fans, can appreciate that.

Critiques of Snyder’s coaching strategies and substitutions, especially at playoff time, are fair and should not be construed as mere nitpicking. Yet, as I stated on Twitter recently, if my team is floundering, or plateauing consistently, let them level off as perennial division champs with 50-ish win seasons, not as 40-ish win also-rans scrambling every year to make a final postseason cut. Woody’s accomplishments, while nurturing the Hawks and navigating through the Young LeBron and Sane Dwight years, is the floor going forward for latter-day Atlanta coaches.

When Nate was getting shown up by his peers Steve Clifford and Tom Thibodeau two weeks ago, I reluctantly moved him to the warmest spot on my Coaching Hot Seat list. McMillan usurped Wizards coach Wes Unseld, Jr., in the process of placing his keister in that dubious number-one spot.

Unseld is enjoying the glow-up Jamelle dreams of, the Bickerstaff-Silas category of coaches granted the benefits of the doubt because of league-wide familiarity with their parents’ experiences. He can not be enjoying the frequency of his Wizards’ meltdowns as they, like the Hawks (31-30), strive to stay above the NBA East’s Play-In cut line.

If the Nets looked quite game in burrowing their way back from 18 points down to the Hawks during the Sunday matinee saved by Trae (what’s a brutha gotta do to win Eastern Conference POW these days? 34.0 PPG and 8.5 APG past two games), it’s because they’ve had recent experience. Brooklyn was down 23 at home to the Wizards in the first quarter, back on February 4. Alas, The Fighting Cam Thomases stormed back to prevail by two.

One evening before, Damian Lillard didn’t need to go for 70, or even 30, to wipe out a 20-point deficit in D.C., making Washington (28-32) the first NBA club to blow 20-plus-point leads in losses on consecutive calendar days in least the past quarter century. Unseld was there last season, too, when his team was up 35 points at home on a Clipper team with no Kawhi nor PG to be found, and yet victory still wasn’t in the Cards for the Zards. Progress, I guess one could argue?

Perhaps preserving their head coach’s employment status, Washington redoubled their efforts in the run-up to the All-Star break, winning four of five. But that old bugaboo unearthed itself in the very first game back.

Three-pointers from Delon Wright (7-for-10 on 3FGs past two games), of all people, and Kyle Kuzma, and a 19-point opening quarter from Kristaps Porzingis ballooned the Wizards’ second-quarter lead to 19 against the Knicks. Then they let All-Star Julius Randle go bonkers, and the chance at victory evaporated in swift order. Still, ‘twas not quite a twenty-point blown-lead loss, so, progress?

With Porzingis (sore knee, DNP vs. CHI, also Out today) sidelined, Washington did manage to lose in a more customary way on Sunday afternoon, following up the Nets’ trip to Atlanta by getting cooked in Chicago’s deep-dish oven. The Wiz held serve for the first quarter-plus before their offense again stagnated, finishing up with a mere 82 points while losing by 20. (You owe me one, Transitive Property. Let’s Go! Chop Chop!)

I’ve gotten this far without mentioning much of Beal (22.7 PPG, career-best 51.5 FG%; 37.1 3FG%, best since 2017-18), and I think that’s saying something. As Beal completes the final season in his twenties, with guaranteed salaries exceeding $45 million on the docket in at least the next three seasons, I find it instructive to suggest, for any NBA franchise on the come up, that the time to sell your top banana is as the rookie-max extension is set to expire. That is if said recipient, drafted and developed and coached under your watch the whole time, has been unable to ascend your team to heights last achieved in, let’s say, the late 1970s.

Unlike some All-Star adjacents, Beal doesn’t get slapped with the henceforward unabbreviated Diva-Instigating Coach Killer label. Perhaps it is because Wiz owner Ted Leonsis, with his tentacles stretching out into multiple sports fronts in the DMV, prefers to hang on to his coaches well past their expiration dates. That could prove to be good news for son-of-a-legend Unseld. Still, he could certainly help his own cause with four successful cracks at Snyder’s Hawks over the next 20 games, including a pair in The District at the end of next week.

Conversely, the Hawks could go a long way to put the Wizards and their fading playoff hopes to bed, while buttressing their own, just by sweeping the head-to-heads on the docket. Washington has been shot-make-or-bust of late, the league’s most turnover-prone club (NBA-high 16.5 TO% this month) despite a 58.4 eFG% in February (3^rd-best in NBA).

Wright will be chomping at the bit to show what the Hawks have been missing, with all due respect to Aaron Holiday. But the Wizards’ errant passes and exposed dribbles will be ripe for the picking by Dejounte Murray, Holiday and company. Speeding up Washington’s guards into rushed shots, without fouling, can help bring the Wizards’ efficiency down.

Clint Capela was limited by interim coach Joe Prunty to about 20 minutes in recent wins at State Farm Arena, over Cleveland and Brooklyn, and his influence waned as the Nets made their charge back from oblivion. With Porzingis unable to be in the mix today, Washington will struggle to stretch the floor from their inside contributors. Rejuvenated fullcourt runs from Capela can keep Kuzma and Daniel Gafford drawn-in as help defenders, opening up the balance of the floor for Murray, Trae Young and Bogi Bogdanovic (7-for-11 3FGs in past two games; 22 points vs. BRK) versus a Wiz backcourt that struggles to offer resistance, particularly without Wright (1.9 SPG) on the floor.

Jimmy Buckets had to go Circus Circus on the Sixers, and Kevin Love had to pop some vintage threes, last night just to keep the Hawks from sneaking back within a half-game of the heat in the Southeast Division. No team is breaking their neck to secure the division banner at the moment – Orlando remains in Cool Story Bro territory, and while the Hornets have been on a tear, the only ankle breaking by their star guard is his own – so it’s up to the Hawks to stake their claim and keep the Wizards from getting up false hopes.

I dare not count championship rings with the Wizlets, but when comparing organizational circumstances and paths forward, I can count my blessings. A dream season for Atlanta is no longer attainable, but a superior record to Miami and Washington sure is. Coach Quin, do you need a refill on that decaf?

 

Let’s Go Hawks!

~lw3

[lethalweapon3]

Hawks' injury sheet is pleasantly clean. On the other side of the ledger...

~lw3

[KB21]

Well shit!  This game is on at the same time as the Mississippi State/Southern Miss baseball game tonight.  I'll have to get two TVs going.

[JayBirdHawk]

 

 

[Gray Mule]

The Quin Snyder rein begins tonight.  ESPN gives Atlanta a 71.3% chance of victory.  Hope they're correct!

GO ATL HAWKS !!

[JayBirdHawk]

 

 

[JayBirdHawk]

 

 

[JayBirdHawk]

 

 

[JayBirdHawk]

 

 

[Diesel]

1 hour ago, JayBirdHawk said:

 

 

The Black socks though...

[macdaddy]

1 hour ago, Diesel said:

The Black socks though...

That's hip. 

[Spud2nique]

33 minutes ago, macdaddy said:

That's hip. 

I wear them. So yaaaahhhh!! Remember when teams would wear black shoes in the early 90’s in the playoffs? Loved it. We should bring it back. ATL BLACK BABY!

[Diesel]

40 minutes ago, macdaddy said:

That's hip. 

The tell tell in this is that you said..... HIP!!

 

[AHF]

2 hours ago, Diesel said:

The Black socks though...

 

51 minutes ago, macdaddy said:

That's hip. 

[JeffS17]

3 hours ago, JayBirdHawk said:

 

 

That's the most intensely I've ever seen Trae listen to a coach

[swanlee]

Man this is shaping up to be one of my favorite Hawks teams. Been a fan since the Nique days in the mid 80s and this new Front office, New head coach combined with our young but talented team and it is really really exciting.

Not often a coach in his prime comes in to a young team like this. 

We shown we can get to the ECF finals with a lesser coach so very excited to see what Quinn can do.

[kg01]

3 hours ago, JayBirdHawk said:

 

 

This is clearly Quinn kicking him outta practice.  Plus his shorts are like 8 sizes too small to be a real HC.

[kg01]

2 hours ago, Diesel said:

The Black socks though...

Teams #1 issue is the number of players wearing white socks with black shoes.

Who does that?!?!

[Spud2nique]

3 hours ago, lethalweapon3 said:

swift

Stromile? 

 

3 hours ago, lethalweapon3 said:

Yet, as I stated on Twitter recently, if my team is floundering, or plateauing consistently, let them level off as perennial division champs with 50-ish win seasons, not as 40-ish win also-rans scrambling every year to make a final postseason cut.

I agree with this, only one champ each year but let’s be consistent winner and practice that habit, after all you what your habits are.. (not well said but you get it).

 

3 hours ago, lethalweapon3 said:

Jimmy Buckets had to go Circus Circus

That hall should have clanked off the back of the rim, the layup he made was bs.

 

3 hours ago, lethalweapon3 said:

Cool Story Bro territory,

 

3 hours ago, lethalweapon3 said:

Wizlets

 

You da man @lethalweapon3. Onward and consistently upward with Snyder. Maybe we can run this thing a little more military style. 
 

Vegas has Hawks -7.5

2k got Hawks by 11, hey @lethalweapon3 that happens to be Trae’s jersey number and to welcome Quin he went ape doo doo  

[Spud2nique]

45 minutes ago, JeffS17 said:

That's the most intensely I've ever seen Trae listen to a coach

Some people (even on squawk ) just walk in the room and command respect. Right @LongTimeFanwouldn’t you agree?