ATLANTA — After the Hawks blew out the Wizards on Wednesday, forward John Collins went on NBA TV and declared that his team can beat anybody. I get that Collins was feeling good after his team won three consecutive games and secured a spot in the play-in tournament. There’s nothing wrong with expressing confidence.
Collins still should have known better. The Hawks also can lose to anybody. They proved it two nights later when Philadelphia’s “B” team beat them on their court. After winning as many as three games in a row for just the second time this season, the Hawks lost at home to a team that gave its top six players the night off.
It happened just when it seemed as if the Hawks finally had some momentum going into the postseason.
“We can’t let tonight’s game be some dramatic statement about where we are,” Hawks coach Quin Snyder said afterward. “Just like it can’t be a dramatic statement before tonight’s game that we’ve arrived.”
The Hawks have been making the same statement all season. They are neither a good team nor a bad one. The Hawks are consistently, maddeningly mediocre. Firing Nate McMillan and hiring Snyder for the final 21 games didn’t change that.
The 76ers sat league MVP favorite Joel Embiid, their four starters and their sixth man for Friday’s game at State Farm Arena. Philadelphia already had the Eastern Conference’s No. 3 playoff seed secured. The Hawks, fully healthy, lost in overtime to Philly’s bench players.
The result was moot before the end of the game. Toronto’s loss to Boston earlier in the night locked the Hawks into the No. 8 seed for the play-in tournament. Now the Hawks will get two chances to win a game to advance to the playoffs.
They can go directly there by winning at Miami on Tuesday. Lose, and the Hawks still could make it by beating the winner of Chicago versus Toronto. Either way, the reward for getting through the play-in would be taking a thrashing from the Celtics or Bucks in the first round of the East playoffs.
That hard ceiling makes the play-in tournament feel sort of pointless for the Hawks. Even the potential benefit of playoff experience for this group isn’t worth much because major roster changes are likely this summer. Snyder and general manager Landry Fields both are early in their tenures. They’ll want to reshape the team more to their liking.
What they have now is a talented and deep group that has produced below-average results. The Hawks are 41-40 with one meaningless game left at Boston on Sunday. For two months, they never won or lost more than two games in a row. They finally broke that that pattern with three consecutive victories, only to lose to Philadelphia’s backups.
“It’s a learning process,” Trae Young said. “We are still learning each other and Coach Quin’s system. It’s going to take time.”
The Hawks are about out of time for this season. Young and other players keep saying that their run to the 2021 East finals gives them confidence that they can get hot. But they can’t cite that experience on the one hand, then say they are still figuring things out on the other.
Anyway, I’m tired of hearing about that 2021 surge. Most of the key players from that team are still on the roster, but it’s past time for the Hawks to let it go. The Hawks are 84-79 since then. They made it through the play-in in 2022 by winning two elimination games, then were handled by the Heat in five games.
This year’s Heat team isn’t as good. I still would pick them to beat the Hawks in a series rematch. The Hawks have a better chance to win a one-off game. If the Hawks lost at Miami, they’d be favored to win a home game against Toronto or Chicago. The optimistic view is that the modest signs of progress they showed before the ugly loss to Philly were signs that they can streak in the postseason.
The Hawks showed off their depth by winning without key players against the Mavericks (Murray), Bulls (Young) and Wizards (Bodgan Bogdanovic). Collins is shooting better over his past 20 games. Second-year forward Jalen Johnson has shown he could become the dynamic, big wing that De’Andre Hunter still isn’t. Reserve center Onyeka Okongwu has become a consistently efficient scorer, rebounder and defender.
The Hawks have some good pieces. It just doesn’t add up to more than a middling outfit. When Fields changed coaches, he said the Hawks should be better. Snyder will get a chance to build his own program, but he hasn’t got any more out of this group than McMillan.
The Hawks were 29-30 this season under McMillan, with a minus-21 point differential. Under Snyder, they are 10-10, with a plus-30 differential that’s skewed by some blowout victories in the small number of games. McMillan’s Hawks ranked ninth in offensive efficiency and 21st defensively, per Cleaning the Glass (garbage time excluded). Snyder’s Hawks rank fifth offensively and 23rd defensively.
The Hawks can prove they are better than those numbers by going on a postseason run. They won’t do it. A team that has won as many as three games in a row only twice isn’t suddenly going to conquer Boston or Milwaukee in the playoffs. The Hawks can beat anybody, as Collins said, but they can’t beat an East contender over a seven-game series.
Soon, the Hawks’ seesaw season will be over and Fields will try to assemble a team that can do that.
