Game Thread: Hawks @ Bucks -- 1/4

[Jamaaliver]

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[Jamaaliver]

Preview: Hawks aim to avoid winless road trip in Milwaukee

A familiar face awaits



On Friday evening, the Hawks will have the opportunity to avoid a winless road trip but, in short, the sledding will be difficult on the road against the Milwaukee Bucks.

Atlanta enters this particular contest as a 14-point (!) underdog (the largest point spread involving the Hawks this season) and, while that may seem lofty, the reality is that Milwaukee is playing great basketball. Under the direction of former Hawks head coach Mike Budenholzer, the Bucks are sitting with a 26-10 record and they are led by an MVP candidate in Giannis Antetokounmpo.

From an injury standpoint, Kent Bazemore and Taurean Prince remain sidelined for the visitors. For the first time in a while, though, the rest of the injury report is clean, indicating that the Hawks will have their full complement of big men available in a situation that demands versatility on both ends.

On paper, this is one of the most difficult match-ups of the season for the Hawks and it comes at the end of a road trip. That isn’t the best recipe for an upset but, on the bright side, Lloyd Pierce’s team has provided reason for optimism in recent days and this should be an entertaining match-up in prime time.

Peachtree Hoops

[Spud2nique]

Heyyyy Buuuuud, you look familiar.

[dms269]

Can we sign Ivan Johnson or Ivan Curry and have them chase a ball out of bounds..yet it just so happens to be that Coach Bud is in the way and gets crushed.

[Jamaaliver]

Can we sign Ivan Johnson or Ivan Curry and have them chase a ball out of bounds..yet it just so happens to be that Coach Bud is in the way and gets crushed.

I can only imagine the agony he'd be in if that occurred...particularly if he was already injured.

Spoiler:

[Jamaaliver]

Milwaukee Bucks: 60-win Hawks live on with Mike Budenholzer in Milwaukee

Ahead of Mike Budenholzer’s first game coaching against his former team, the magic of the 60-win Atlanta Hawks lives on with the Milwaukee Bucks

As Mike Budenholzer prepares to face the Atlanta Hawks for the first time in his career as a head coach, it’s fitting that a win would bring his Milwaukee Bucks team on pace for a win total that has a special significance in his career.

A win over the Hawks on Friday night would move the Bucks to 27-10 on the season to date, leaving them on pace for 60 wins.

At this juncture of the season, it’s difficult not to look at the Bucks and see similarities to that particular Hawks team. The Hawks built one of the league’s best records in that year thanks to elite play on both ends of the floor (sixth in offense, fifth in defense) and the Bucks are currently on track to be even better in both areas this season (second in offense, third in defense).

As the Bucks currently boast the NBA’s best record ahead of a summer when four of their five starters will enter free agency, there’s a cautionary tale that needs to be paid attention to here. When opportunities come along in the NBA, they must be seized.

That Atlanta run started in Milwaukee with a December 27 win over the Bucks.

Milwaukee Fansided

[lethalweapon3]

Our Atlanta Hawks Basketball Club travels to Milwaukee to face the top team in the NBA, who is, somehow, the Bucks (8:30 PM Eastern, Fox Sports Southeast and 92.9 FM in ATL, Fox Sports Wisconsin). And, goshdarnit, would you believe that our former headliner coach, Mike Budenholzer, is giving refs his signature, grimacing Budfaces on the other end of the sideline?

Our dear franchise’s crest of single-season success, and team-wide acclaim, occurred under his watch. Riding in his rocket, he gave us some stars. And then, a half a mile from heaven, he dropped us back, down to this cold, cold, lottery world. The nerve of this man! I rooted for you, Budenholzer. We were ALL rooting for YOU! How dare you?

In the NBA, we dump our Coaches of the Year. They don’t get to dump us! BUCK FUD!

Alright, that’s the last time you’ll get me to inverse-cuss this man out on the Internets. I’m over it. Over the entire Atlanta sports media, such as it is, getting thoroughly scooped by, as our four-eyed-cool CEO Steve Koonin would put it, “The Wausau Daily Courier”. Over the fact that our sideline savior flew his lame-duck-butt up to America’s Dairyland to go become someone else’s. Over the fact he took almost all of his assistant-coaching Brookhaven braintrust with him.

If you’re still feeling Spur-ned by Mr. Spurs East, then bear with me, and take a few moments to place yourself in Coach Bud’s Bruno Maglis. Go ahead and assume they’d fit.

You’ve got a job. A GREAT job, one that comes with accolades borne by intense, collaborative work and occasional strokes of luck. Everybody in the town where you work adores you, reveres you. They even envy you. And who wouldn’t? After all, your input was essential in putting that burg firmly on the sports map, and keeping them there.

You helped one of your old friends, and I do mean old, reach the pinnacle of professional success, over and over again, while situated in a small sports market, in an unforgiving, brutally competitive field. Whenever your pal decides to hang it up and call it a career, as he vowed he would, soon, everyone knows that you, ma’am/sir, are the head coaching star-in-waiting.

Along the way, you built camaraderie with another Bud bud, too. This one was a sub-mediocre veteran player from a trash team who finessed his way onto yours, hung around long enough to get himself a ring, retire and, with a bit of Daddy’s pull, ascend quickly into upper management. A failing upwards specialist, he rode the wave of Yung LeBron until it ebbed in Cleveland. Then he came back to town, in part, to hang out with you. He can tell that you, and him, are going places.

He’s enticed by this Great Value! Tim Duncan over in Atlanta, a center with forward tendencies who, when healthy, is a model of fullcourt efficiency, a regular-season winner if ever there was one. Imagine, your friend tells you, what a dash of The Spurs Way might do for him! Turns out, your pal gets invited to Atlanta to help its owners present some semblance of front-office competency, to beleaguered, starving fans of a team stuck in neutral.

That first friend, the ol’ geezer, has a change of heart and declines to budge from the cushy seat kept warm for you. Your destiny deferred? No worries! You’ve got your homeslice over in the ATL. Just sit tight and wait for Plan B to give you a call.

The call arrives, and “Ferrybudz” is born. A bond that’s sure to stand the test of time. When he wasn’t calling in hopes woo you over, your new GM pal can Not. Stop. Crowing. About some teenager, toiling away in a ratty gymnasium halfway across the world, that few people know about. He’s been raving to everyone at Hawks, Inc., about the rangy-limbed Aegean for the ages, sending a scout-turned-lead assistant GM that he hired from his days in Cleveland overseas to keep tabs on him. Raving to everyone, including the gentleman who was unwittingly keeping your head coaching seat warm for you.

You move nearly your entire nuclear family to an unfamiliar locale. Within the first month of the alliance, Ferrybudz takes its first hit when the coach that was dumped for you shares your friend’s double-super-secret intel with his new club, the Bucks. Your pal tries to move ahead of Milwaukee, but to no avail, as your team settles for the promise of Bebe Nogueira, while the Bucks decide to heed your predecessor’s advice and not waste their mid-round pick on Tony Snell.

You’ve barely gotten your office furniture in place when, on an inauspicious night in Midtown, some DUI cop trying to meet a boss-mandated quota decides to pick you to star in Georgia’s sequel to "My Cousin Vinny" (could be worse… at least it wasn’t "Deliverance 2"). Rosco B. Coltrane out here on some busted-taillight nonsense, smh.

Your rep takes a hit before you’ve had a chance to coach a game. Good thing your ace, the one who thought he had an ace up his sleeve balling around the Balkans, still has your back, 110 percent. You finally get to run your new team. Months into the new season, your team is starting to adjust, to your ball-movement designs, and figure things out when the next destabilizing tailspin happens.

That jab-stepping Frankenstein, the one you planned on building around, pops a ta-ta. Not the previously popped one, either, but the last good one. For the foreseeable future, your team’s routine playoff quest appears to have gone tits up. But not so fast! You whip out your magic whiteboard and, suddenly, unheralded guys named Teague, Scott, and Antic are making Paul George’s head spin, pushing the top-seeded Pacers to the brink of playoff elimination.

Now, you’ve got all the momentum, building on the good feeling from a heroic playoff exit into the next season. And Frankenstein is getting healthy, too. Time for the next big setback.

Let’s say, your buddy-boss, the one brought to town to bring professional stability to the job, starts reciting the unedited refrain to "Gold Digger," or something like that, on what he thought was a lighthearted summertime conference call with his overseers. Let’s say that sets off a powder keg of saber-rattling among the bigwigs within earshot of him, a blowup that would publicly pick away at many of the scabs the franchise you represent has suffered over the decades.

Out of nowhere, the buddy that beaconed you away from the safety and surety of your old job has been exiled to the hinterlands.
Left holding a flaming bag of poo while the owners immolate themselves, Koonin scrambles to find a way to keep you from immediately looking elsewhere. The assistant GM guy your buddy hired? How about we make him your boss? Then, how about, we make you his boss, too, and pay you handsomely to be a coach-executive?

For a minute there, it looked like the indecent proposal was going to finally pay off. With your guidance, the remnants from the prior coaching regimes, plus the new guys Ferry enticed to town, grew together around your Frankenstein to form a formidable force, one that seized the best record in the league, ahead of LeBron, ahead of the Warriors. You earned Coach of the Year! You’re running a team with four coaches-vote All-Stars, one that might finally hold LeBron in check long enough to… oh wait, there’s another set of poor decision-making, another cop, another ill-timed season-ending injury, another crippling setback.

Things plateaued the next season, after the first member of the starting unit departed in free agency, and after you let your ref-piggybacking tendencies get the best of you, but it wasn’t all bad. After a decent end to the regular season, your team finally knocked off those hopelessly entitled nemeses, the Boston Celtics, in the playoffs, although it did set up yet another latter-round beatdown at the hands of LeBron and Friends.

But here comes the next unkind cut. That summer, the new ownership fumbles the self-appointed task of negotiating with your free agent Frankenstein. It turns out, he is enticed to saunter off to… you guessed it, Boston. Celtic Pride!

Reeling in a Real True Center, in this case, a hometown goofball to join a cast of young goofballs, to replace “Frankie”, wasn’t cutting the mustard on or off the court. Your former understudy-turned floor leader adding his name to the police blotter, and your tone-deaf GM boss/underling resorting to Blue-Eyed Soul tactics to appease the season-ticketholder masses, weren’t helping matters. The traditional end for Coaches of the Year was in sight, and with a new “Warriors Way” GM arriving to, ostensibly, allow you to do your coaching job better, your only question was whether you should jump, or hang around long enough to get pushed.

Fortunately for you, Jason Kidd was mangling the coach-GM thing worse than your ill-fated “Budcox” partnership could, and his mid-season departure last January made the prospect of making the youthful Greek Freak your new “Frankie” to good an option to pass up. I ain’t mad at ya, coach. Not in hindshight, anyway.

The next Coach of the Year hardware may soon be headed Budenholzer’s way, if Milwaukee’s mastery of the Leastern Conference (26-10; 18-5 in the NBA East, second only to Indiana’s 19-5) holds firm. It’s also quite possible that the Maurice Podoloff MVP trophy will be inscribed, if there’s enough room on it, with the name of a guy who is currently shooting 15.2 percent on a couple three-point attempts per game, and making just 69.5 percent of his free throws.

That’s largely because all this time, the once-wiry Giannis Antetokounmpo has been drinking milk, or kaffir or something, and now has the build of a freaky Greek God from a comic book somewhere. Antetokounmpo (1st in per-48 Win Shares, 2nd in Box Plus/Minus, 3rd in VORP, as per bball-ref; 4th in Net Rating, as per nba.com stats) is now the closest thing to Thanos, LeBron included, that the league has seen this season, now that he can meander from the three-point line to the square above the rim in two dribbles, with futile defensive resistance.

He was running away with the MVP race until James Harden literally walked his way into the running. After Harden devoured the Warriors last night, Giannis will be tempted to stuff the boxscore, and the SportsCenter Top 10, at the expense of the visiting Hawks (11-26).

Giannis’ MVP candidacy is a real thing, also, because Budenholzer’s pace-and-space schemes are disallowing anyone not from Greece to suck the life out of possessions for Milwaukee (7th in NBA for Pace) the way Kidd’s Bucks (20th in NBA for Pace in 2017-18, 26th in 2016-17) would.

Customary iso-culprit Eric Bledsoe’s usage is at its lowest level since his second season with the Clippers, yet the guard’s interior scoring (career-best 59.8 2FG%), passing (career-best 2.6 assist/TO ratio, previously never above 2.0) and per-minute efficiency (best WS/48 since 2013-14) has arguably never been better. At the wing, Khris Middleton is re-emerging after a Klay Thompson-esque shooting funk last month, averaging 25.3 PPG and shooting 46.2 3FG% in the last three games of the Bucks’ four-game winning streak.

To open up the paint for Antetokounmpo and Bledsoe, space-eater Brook Lopez has been refashioned into a chain-smoking three-point threat. After dabbling with the long-range jumper during stops in Brooklyn and L.A., over 70 percent of his attempts with the Bucks are beyond the 3-point arc, his 37.3 3FG% not too shabby for such a novice.

Reserving Lopez’s energies as a help-rebounder, along with second-year pro D.J. Wilson (filling in for the injured John Henson), Middleton and injured ex-Hawk Ersan Ilyasova, Milwaukee is riding Giannis’ coat-tails to a league-best 76.0 defensive rebounding percentage. That usually makes easy pickings for the Bucks (NBA-best 55.2 eFG%) when they face subpar-shooting opponents like the Hawks (51.1 eFG%, up to 21st in NBA; 50.7% on the road).

Unwilling to suffer a fool like Matthew Dellavedova, for obvious reasons, Coach Bud turned to GM Jon Horst to find an upgrade, and Horst acquired George Hill from the Cavs to fill the bill. The move to shore up the depth behind Bledsoe is sure to strengthen the postseason prospects for a team unaccustomed to relying on depth at all, especially once Ilyasova (broken nose) returns to join Snell and Hill among the reserves.

Milwaukee’s 136-134 loss at New York on December 1, representative of half of the Knicks win total for the month, was enough to convince voters of Kevin Knox’s worthiness as December’s rookie award winner for the conference. Since that defeat, the Bucks’ 11-3 run included back-to-back wins over the Knicks around Christmastime, a pair of wins over the Cavs, a trio of victories over the Pistons, and wins over the shorthanded Pelicans and the Frankenstein-less Celtics.

Milwaukee’s one impressive team victory from that month came back on December 9, when they toppled Toronto on the road. They’ve had a couple days of respite since trouncing visiting Detroit, 121-98, and if they show any signs of slippage tonight, it’ll be because they got caught looking ahead to the second-seeded Raptors’ visit to Fiserv Forum tomorrow.

To maximize the Budface camera cuts tonight, the Hawks have to cut down on their careless turnovers (league-high 18.0 team TO%), commit to keeping Giannis from punishing Atlanta on fastbreaks, and show enough defenders to make the Greek Freak (4.3 TOs/game) maneuver laterally and entice him to either loft long-distance jumpers or pass the ball to inferior options.

Atlanta’s last five games have seen the Hawks’ ability to force turnovers dwindle (opposing-player TOs: 16, 14, 12, 11, and finally 10 in the loss @ WAS). It’s a decline that began even before Kent Bazemore (ankle) exited stage left for a few weeks.

More active hands from the otherwise uber-active John Collins (one solitary steal in 21 games, back on November 28), and Trae Young (0.8 SPG; ATL 3-14 when he gathers no steals, as was the case in Wednesday’s late collapse in Washington), particularly when Giannis gives up the ball, could conceivably help Atlanta even the playing court tonight.

Hawks fans, I leave you with this old, time-tested adage.

Don’t hate the coaches. Hate the game!

Let’s Go Hawks!
~lw3

[jayu70]

Damn lethal.....you 'kilt' it!
Some of that just makes me sad....why can't the Hawks get right, sigh!

[hawkmanreturns]

As much as I like to cheer for the underdog and would LOVE to see the young Hawks hand Bud a loss, I'm also a realist. This game is strictly about player development. I have no other expectations.

[ducler]

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[Spud2nique]

Nice game thread lw3! Made me sad like Bird, We keep on being optimistic till the buzzer sounds though. Funny thing is despite everything I don’t hate Bud. I know everybody seems to die to everything that went down but I dunno, call me crazy he still the man and one of the best coaches around. Having said all that I hope we get him tonight as I’m all for getting lotto balls but beating the Bucks is a good win.

Go Hawks!

[lethalweapon3]

"IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW YOU SPELL YOUR NAME!"

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~th3r0ck

[lethalweapon3]

Dah-dah-duh-dah-duhdah! (Watch out for the) CHARGE!

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~lw3

[lethalweapon3]

Can we sign Ivan Johnson or Ivan Curry and have them chase a ball out of bounds..yet it just so happens to be that Coach Bud is in the way and gets crushed.

Where's Langston Galloway when you need him? At least Bud's got both hands free now.



~lw3

[benhillboy]

Not looking forward to Brogdon’s +/- tonight. Sh$t might be +50. Everything Trae is weak at he excels in.

[Vae Victus]

Oh lordy. A game where i finally tune in and its an ass whooping of epic proportion.

Well, dont give up, gotta keep playing hard and chip away at the lead.