Figured I'd take a lazy Saturday morning to catch up with some reading and found a couple of interesting items to post here. This one tackles some insightful research over on Peachtree Hoops found here: link. (Side note: if you want to get your handle researched in an ATL site, it might be a good idea to not have "sox" in your name...)
There are several interesting notes here, but the one I wanted to highlight is that if everyone except Horford was healthy and playing, then we were 16-7 and 15-4 since 1/18 (I assume this is when Pero went out with the stress fracture). Now, there isn't anything showing the teams we played in that 15-4 run now do I know if games like the CHAR game last week count into that total (Millsap didn't play so the algorithm could have counted him as injured - it shouldn't have, but it'd be an easy mistake to make when compiling a bunch of numbers). Still, this projects to win around 60 games (57 for the 16-7 run, but 64 for the 15-4) over the course of an entire 82 games... even 57 Ws is a 1 seed in the East this year.
Why I bring this up is that when people talk of "proven" veteran teams, they all say the same thing: there is really only one goal of the regular season and that is to get to the playoff healthy. For instance, MIA this year was all about getting to the playoff with a healthy D-Wade - the 1 seed or the 2 seed really didn't matter to them in the grand scheme of things. Well, here we are - we made to the playoffs with a healthy complement of players. Sure, we would have preferred to get here being a bit higher seed, but we are here.
An aside to the thrust here, but I saw another interesting item as well. We talk about the loss of the C's for a long stretch and how that affected us - and I can't think anyone would say that it did not. But the team was much more affected when Korver or Carroll were down (2-15 combined). From this, I'd assume our record without Cartier Martin would be a bit worse than his skill level would indicate, but the numbers for him weren't compiled.
