What the pundits are saying about the Hawks

[Jamaaliver]

...after a disappointing end to a wonderful season.

CBSSports:

2. THE BIRD IS NOT THE WORD. The Hawks won 60 games, played brilliant basketball until the All-Star Break and made the Eastern Conference Finals. They accomplished a lot. And yet this feels like a disappointing season because of how awfully they played vs. the Nets, how mediocre they were vs. the Wizards, and how downright pathetic they were vs. the Cavs.

Lack of talent, no superstars, lack of heart, lack of preparation, out-coached, out-played, out-efforted, the works. The Cavs were better, of that there can be no doubt. But there was reason to believe the Hawks could compete in this series and they simply never executed like they did in the regular season.

Do you tear it down and chase a superstar? Do you try and add a rim protector (they badly needed one), better depth, and make another run? Do you bring back DeMarre Carroll for big money? Paul Millsap for bigger money? Do you believe in this core? Do you abandon a team that won 60 games?

Tough questions face the Hawks this summer

Basketball Insiders:

Was Hawks’ Season a Step in Right Direction or a Failure?

For some, the 2014-15 campaign was a dream season for the Atlanta Hawks. For others, a resounding playoff sweep at the hands of the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference Finals will undoubtedly leave a sour taste their mouth all summer. These two conflicting viewpoints properly sum up why it’s so hard to properly categorize the current situation of the Hawks.

Should 60 wins, a top seed in the Eastern Conference, a Conference Finals appearance, four All-Stars and a Coach of the Year deem the 2014-15 campaign a success. Or should it be viewed as a disappointment, losing at the cusp of a NBA Finals appearance to a team with serious injuries to two of its own All-Stars?

Whatever side of the fence you may land, both views will be able to fully agree that this summer will be a key to the team’s future longevity at the top of the Eastern Conference hierarchy.

There are three ways to improve in the NBA – draft, free agency and trades:

• As it stands currently, the Hawks won’t have many rotation minutes for a guy [drafted] at No. 15.
  
• The Hawks have $39.3 million in guaranteed salaries on the books next season. This gives the team a bit of flexibility to be active on the free agency front. The team could have up to $25 million in salary cap space...
  
• In regards to trade assets, the Hawks don’t have many options outside of their All-Stars under contract.

This summer will be huge for the Hawks franchise. They could opt to put things on cruise control by re-signing Carroll and Millsap and seeing if the core can make another run in 2016. Or the team could opt to move away from Millsap and try to lure another free agent big man such as LaMarcus Aldridge or Greg Monroe into the fold. The future is still bright for Atlanta, but how bright will be determined over the next few months.

[Jamaaliver]

Sports Illustrated:

Hawks point to bright future even after playoff rout by Cavs

The season didn't end like they wanted.

Not even close.

But, despite the sting of a humiliating playoff defeat, the Atlanta Hawks seem closer than ever to winning a championship.

The Hawks went farther than anyone expected this season. They won 60 games for the first time in franchise history and claimed top seed in the Eastern Conference. They set another team record by winning 19 in a row. They became the first team in NBA history to go 17-0 in a calendar month. They had four players selected for the All-Star Game, not to mention Mike Budenholzer earning coach of the year honors. They won two playoff series for the first time since moving to Atlanta in 1968 to reach the conference final.

That's where Atlanta's season came to a crashing halt. The Hawks were completely overwhelmed by James and the Cavaliers, who finished off the series with a 118-88 blowout in Game 4 Tuesday night.

''It's clear that we have some work to do as a team,'' center Al Horford said.

Whether Ferry returns as GM or Ressler's group decides to go a different route, the Hawks have some major decisions this summer. The first priority is finding room within the salary cap to re-sign free-agents-to-be Carroll and two-time All-Star forward Paul Millsap

''Since we know how it feels to get here, it'll be easy to get back here,'' Demarre Carroll said after the final game in Cleveland. ''We hated ending it right here, but by the same token, man, the best is yet to come.''

The Hawks also will be monitoring the health of Kyle Korver and Thabo Sefolosha, who will both be recovering from season-ending injuries.

If the Hawks decide not to reinstate Ferry, Budenholzer could wind up taking on an expanded role in player personnel matters, likely assisted by assistant GM Wes Wilcox - similar to the arrangement in San Antonio with Gregg Popovich, who was Budenholzer's mentor.

The Atlanta coach would like to bulk up on the inside this offseason, especially after the Hawks were dominated on the boards by the Cavaliers. But Budenholzer seems committed to having a balanced lineup rather than one or two superstars. That system worked just fine during the regular season, but the lack of a go-to player was exposed by James' dynamic performance in the conference final.

''This is a hell of a group,'' Budenholzer said, ''and to bring them back would be a huge priority.''

[Jamaaliver]

Jeff Schultz from AJC:

Avalanche. The Hawks’ maiden voyage to the Eastern Conference finals evolved into a Groucho Marx tune: “Hello, I must be going.”

Four games. Gone.

Two days after showing the basketball world what courage and resilience look like, nearly pulling off an improbable Horford-less upset in Game 3, the Hawks all but walked themselves onto the dustpan Tuesday night.

They trailed Cleveland by 20 points in the second quarter and, well, were pretty much just counting the minutes to the offseason from that point on. A season of beauty for most of seven months ended in a dumpster fire.

Jeff Teague: “We did a lot of things (during the season) but we ended on a disappointing note.”

Understatement.

They weren’t good enough. This isn’t to suggest they didn’t belong in the Eastern Conference finals. They just played like they didn’t belong in the Eastern Conference finals. The skies opened up when they reached the conference finals. Then it hailed on their heads.

Mark Bradley of AJC:

They won 60 games and reached the Eastern Conference finals, two signal achievements, but in the end the best team in Atlanta Hawks history reminded us it was still an Atlanta Hawks team. In the end, it embarrassed itself.

Go ahead. Make any excuse you want. Injuries? Yes, the Hawks had injuries. But let me remind you that in Game 2, they started four 2015 All-Stars to Cleveland’s one, and they lost by 12 points — at home in the series’ biggest game — after trailing by 20. In the elimination Game 4, they were down to three All-Stars and Cleveland was up to two, and the No. 1 seed was beaten by 30.

The Hawks were 60-22 in the regular season, having gone 10-2 against the teams they’d face in the playoffs. They went 8-8 against those three opponents — Brooklyn, Washington and Cleveland — in postseason.

You can say that the Hawks, in the end, were outmanned. If so, they were outmanned by what was, in Games 2 and 3, a one-man team. (Yes, the one man was LeBron James.) You can say that the Hawks were unaccustomed to high-level playoff basketball and didn’t know how to act, but this was also the first conference final for Irving, Tristan Thompson, Timofey Mozgov, Iman Shumpert and Matthew Dellavedova, and they seemed to figure it out.

Make any excuse you want, but here’s where I note that, after Game 3 in a tied Round 1 and after Game 2 in a conference final where they’d already lost at home, the Hawks themselves conceded they hadn’t played hard enough. (And this was before the 30-point loss in an elimination game.) That cannot happen, but it did, more than once.

As much as I enjoyed watching the Hawks during the regular season, those Hawks were a playoff no-show. If you hadn’t known they were the No. 1 seed, you’d never have guessed by how they played. They weren’t precise. They were rarely the aggressor. They were lucky to survive Round 2, in which the final four games came down to last-second shots. Come Round 3, they were ready to go home. And so they have.

[Jamaaliver]

C-Viv, Beat Writer at AJC:

The end came quickly and decisively.


The Hawks’ historic season is over. The demise came with a loud thud.

“They just outplayed us,” Paul Millsap said. “Simple as that. We stuck to our game plan. They came out firing on all cylinders. We were playing from behind all game. It was tough. The crowd got into it. They just beat us.”

The Hawks reached heights this season never before seen in Atlanta. They made it to the Eastern Conference finals for the first time. They won two playoff series for the first time since 1958, when the franchise was located in St. Louis and won the NBA championship. They set a franchise record with 60 wins. They won 19 consecutive games, the fifth longest streak in league history, including all 17 in January. Four starters were named to the All-Star game. They had the Coach of the Year.

The Hawks can reflect on those positives after the sting of their performance in the conference finals is gone.

The Hawks struggled with their outside shooting all series — particularly from 3-point range. They were 26-of-111 for the series, a meager 23.4 percent. One of the hallmarks of the regular season disappeared in the playoffs. It hurt.

The upcoming summer will be an important one for the Hawks. Millsap and DeMarre Carroll, two-fifths of the starting lineup, will be unrestricted free agents. Re-signing one or both of them will go a long way in preserving the continuity and building on this season’s success.

In addition, Elton Brand, Pero Antic and John Jenkins will be unsigned. Thabo Sefolosha and Korver will be rehabbing from season-ending surgeries.

[Jamaaliver]

Folks at NBC Sports were surprisingly upbeat:

The Atlanta Hawks had never won more than 57 games in a season. They had never made it past the second round of the playoffs.

This season the franchise won 60 games and made it to the Eastern Conference Finals.

Once there, the banged-up Hawks got swept by a banged-up Cavaliers team. That led some narrow-minded people to say they didn’t accomplish anything. I pity fans who view the world thinking if you don’t have the ultimate victory then it was a waste; they miss out on the joys of building, growing, the small victories of life. The Hawks had an exciting season, they filled an arena that in past years felt like a mausoleum, they played beautiful basketball for months at a time.

It’s something to build on.

The Hawks are not like the Cavaliers — they can’t luck out and have the best player on the planet decide to come home and change their fortunes...They need to lay out a system and get the right people to fill the slots in it. It’s the only way they can build. They have taken huge step in the right direction, one they can build on. To dismiss that as empty is shortsighted and just plain wrong.

[PandaKidd]

Not a ton of hot takes there.

Ive been pretty vocal on what we need to do, Pero/Brand are not getting it done for us. We need BIGs, and Muscala is your backup PF now.

Millsap and DMC it depends on the $.

Im in favor of bringing in a Center at the minimum to come off the bench who can REBOUND.

[Jamaaliver]

The basketball starved writers of the NY Post had a wonderful, unbiased write-up of our season. A really good read all the way around.:

The Atlanta Hawks saw their season end with a thud Tuesday night, getting waxed by the Cleveland Cavaliers by 30 points as they were swept out of the Eastern Conference Finals and ingloriously sent into their offseason.

It was a result that seemed to back up the biggest doubts about this Hawks team ever since they went on a 21-game winning streak during the first half of the regular season...But did it really prove that?

Atlanta never played as well over the past three months as it did during the first half of the season, when the Hawks generated a significant cushion by the time the All-Star Break came around. They held a 6 1/2 game lead over the Raptors at that point, and a 10 1/2 game lead over the Cavs, and the Hawks spent the final two months of the regular season doing everything they could to stay healthy when the postseason finally arrived while cruising to an East-leading 60 wins.

The Hawks were always a team that, when they were at their best, had everyone playing at a high level. Other than Game 6 of their first round series win over the Nets, when Atlanta finally blew out a Brooklyn team that had gamely hung with them to that point despite finishing the regular season with a sub .500 record, we never saw the Hawks play at that level in these playoffs.

They also weren’t helped by some questionable coaching decisions by Mike Budenholzer. While Budenholzer was a deserving winner of this season’s Coach of the Year award, he made some odd choices during these playoffs. The biggest one was his outright refusal to play his starters more minutes throughout virtually their entire playoff run...you have to be willing to move away from that philosophy once you reach the postseason – and especially when you have a starting five like the one the Hawks have.

...the fundamental question about these Hawks: what is their ceiling? Are they, if they bring back both Carroll and Millsap in free agency this summer, a true title contender next season, as a normal returning 60-win team with a core group of players all in their prime normally would be? Or is this nothing more than a nice regular season story that proved to be more fantasy than reality once the postseason arrived?

These Hawks may not have proven their formula can work in the playoffs, but they showed enough that, at the very least, they deserve another chance to do so.

[Geaux_Hawks]

They all are pretty much spot on. A dominant team the first half of the season, that never got back to that style of play the rest of the season. They showed enough fight to make you wonder if they needed just a little bit more juice to put them over the top(star player) or was it just a bad run in the playoffs and they really just need small tweaks to become a true contender?

Coach Buds prefers balance, and I think we can stay a balanced team with no star player. One thing for sure is we need some more talent though. Sap is great, but I think he has to be a victim of circumstances for us.

[Jamaaliver]

Hardwood Paroxysm

The Atlanta Hawks fancy themselves as a team that can win without a superstar. They’re here to prove that talent-by-committee is viable in the NBA for teams that don’t benefit off the league’s scarce supply of generational talents...the Hawks exemplified the team-first, ball-moving playing style beginning to creep into the mainstream. They were a whirlwind of slashing, passing and shooting action, with everyone playing their part in harmony...Everyone was important, and Mike Budenholzer’s well-oiled machine landed the unique honor of having their entire starting lineup named Player of the Month in January.

There wasn’t a happy ending for well-wishers of the Hawks’ team-building approach, however. The playoffs were a different monster for them. They were off-kilter from the start, needing all of six games to get past the eighth-seeded zombie Nets. By the third round, the Hawks were the zombies. We had them pronounced dead halfway through the series, almost literally when Korver went down and Millsap and Carroll had to play hurt.

Some of the old rhetoric is back. The Hawks’ sputtering finish in the playoffs cast some doubt about the real ability of a superstar-less team to win it all. 60 wins in the regular season was one thing. How about in the playoffs, where teams scouted for every weakness and exploited them with ruthless double-teaming? Opposing defenses became bolder with leaving so-so shooters like Teague, Millsap, Dennis Schröder and Pero Antic open from deep. Conversely, Korver saw increased defensive pressure and Carroll was the only Hawk to post a three-point percentage above 36% in the playoffs.

That’s why they’d like to be back for another run next season, and we’d like to see it happen. The Hawks will have plenty of cap space, but they’ll have to clear a bit of additional room to bring both players back. What we saw on the court was basketball symphony, with each player complementary to one another and playing as one. In an increasingly star-powered league, the Hawks were something to preserve. Here’s hoping they’ll be back to prove it.