Game Thread: HorCats vs Hawks 02/09/19

[jayu70]

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[jayu70]

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[jayu70]

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[Spud2nique]

Hornets favored by 3??? WHAT!!! We are at home, we are playing really well with spacing the floor and gunning from all angles. I dunno I think the Vegas bookies are fast asleep behind the wheel. O/U is at 228.5 which also seems a bit low unless the Hornets slow it down a bit.

Honestly we are a different team than a month ago. The Hornets and Kemba is particular will have his hands full tonight.

Honestly think we win this one.

Let the chips fall where they may!

GO HAWKS!!!

[jayu70]

Mmmmmmmm???

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[hawkmanreturns]

Mmmmmmmm???

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I really hope this doesn't mean that the current backup PG asked for a buyout.

[steady]

Mmmmmmmm???

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I really hope this doesn't mean that the current backup PG asked for a buyout.

It’s probably just that they have space because of Dorsey and Hamilton being gone

[jayu70]

Mmmmmmmm???

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I really hope this doesn't mean that the current backup PG asked for a buyout.

It’s probably just that they have space because of Dorsey and Hamilton being gone

And we have back to back today and tomorrow.

[peoriabird]

Mmmmmmmm???

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I really hope this doesn't mean that the current backup PG asked for a buyout.

The coach is expecting a lot of garbage time after we run them out of the gym in the 3rd!

[HMFFL]

Charlotte is favored by 1.5 points.

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[Spud2nique]

Charlotte is favored by 1.5 points.

Sent from my SM-N920P using RealGM mobile app

Really it was at 3 earlier. Public is piling on Hawks meaning if it’s a fixed game the Hornets should win.

If u ride with the mobs of Vegas and want lobster tonight with the pit bosses u ride with the Hornets.

If ur a die hard Hawks fan and gave up gambling u say GO HAWKS!!!!

[ducler]

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[Hazer]

Hmmmmmmm, Hawks are right back at.....yep.....4.5 games between them and teams directly ahead and behind our 5th worst record. A loss here wouldn't be the end of the world, as there is adequate cushion to absorb it.

[lethalweapon3]

Hooray. It’s Wivalwy Reekend!

I’m in my 15th season of standing fully in my Atlanta Hawks fandom, proudly, with both feet. There were several prompts that allowed this Transp-lantan to shed his wallflower attitude for good, but maybe the most momentous factor was the formal creation of something I silently craved, for over a decade prior.

The 2004-05 season was the kickstart of the NBA’s Southeast Division, the re-introduction of pro hoops to Charlotte making the move by the league to expand to six divisions, three per conference, feasible. This new division’s home markets, without an obvious New York/Los Angeles/Chicago draw, lacked the historical TV revenue generation of its divisional competitors. But the growing shift of hoops-hungry snowbirds, like Yours Truly, were coming in droves to help level the playing field.

Its charter members, in their southeastern residencies, had a total of one NBA championship to their collective credit, a title won a quarter-century before. But that was kind of what appealed to me. Fertile NBA ground, with plenty of room to grow.

Wouldn’t it be cool to brag about getting in on the ground floor of a sizzling geographic rivalry? Before, like, we get placed in a senior home somewhere? I acknowledge, rivalries can take some time to lather up. Few of the attendees up the way from State Farm Arena, at Piedmont Park in 1892, could have envisioned how far Auburn versus Georgia football would go.

But even though it has “only” been 15 years, I’ve grown impatient with the “history” between opponents like the Hawks and the Charlotte then-Bobcats now-Hornets (7:30 PM Eastern, Fox Sports Southeast, 92.9 FM in ATL). Or, between the Hawks and the Magic, who stop by tomorrow night for a spot of tea. Or among everyone, really, in this deity-forsaken division of the Eastern Conference.

Regional rivalries matter, or, at least, they should. New York and Boston are always at each other’s necks in everything, with Philly or D.C. always at the ready to jump into the fray. Milwaukee/Green Bay loathes Chicago, and the feeling from the big brother metro is mutual. Portland and, when they had a team, Seattle, were constantly trying to one-up each other. Anyplace anywhere else in California, versus L.A., is always a good one, as are the battles between Texas cities.

Yet in basketball, as with other pro sports, the southeasternmost franchises got too fragmented, in their early histories, to build up much of a frenemy foundation.

The original Hornets started out in the Atlantic Division in the late 1980s, then joined the Magic in something somehow called the Midwest Division. Washington’s “Eastern” NBA team, and the relocated Hawks from the “Western” St. Louis, didn’t share a division (just a conference, really) until 1970. Even that alliance got broken up by 1978, when the Bullets got shifted to the Northeast’s Atlantic (future home to Miami’s heat) and the Hawks stashed in the real Midwest’s Central.

Even in the 1990s, I imagined seeing these teams scrapping, and being rewarded, for Southern-fried supremacy, the good kind. Just as importantly, I envisioned those rivalries becoming of significance within the national sports consciousness, or least the regional one.

Falcons-Saints. The World’s Biggest Cocktail Shindig or whatever they can call it. Tobacco Road. Iron Bowl. The way fans get together to watch NASCAR racers tradin’ paint at Talladega? That’s what I hoped to see, certainly by now. Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate, NBA-style.

The Falcons, like the Hawks, had decades of opportunity to parlay their cross-country geographic interloping into some America’s Team-style draw, to no avail. But at least they had the Aints to share in co-misery every year since 1970. No matter whether they’re 12-4 or 4-12, Atlanta’s and New Orleans’ football fans hate to lose to one another. Thank goodness nobody’s won a Super Bowl in the other’s Mercedes Benz stadium yet.

After the NFL created the NFC South Division in 2002, and the fanbases of those two teams, plus Tampa Bay’s and Carolina’s, all fit within it as snugly as a non-courtroom glove. Super Bowl ring or naw, “NFC South Champion” has a nice enough ring to it. The move probably prompted the NBA to follow suit. But we’re a decade in a half into this thing and, egad, Where’s The Beef?

Orlando and Miami are natural interstate competitors. Alas, Dwight’s drain-circling spiral began right around the time LeBron and Friends arrived in South Beach. Shaq left one team in the 1990s (like Dwight, to L.A.) only to turn around and win a title with the other one a decade later, more of a coincidence than a useful plotline. Wizards-heat was looking awfully good at the outset of the Southeast Division era, before Gil Arenas chose to unveil his arsenal upon the fellows in his own locker room.

The Hawks and Bul-zards have had their occasional noteworthy playoff clashes, going back to Terry Furlow in the 1970s and leading up to the John Wall era. The high-point of those decades of matchups was, arguably, when Washington rented slow-twitch Paul Pierce to nearly knock off Atlanta’s 60-win team a few seasons ago. Beyond that, and a brief Millsap-Markieff spat, there hasn’t been much to write home about.

The Hawks outlasted the post-Shaq-era heat in seven games in a 2009 first-round series, but each meeting turned out dull and ugly in either direction. 2010 Magic-Hawks was the last time we saw a pair of Southeastern NBA clubs, both Top-4 within the conference, facing off in the second round. The six-game series win by Atlanta over the Magic in 2011, one year after that epic sweep by Orlando, was maybe the closest we got to a tenacious rivalry. But the Dwightmare that unraveled the following season nipped that in the bud.

The last real good playoff battle I can recall was Hornets-heat, Charlotte’s last appearance in 2016. Even then, we needed some rando sitting courtside in a purple shirt, cajoling Dwyane Wade into hitting threes for the first time in his natural life, just to help liven up that conflict. The divisiveness between the clubs didn’t linger very long, either, not in a way that mattered to anyone.

Even the league itself has abandoned hope, electing before the 2015-16 season began to take the teeth out of clinched division titles after 82 games. Eliminating the possibility of a playoff seed upgrade rendered winning a division banner a mere triviality.

Over the past 12 seasons of this six-division era, every team that won their division won at least 45 games, except for two. Miami went 44-38 in 2006-07, then repeated that modest feat last season to edge 8-seeded Washington by a single game.

Facing the East’s second-toughest remaining schedule (as per playoffstatus.com), Charlotte (26-28) will be hard-pressed to even match 44-38. Yet the Hornets stand primed to edge out Miami (25-28) to become the NBA’s third-ever division winner with a losing record.

The last ones to pull off that feat? You’d have to go back a-ways. The Kareem-less Milwaukee Bucks of 1975-76, who finished at 38-44 but skated past a weak Midwest Division field. And, the Pearl Monroe-less Bullets of Baltimore, who went 38-44 to beat out Atlanta by two games for the Central Division crown in 1971-72.

Winning something, despite losing, is an accomplishment that seems conceivable only in a milquetoast division grouping such as this. But Charlotte (6-2 division record), who has never won a division of any stripe over the course of three decades, will happily accept that fate, especially if a playoff spot comes attached to it and, extra-especially, if the upward momentum encourages All-Star Game host Kemba Walker to secure the biggest bag and stick around Uptown a bit longer after this summer.

Somebody in the Southeast is bound to be a playoff team, if only by virtue of the numbers game. Trending Detroit is the only non-Southeast team threatening to steal a 6-through-8 seed from either the Hornets or the heat. It will help tremendously for playoff-hungry teams like the Hornets, heat, and Magic to compile wins versus their division foes.

On that note, it speaks volumes about the State of the Southeast that the winner of this evening’s contest will take the lead for the most intra-division victories to date, and that one of those teams, Atlanta (18-36; 6-5 vs. Southeast), isn’t trying all that hard to put up a banner alongside the one from 2014-15.

Charlotte comes to The Farm with the second-worst road record (7-19) among the East’s playoff contenders – division competitors Washington (6-21) and Orlando (8-17) are about equally awful. They’ve lost two close contests this week, and GM Mitch Kupchak was unable to reel in a big fish – Marc Gasol or, for some reason, Harrison Barnes, as reported by ESPN’s Zach Lowe – prior to Thursday’s trade deadline.

But on the good side for the visitors, Hornets coach James Borrego is getting reinforcements for the playoff run. Starting with starting center Cody Zeller, who returned this week after hand surgery had him missing over a month of action. Zeller’s team-high 6.5 RPG is essential for a Hornets team that, under Borrego, relies on a balanced approach to defensive rebounding (73.4 team D-Reb%, 10th in NBA).

Sidelined with a strained back, backup guard Tony Parker is the only player on Charlotte’s injury list. The Hornets recalled Hawks 2018 Draft Night tradee Devonte’ Graham from G-League Greensboro to help supplant the veteran Parker.

In continuity with a style of play carried over from former coach Steve Clifford, who arrives tomorrow with Orlando, the Hornets don’t produce many assisted plays unless they’re initiated by Walker, Parker, Malik Monk or Nic Batum. But keeping it simple minimizes the stupidity (NBA-low 12.5 TO%).

Teams squandering double-digit leads to lose by double-digits is ho-hum in this day and age of breakneck-paced NBA hoops. I believe I watched at least a couple of instances of that happening in the past couple days since Atlanta’s 66-49 script got flipped in Thursday night’s 119-101 loss to the shorthanded Raptors.

It is always a matter of who can control the ball and the tempo at a scale amenable to their style of play, and Charlotte does what they can to give Kemba (30 points, 11 rebounds, 6 assists @ DAL on Wednesday) a chance at victory by night’s end. In Lukaville, the Hornets lost to a team that was generally just getting to know each other, with one player barely getting a chance to say farewell. But Charlotte’s on-ball defenders would not allow Luka Doncic (triple-double of 19-10-11, but on 5-for-20 FGs) to pull his Mavericks away.

Dallas was unable to build on a nine-point second-quarter lead, Batum and Jeremy Lamb scoring and leaving the door open just enough for Walker to possibly kick through it. They will hope to similarly contain rookie wunderkind Trae Young (team-high-tying 19 points and 5 assists vs. TOR) tonight. Young will try to get John Collins back up to speed after the pair was upstaged by Fred VanVleet and Pascal Siakam, respectively, on Thursday. Collins will certainly hope to outshine rookie Dunk Contestant Miles Bridges, this Saturday and next.

I want a world where I can turn on the sports talk radio stations and hear Phyllis from Mulga passionately arguing with Mel from Southwest over whether the Hawks or Hornets will be more worthy championship contenders come playoff time. Well into our second decade as division foes, the fans in this corner of the NBA galaxy deserve at least that much.

Let’s Go Hawks!
~lw3

[Spud2nique]

Oh man lw3, if you were from Philly I’d think you were from the yay. Seriously do you do these write ups while sipping on the best wine in the world? Is it yoga? You keep me wanting more and often times going to my garage to find my 1989 Xmas gift, NBA encyclopedia, the smell...ahhhh great stuff.

Ps Just played 2k as Hawks and Collins grabbed a board 2 feet above rim.

Ps Go Hawks!

We win tonight!

[Hazer]

Oh man lw3, if you were from Philly I’d think you were from the yay. Seriously do you do these write ups while sipping on the best wine in the world? Is it yoga? You keep me wanting more and often times going to my garage to find my 1989 Xmas gift, NBA encyclopedia, the smell...ahhhh great stuff.

Ps Just played 2k as Hawks and Collins grabbed a board 2 feet above rim.

Ps Go Hawks!

We win tonight!

Strollin’ down the tunnel swirlin’ a goblet of fine red, ala LaBrawna James.

[Hazer]

Well they cain’t shoot 110% all night...

[Hazer]

As I was sayin’...

[Hazer]

Red Alert from Da Huert!

[HMFFL]

I have Charlotte -2 and money line parlayed with UFC.

Charlotte is favored by 1.5 points.

Sent from my SM-N920P using RealGM mobile app

Really it was at 3 earlier. Public is piling on Hawks meaning if it’s a fixed game the Hornets should win.

If u ride with the mobs of Vegas and want lobster tonight with the pit bosses u ride with the Hornets.

If ur a die hard Hawks fan and gave up gambling u say GO HAWKS!!!!

Sent from my SM-N920P using RealGM mobile app