Can anything good come out of these collapses?

[ATL DirtyBird]

Twice in 5 games we have lost games in sickening fashion. Can we expect any adjustments or changes from these meltdowns? Or is Woodson incapable or properly analyzing and adjusting? I vote for the later because some of these mistakes can be avoided (switching, which leads to the bad double teams, ill timed iso's, etc etc).

Hey, at least the player we all deemed as incurable seems to have turned the page and turned into a monster. Young Josh is balling and as long as hes playing like this I have hope.

[azuresou1]

Woody hasn't learned anything this season, if he's letting Bibby still get so much time when we need defense.

[parson]

Woodson getting fired?

Ya know, we drafted fantastic YOUNG talent, only to choose a coach who is HORRIBLE at developing talent. We've essentially wasted that great drafting position.

[HoopsGuru25]

The Hawks were actually the best 4th quarter team in the league last year. Their problem used to be the 1st 5-6 minutes of games where they just came out shell shocked and got down double digits before the 1st timeout(Miami/Cleveland/Boston series).

Just looking at the Hawks collapses in the last 2 years...the opposing pg has always had a monster game outside of the Lebron birthday game.

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/boxscore?gameId=300226001
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/boxscore?gameId=300221009
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/boxscore?gameId=300101001
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/boxscore?gameId=291230005
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/boxscore?gameId=291219004
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/boxscore?gameId=291126001
http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/boxscore?gameId=290102017

[Master8492]

Like I said, the lineup of Bibby, Crawford and Joe is not going to work against good teams, especially when defense/rebound is what the Hawks needed in order to maintain the lead. Why not play Bibby, JJ, Marvin, Smoove, Horford in the fourth? That's what you start with then you you need to finish with it.

[evildallas]

I've not seen signs of it yet, but the coaching staff and players need to learn from failures. I'm tired of hearing stuff like "we had good shots be they just weren't falling."

1. If confronted with a zone we need to recognize that and have a plan to get generate makeable open shots.

2. If no one is hitting their jumpers, we need to a strategy to get to the basket or foul line. The follow-up to that is that if no one is hitting their jumpers Woodson needs to try tweaking the lineup either to give someone else a shot at a jumper or changing the offensive focus.

3. There needs to be a realization that the switching defense as designed has some flaws. Sometimes it has to be selectively applied. For instance, Bibby isn't physically capable to switch everything. Too short, too slow. In the Dallas game, Barrea had the ball, Dirk set the pick. Josh switches with Bibby to deny an open shot or lane to Barrea and then hustles back to get the ball out of Dirk's hands. Dirk would throw the ball back to Barrea who would flare out. Joe would attempt to rotate over to Barrea from Kidd. The rotation out to Kidd was too slow to stop him from draining a 3, but had it been faster we'd probably have surrendered a lay up by Kidd passing the ball down low. This happened 3 times in a row without any defensive change. I would have thought that making Barrea prove he could nail the jumper would have come up during that stretch. That or getting Bibby off the court.

The point of this rehash is that the team never varied their defensive approach to a play that was repeatedly trimming the lead 3 points at a time. The options were present to try to plug the gap and we just didn't take them. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. That doesn't give me hope that we learn to adapt over whole games.