The New England Patriots have won the Super Bowl. Spring Training is still a month away, as is March Madness. That means you now have no valid excuse for turning your attention to the NBA. Well, OK, other than being a Knicks or Lakers fan. Here’s this week’s biggest basketball stories.
The Atlanta Hawks win streak ends at 19 games
January marked a turning point for the Atlanta Hawks, as the question surrounding the team went from “are the Hawks real?” to “are the Hawks really the best team in the East?” They went 17-0 in the month of January, an immaculate record that helped solidify their status as the favorites to win the Eastern Conference.
In fact, it would eventually take Anthony Davis going full on Anthony Davis to finally stop them. He scored 29 points and snagged 13 rebounds in Monday night’s New Orleans Pelicans’ 115-100 victory over the Hawks, snapping their win streak at a franchise-record 19 games. Even with that loss, the Hawks 40-7 record puts them seven games ahead of the second place Toronto Raptors in the Eastern Conference standings.
No shame in being beaten by the best.
With the East up in the air after LeBron James’s return to the Cleveland Cavaliers, there was always a chance that an upstart team would capitalize on the opportunity and separate itself from the rest of the pack. It’s just that nobody suspected it would be the Hawks, especially not after an offseason where the only headlines they made were those involving their controlling owner and general manager being pushed out the door after making racially insensitive remarks.
Instead, the star-less Hawks have been playing near-flawless team basketball and are actually drawing in fans. As Yahoo! Sports’ Jay Busbee reports:
Hawks attendance, always a league joke, is higher than it’s been in five years, and nearing capacity levels. The team touts its increased merchandise sales as a sign of fans’ loyalty beyond just showing up. A demographic cross-section that cuts across age, race and gender now fills Philips Arena. A Hawks game is now a destination, not an obligation.
Maybe the “league joke” line is a key to how many of us missed what the Hawks were poised to do. Sometimes those of us who write about the game are so quick to go for the easy punchlines that we don’t actually see the teams and players that are actually playing. It’s why it took far too long for us to write about how the Golden State Warriors had transformed into one of the best defensive teams in the league or admit that Monta Ellis has become an all-star caliber player with the Dallas Mavericks.
And it’s why that many, including this writer, just assumed during this summer that this Hawks team was destined for another first round playoff exit, played in a half-empty arena and broadcast exclusively on NBA TV. Instead they are now playing like a team that believes it can make the NBA Finals and, amazingly, they may be right.
The NBA All-Star reserves were announced
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Coaches around the NBA kept the success of the Atlanta Hawks in mind when they made their votes for the 2015 All-Star reserves. When the lineups were announced on Thursday, Hawks Al Horford, Jeff Teague and Paul Millsap all made the cut for the Eastern Conference. Even then there were discussions about whether or not Atlanta was sufficiently represented, as Kyle Korver, who might be having the best shooting season of anybody in the NBA, missed the final cut.
Korver has a case, but it’s easy to understand why he didn’t make it. The All-Star Game roster will always be tilted in favor of the bigger names, even when its the coaches and not the fans who do the voting. Yes, maybe this season’s edition of the Miami Heat really didn’t deserve to be represented by both Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade (who might miss the game with a hamstring injury) but it’s not a huge travesty that they get a little extra push after four straight years of representing the East in the NBA Finals.
And yes, perhaps the Cleveland Cavaliers’ slow start should have precluded the presence of guard Kyrie Irving, but Irving’s pivotal role in their recent turnaround has made it difficult to argue against the selection. That just leaves the Chicago Bulls’ Jimmy Butler, who arguably has had a good enough year to start the All-Star Game.
So apologies to Korver, but for the most egregious snub this year we turn to the 2015 Western Conference All-Star roster which, somehow, will not include Damian Lillard of the Portland Trail Blazers. Yes, the voters had a much tougher job in the West, which is stacked with great teams with rosters overflowing with great talent, but it’s still annoying that maybe the most clutch performer in the league didn’t get an invite. Even when a move had to be made to replace injured Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant, voted in by fans to be a starter, commissioner Adam Silver picked the Sacramento Kings’ DeMarcus Cousins to fill the spot in the lineup.
While Lillard has vowed not to forget the snub, it should appease him a bit that at least teammate LaMarcus Aldridge will be representing Portland in the All-Star Game. Aldridge will join the Oklahoma City Thunder’s Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant, the San Antonio Spurs’ Tim Duncan, the Houston Rockets’ James Harden, the Los Angeles Clippers’ Chris Paul and the Golden State Warriors’ Klay Thompson among the Western Conference all-star reserves.
Admitting that Lillard was snubbed means removing one of the above players from the list, and they all deserve to make the trip to New York. Perhaps the real problem lies in the fact that the Western Conference right now is too loaded with talent to be properly represented by the current NBA structure.
Unlike the discussion about revamping the playoff structure, there seems to be a relatively simple solution here. Silver has said he’s open to the idea of expanding the All-Star rosters which, honestly, feels like something of a no-brainer considering the absolute surplus of amazing basketball players out there.
This isn’t the Pro Bowl in the NFL, where somehow an Andy Dalton makes the roster every year, or the MLB All-Star Game where the rules end up forcing coaches to include a player from every team, even the Arizona Diamondbacks. There’s no good reason that there’s no room for Lillard or Korver on the NBA All-Star roster.
The Injury Report
The Western Conference is so brutal that it seems quite likely that the final seedings will be determined by which contending teams end the season with the fewest major injuries. If so, this has been a bad week for the Houston Rockets and the Dallas Mavericks.
In Houston, Dwight Howard is out indefinitely with a right knee injury. The good news for the Rockets is that they have been playing consistently with or without their star center, who has been missing games or playing hurt throughout much of the season.
Can that continue though? Can the Rockets system keep humming even without the Last Of The “True” Centers on the floor? Can James Harden channel his inner Kevin Durant and keep up his MVP caliber of play long enough for Howard to get right? Or is this line of questioning just blatant concern trolling from those of us who find the Rockets’ style of play annoying and hate the fact that it seems to be working?
Meanwhile the Mavericks’ decision to go all-in and trade away valuable bench assets in exchange for Boston Celtics point guard Rajon Rondo has hit a pretty major snag. Rondo will be out indefinitely after an eye injury suffered in a collision with his own team-mate, Richard Jefferson. It’s yet another freak injury in a career that seems to be full of them for Rondo, and Dallas has to hope that the point guard’s unique stubbornness means that he will be back on the court sooner rather than later.
Oh there is good news in the Western Conference though: Ricky Rubio made his return to the Minnesota Timberwolves lineup on Monday after missing most of the season with an ankle injury. Since this is Minnesota, Rubio’s return won’t really make much of a difference in the standings, the Timberwolves fell to the Mavericks in his first game back, but still: the game is more fun when Rubio’s around.
The Cleveland Cavaliers can’t lose, Kevin Love can’t win
When the New Orleans Pelicans handed the Atlanta Hawks their first loss of 2015, that meant that the Cleveland Cavaliers now had the NBA’s longest active winning streak. The Cavaliers have won their last 11 games and maybe, just maybe, are finally start to coalesce into something resembling the team they should be on paper.
The biggest reason that the Cavaliers have started to put things together has been that LeBron James has looked more like himself after that two week stretch of missed games. The second biggest reason is that Kyrie Irving has been justifying his All-Star selection. When the Cavaliers played against the Portland Trail Blazers last Wednesday, Irving put up a career high 55 points in the 99-94 Cleveland victory.
Power forward Kevin Love has not been getting the same amount of credit. It’s been a bad week for Love, in fact. First he didn’t make the All-Star team, while Klay Thompson, the Golden State Warriors player he could have been traded for during the offseason break breezed in.
Then, in his first game playing in Minnesota since being traded, the Timberwolves organization declined to give him the traditional video tribute, preferring to honor Mike Miller instead (although Timberwolves head coach Flip Saunders was not amused at the prank). Finally, in the midst of the Cavaliers going on their first huge win streak, the main headlines are all about … LeBron James maybe sorta kinda calling him out for being too passive. One shudders to think of the atrocious Love puns that would be making the headlines if the Cavaliers were on an 11 game losing streak.
Other things we’ve learned
• Admission: If the Cavaliers were struggling my atrocious Kevin Love pun would have been either “Love will tear us apart” or “Love --> building on fire.”
• The biggest transaction of the previous week has been the Oklahoma City Thunder signing Nick Collison to a two-year extension. No, not the sexiest of weeks for industry gossip fodder. Nobody could have even floated a Brook Lopez trade rumor or something?
• A writer once predicted that Sacramento Kings center DeMarcus Cousins would be arrested in five years’ time. Five years later, Cousins called him out. Awesome.
• Because we’re obligated to include at least one Super Bowl related item this week: The great Jackie MacMullan wonders if the New England Patriots are the San Antonio Spurs of the NFL. Now I’m trying to imagine Gregg Popovich and Bill Belichick in the same press conference. It would be like a Samuel Beckett play except without all the warmth and cheer.
• Dunk of the week: Damian Lillard states his all-star case to a receptive Rudy Gobert.
