Let’s get something straight at the outset: The Atlanta Hawks and the Washington Wizards are good basketball teams.
The Hawks won 60 regular-season contests. That takes talent. The Wizards have fought well in the playoffs with John Wall either out or battling injuries. Randy Wittman has coached far better than he did in the regular season.
Mike Budenholzer was rightly recognized as the NBA Coach of the Year for this season. Bradley Beal has enjoyed a tremendous Eastern Conference semifinal series against the Hawks. Paul Pierce has reminded us of his Hall of Fame-worthy clutch gene. Al Horford rose above Game 5 Wednesday night in Atlanta with a strong shooting performance, noticeably good rim protection on defense, and the putback bucket which has the Hawks one win away from capturing the series. Even in the midst of chaos and ugliness, small rays of beauty and quality can (and do) emerge.
Please realize that what follows is not some attempt to kick two teams while they’re down, to dump on them just for the sake of it, because it’s easy. This is not an attempt to rain on Atlanta fans’ parade, or to talk about how wretched Eastern Conference basketball can be. (After all, the West semifinal between Houston and the Los Angeles Clippers has been the worst of the four second-round series, hands down.)
There is a purpose, though, in saying just how awful Game 5 of Wizards-Hawks turned out to be. Actually, two purposes exist — one is connected to the art of appraising individual sporting events, the other connected to the reality of team sports as an enduring psychological creature.
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Why is it necessary to take the time to say that Game 5 of Wizards-Hawks was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad pro basketball game? The business of sports commentary must consistently resist the temptation to call a game “good” or “compelling” just because it was extremely close and, accordingly, very dramatic.
Recall those 1990s basket-brawls between the New York Knicks and Miami Heat? Those games were often played in the 70s, with even lower scoring totals than Atlanta’s 82-81 win over Washington on Wednesday. Yet, with the Knicks and the heat in the ’90s, there was no pretense about those teams’ skill sets. They were both limited teams who liked to play (and win) in an ugly way. Defense was everything for them. Tough-guy centers, tough-guy coaches, and a shared emphasis on pure work animated what the Knicks and Heat were all about. When you bought a ticket to one of those New York-Miami games or sat down to watch on TV, you accepted that you were in for a street fight. You were watching for the drama, not the quality. Neither team could blow the other one out because neither team had shooters good enough to create a decisive scoring run.
Sure, the games were close. Sure, they were exciting and dramatic, theatrical in the extreme. Seeing Pat Riley coach against his former team in a series drenched with bad blood made for great television… but terrible basketball.
In Wizards-Hawks, neither team carries an identity anywhere close to what the Knicks and Heat represented in the 1990s. The Hawks in particular were built on the fluid style of play best modeled by the 2014 champion San Antonio Spurs. When fans buy a ticket to a 2015 Hawks game, they expect three-point makes, accurate reads by point guards, and crisp ball movement — basically, what Atlanta brought to the table in a very entertaining and enjoyable Game 4, one that flowed like milk and honey.
Game 4 serves to underscore how awful Game 5 really was. In Game 4, a team that hit 12 of 26 threes lost at home. Excellence was topped by even more excellence on the other side, the mark of a quality competition in which the winner won more than the loser lost.
In Game 5, we had the exact opposite scenario. This is what one could call “hard hat basketball,” given all the falling bricks inside Philips Arena.
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In Game 5, the team that went 5 of 22 from three-point range; watched its best three-point shooter make just one shot in 38 minutes of playing time; scored just one point in the first 6:25 of the fourth quarter; allowed a wide-open three when leading by two in the final 10 seconds of regulation; and committed 23 turnovers… WON.
That team — Atlanta — won despite all those train-wreck statistics because its opponent shot just 37.5 percent from the floor; scored under 20 points in three of four quarters; and committed 19 turnovers, the last of which gave the Hawks an 80-78 lead in the final half-minute. That turnover (by Pierce) enabled Horford’s putback to lead to a game-winning layup, as opposed to a desperate kickout for a tying three, which — given Kyle Korver’s failures in this series — almost certainly would have missed the mark.
If greater excellence trumped excellence in a magnificent Game 4, acute failure turned out to be one point worse than almost-as-acute failure in Game 5.
42 total turnovers.
9-of-39 three-point shooting.
Washington’s bench shooting 3 for 21 from the field.
Atlanta’s non-Jeff Teague backcourt shooting 4 of 20 from the field.
Five quarters under 20 points (3 for Washington, 2 for Atlanta).
Game 5 of a 2-2 conference semifinal series should feature two teams that raise their games as they settle into a series and reach for glory. Wednesday showed two teams that shrank instead of growing larger. If anyone calls this a good basketball game, such a commentator or observer is falling into the trap of equating a close score with quality of play. Let’s use this occasion to separate the two if the contours of competition demand such a verdict.
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Now, to the second purpose for tearing Game 5 to shreds.
Very simply, it is easy — and moreover, often accurate — to say that what happened in the past has no bearing on the present. This is the province of analytics experts who rightly make the claim that just because X happened then, X will repeat itself now. It’s true that the past can’t lead to assumptions of what will happen in the present or the future. Each event is its own organic self. Narrowly, the analytics community is correct and logically consistent.
And yet…
We do see from time to time how history — the weight of past experiences with different players, coaches and management — sits heavily on present-day performers.
We saw this in 2003 with the Chicago Cubs in Games 6 and 7 of the National League Championship Series against the Florida (now Miami) Marlins. The Detroit Lions and Cincinnati Bengals relentlessly tighten up and shrivel when they make the NFL playoffs or play a late-season game of particular consequence. In hockey, the St. Louis Blues freeze when playing Game 5 of a 2-2 playoff series at home. The players and coaches change every several years or so, but the results somehow wind up being the same.
It’s baffling, but it happens in sports (college as well as pro): Franchises — specific teams — are not individual persons, but their results over many decades are consistent with psychologically paralyzed patients who need some form of psychotherapy. It is uncanny, but it happens. It’s that terrain of sports which can’t easily be explained by numbers, and hence, it’s the part of sports which exists beyond a realm analytics can encompass.
Very simply, the Hawks and Wizards — two teams quite unaccustomed to playing in a game of this significance, this deep into the playoffs — reminded all of us on Wednesday…
… why they haven’t often played a game of significance, this deep into the playoffs.
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Game 5 of Wizards-Hawks kicked James Naismith’s game to the curb. It’s not worth celebrating the fact that Atlanta won, because the Hawks should have lost as a result of such a performance. It’s not worth emphasizing how the Hawks came back, because Washington didn’t play well in its own right.
This was a story of how two teams littered the stat sheet with horror-show numbers. One had to win… on a night when both deserved to lose.
The Hawks and Wizards have a maximum of two more games in which to determine how they want this series to be remembered. If the quality of play doesn’t improve in Games 6 and (if necessary) Game 7, the winner of the series will have to do something of note in the Eastern Conference Finals in order to say that it achieved something of substance in the playoffs.
