Sunday Shootaround: The Hawks were no fluke

BOSTON -- The Atlanta Hawks are 8-3, owners of the second-best record in the Eastern Conference and they are once again one of the best passing and shooting teams in the league. Before dropping two of their three games this week, they had won seven straight including victories over Miami and Washington, a pair of teams many suspected would overtake the Hawks this season. A little early season validation, perhaps?

"I don’t know where we are in the standings right now," Atlanta forward Kyle Korver said. "Somewhere at the top."

You can forgive the Hawks if they are unimpressed with their early-season success. This is what they’ve come to expect from themselves. While others may have written them off as a one-season novelty that was exposed in the playoffs, they feel like that was just the beginning of a sustained run that will continue to develop as they improve with time and experience. Exciting, they’re not. Still, has any objectively good team come into the season with less fanfare and hype than the Hawks?

Maybe it’s because they lost DeMarre Carroll in free agency and plugged in journeyman Kent Bazemore into his spot. Or maybe it’s because of the way they finished last season coasting down the stretch before ending with a pair of tougher-than-expected playoff series and a disheartening sweep in the conference finals against the Cavs. Their collective response to all that is a shrug.

"The beginning of the season is all based on what you see on paper and that’s what everyone bases their opinion on," Korver said. "We’re not the most physically dominating team and then the way the season ended. We understand that. It’s fine. We’ve got to earn our respect. You’re supposed to earn what you get in this league."

What the Hawks have earned at this point is the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps that should have extended to all those preseason prognostications, but what’s the difference anyway? Few teams are as unbothered about things as Atlanta for whom "trust the process" may as well be stitched onto their gaudy new dayglo uniforms. In small type, of course, so as not to be too distracting. The big picture is what’s important here, and the big picture is all they ever talk about.

It’s revealing that Korver’s response to my initial question about what’s changed this season mainly involved what hasn’t: continuity, familiarity, coach Mike Budenholzer’s deliberate message. Where they have changed, Korver believes, is through the experience of having gone through that playoff run. In some ways it confirmed many people’s suspicions about the Hawks as a great regular season team that would struggle against star-laden teams in the postseason. But to them it was an essential experience. Regrets about how it ended? No.

"I don’t think we look at it that way," Korver said. "Everyone who’s here and what Bud preaches every day, is we’re on this journey and we’re going to keep on growing. Because the way the regular season went, all of a sudden expectations for us jumped quite a bit higher. We weren’t supposed to win a championship last year. You’ve got to earn a championship. You’ve got to go through some hard times. That’s just a rite of passage.

"Are we going to win a championship, are we not? I don’t know, man. That’s definitely our goal but in a lot of ways it was a good series for us. You never want it to end it that way. We had guys hurt, we got swept, it was a hard ending in a lot of ways. Overall, if we’re looking at the bigger picture and not just one playoff series we’re still headed in the right direction. It’s easy to say that, but I really feel like that’s the goal of our organization and not just our team."

There have been little tiny things that have changed for Atlanta, at least in the early part of the season. Jeff Teague is scoring a bit more. Al Horford is producing at even better level than last season. Korver’s shots and three-point attempts are down a bit as he works his way back from a pair of offseason surgeries. (Paul Millsap remains Paul Millsap. The dude is a metronome.) The Hawks aren’t quite as dominant as they were during their best days of last season, but they have been consistently good and there again is that process that needs to develop.

"I’m still working my way into rhythm," Korver said. "I think Bud’s been a little cautious with me as far as minutes and in games. He’s not calling my number as much right now and teams are guarding me tightly. It’s part of it. I’ve had a couple of games here and there where I felt like I was in rhythm, but I’m still putting some things back together. A lot of us last year had incredible starts to the season and it was great to experience that. Now we know, not that we didn’t before, but there’s even more emphasis for us on finishing strong."

The Hawks did add Tiago Splitter, giving them much-needed size off the bench. They also welcomed back Thabo Sefolosha and brought in Justin Holiday, who is exactly the kind of player who tends to thrive in their system. In many ways, Holiday is a lot like Bazemore who was a lot like DeMarre Carroll, unheralded journeymen wings who just needed a chance to play consistent minutes and develop. If Carroll was the first great success story of Atlanta’s skill development machine, then Bazemore is the next in line.

"He saw what he could be in this league, not that he is ever lacking in confidence," Korver said. "He’s really grown as a skill player. He’s just been an energy guy for a bunch of years, people just thought of him as, ‘He’s going to play so hard and make some awesome plays and he’s going to have a turnover here and there.’ But I think his skill level and his IQ just keep on going in the right direction. His ceiling is so far from what he can be still."

Knowing that he would be in line for a bigger role following Carroll’s departure, Bazemore hit the gym in the offseason. He stayed in Atlanta and worked on his shot, running through the gamut of in-game actions: contested shots, uncontested shots, catch-and-shoot, pin-downs.

"Most of it was mental. Just accepting the change," Bazemore said. "The body follows the mind. So once you lock in up top, the body follows. For me it was getting in there, believing in it and shooting a bunch of them."

Bazemore also played a lot of golf. Oddly enough, the two things are related.

"Golf and basketball are two extremes," Bazemore said. "It’s staying within your tempo, which is the same as a jump shot. For me, golf taught me a lot of patience. If I get to a shot and the wind picks up, I don’t like the club I got in my hand, I have the patience to go back to the bag, take another club and hit the same shot."

Bazemore is in the lineup for his defense but he’s been a revelation on the offensive end. He’s more than doubled his career scoring average, which is one by-product of a minutes increase. More importantly, he’s shooting 41 percent from behind the arc and he’s been deadly from the corner. Hot starts eventually fade, but Bazemore has made himself into a competent shooter from long range, just like so many others on this team. This is the heart of the Hawks’ ethos, to take players into their system not as finished products, but as players who can continue to develop.

"You’ve got to look at the type of guys they bring in, all they know how to do is work," Bazemore said. "DeMarre’s a blue collar guy, Paul Millsap, everybody on this roster from top to bottom is a guy that puts in tons of hours of work. You see guys get better every day and from year to year. The guys they brought back from last year, everybody’s gotten so much better. Player development is something that should be harped on by all teams but for the ones that do, you can definitely see that it pays off."

None of this is as satisfying as a splashy offseason move and none of it solves the eternal conundrum of a team full of skilled overachievers matching up with more physically talented opponents, but all of it is good for something. The Hawks are building a team with staying power. Last season may have been a wondrous surprise, but it’s not the end for them. Not by a long shot.

They say it takes at least three years to evaluate a draft and with good reason. Anthony Davis struggled as a rookie, Draymond Green was coming off the bench until last season and Andre Drummond was more myth than monolith before this season began. As we enter Year 4, let’s revisit and reframe the 2012 draft class’s top 5. (Dion Waiters not included).

1. Anthony Davis: The idea for this List came about after I saw some people questioning whether Andre Drummond would go first if you could do it all over again. Let’s stop that kind of talk right now. Thanks to the Pelicans’ atrocious start and some uninspired AD performances during the first week of the season, Davis’ stock hasn’t been this low since his rookie season. It’s fair to take a closer look at his game and his part in the Pels’ struggles, but let’s be real about who he is right now (a top-10 player) and what he could be in the future (a perennial MVP candidate). You take Anthony Davis first every single time and count your lucky lottery stars for the opportunity.

2. Andre Drummond: Here’s where it gets interesting. Drummond slipped to ninth on draft day over concerns about his work ethic. The projection game is a dangerous one because Drummond has been notably durable and is coming into his own as a terrifying rim destroyer and protector. You can build a franchise around him, assuming he can improve his woeful free throw shooting. That’s why he goes second in a redraft, but let’s imagine the conversation between GM and owner in the days leading up to the selection.

GM:"It will take some time, but by Year 4 he could be a major player."
Owner:"If it takes four years you’ll probably be out of a job."

Grabbing Drummond with the ninth pick was a huge coup for Joe Dumars and a fantastic farewell present to the franchise he ran for so long.

3. Damian Lillard: When the Blazers drafted Lillard with the sixth pick in 2012, GM Neil Olshey wanted to send a clear message that the job belonged to the rookie from Weber State. Olshey didn’t sign a veteran backup to compete for minutes or provide a steadying hand when things got rough. The job was Lillard’s and he took it and ran with it. Dame has started 273 consecutive games and played close to 3,000 minutes every season. He’s been Rookie of the Year, a two-time All-Star and helped the Blazers to a pair of 50-win playoff seasons. It’s his team now and the young crew he’s leading have been a pleasant surprise thus far. In the abstract you take Drummond second because franchise big men don’t come out very often, but even with the benefit of hindsight, passing on Dame would be a helluva thing.

4. Draymond Green: We all know the profile on four-year college players without an obvious position: too small to guard fours, not quick enough to defend wings and not athletic enough to create his own shot. Skilled, but limited upside. Now, of course, every wannabe small-ball team in the league would kill to have Draymond Green on their roster. He had the skills, yet Green’s actual upside was rooted in what we like to call intangibles but can actually be measured and quantified. Friends of the Shootaround Eric Weiss and Kevin O’Connor have a fascinating psychological profile of Green over at DraftExpress that gets into this more deeply. The bottom line is that Green’s ability to defend multiple positions is absolutely crucial to Golden State’s success and you can make the case that he’s their second-best player after Steph Curry. Footnote: Green turned out to be what the Hornets hoped Michael Kidd-Gilchrist would become. Considering their respective ages, that’s a decision just about every team would make on draft day.

5. Bradley Beal: The Wizards selected Beal ahead of Lillard and Drummond in a decision that was, and is, absolutely defensible. They already had John Wall and while Drummond would be fantastic in Washington as his pick-and-roll partner, the Wiz elected to go with Beal as his backcourt complement. The biggest thing that has held Beal back have been injuries. He looked well on his way to joining Drummond on the Breakout All-Stars before injuring his shoulder in a loss to Atlanta, elevating he and Wall into the upper tier of backcourts. While nothing is a sure thing in the draft process, Beal was seen as far more polished and mature to handle the NBA grind than Drummond. It would be fascinating to see how this dynamic has played out over time and whether there’s a quantifiable reason for rolling with the known over potential, beyond gut-feel.