Pac's Resurrection: The Official 2014-15 Atlanta Hawks Season Thread

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http://espn.go.com/blog/marc-stein/post/_/id/3389/coach-of-the-first-trimester-2

Coach of the First Trimester: Mike Budenholzer, Atlanta


I know what you're going to say.

You only picked Budenholzer to make yourself look good, Stein.

I get it, too. That's a natural leap to make if you've paid close enough attention to recall that, on both the pages of ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com, Budenholzer was my preseason Coach of the Year pick.

Yet I would argue, in response, that you're being overly conspiratorial. Look at Atlanta's roster. Look at the Hawks' record. Look at what they've done these past two weeks alone after everyone dismissed their 16-7 start by citing an easy early schedule.

First Trimester Report
It is often said Christmas signals the real start of the NBA season for much of the sporting public.

Not around here, though.

Can't speak for the Casual Sports Fan Universe, but what we reflexively say at Stein Line HQ is that the arrival of Christmas reminds us we're already one-third of the way through the regular season.

In other words: It's Trimester Time!

As introduced last December when Stein Line Live was in its infancy, each of our seven traditional Trimester categories will be unveiled here one at a time. Through the prism of the NBA's major award categories, this is how we take stock of what we've seen so far now that every team has essentially reached the 27-game threshold.

Click here for more awards »

Don't forget, furthermore, all the Danny Ferry-related turmoil Atlanta lugged into the season and the stability Budenholzer has provided. The Hawks don't have an obvious All-Star and are challenging for the Eastern Conference lead, which is a significant achievement no matter how underwhelming two-thirds of the East looks.

The hard part here, of course, is choosing Budenholzer over Steve Kerr, whose recent 16-game winning streak fell one shy of the record for rookie coaches ... just one win shy of the 17-gamer that a certain Arnold "Red" Auerbach enjoyed as the first-year coach of the Washington Capitols back in 1946-47.

Kerr has made an immediate impact in Golden State, simultaneously making a mockery of the notion -- which yours truly bought into -- that replacing a coach as popular with his players as Mark Jackson would be problematic. Kerr had the Warriors in the top five in offensive and defensive efficiency when he awoke on Christmas morning, spicing things up at the fun end with more ball and player movement without the Dubs losing anything on D ... even with anchor/rim protector Andrew Bogut playing all of two minutes in Golden State's past nine games.

We're simply giving the slightest of nods to Budenholzer, one-third of the way in, because he has less overall talent and less of a ready-made squad when the season started given Al Horford's gradual return from injury. It must be said, though, that the narrow margins here are reminiscent of how taut things are in the West MVP race.

Other names to earn serious COFT consideration: Portland's Terry Stotts, Houston's Kevin McHale, Toronto's Dwane Casey and Milwaukee's Jason Kidd, who has almost matched Milwaukee's 2013-14 win total with 63 games left on its schedule.
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http://www.cbssports.com/nba/writer...a-threat-in-the-east-with-spurs-like-approach

Hawks become a threat in the East with Spurs-like approach
December 26, 2014 2:04 pm ET

  • Coach Mike Budenholzer, a former Spurs assistant, has the Hawks on a roll. (USATSI)
    ATLANTA -- About an hour before tipoff, in the place they used to call the "Highlight Factory," Dominique Wilkins darts around the Philips Arena court. He is wearing a crisp beige suit and a million-dollar smile.

    He is inhaling every breath of this strange, wonderful new experience on Marietta Street, in the city that professional basketball forgot for years.

    Wilkins, who looks like he can still take off from the foul line and dunk at 54 years old, hugs friends and fans, poses for cell-phone pictures and generally excels in his role as professional multitasker -- broadcaster, bon vivant, ambassador, cheerleader, you name it.

    On any given night as the Hawks mow through the first two months of the NBA season -- their 21-7 record heading into the weekend is tied for the best start in franchise history -- Wilkins is the most famous Hawk in the building. But this takes nothing away from the sparkling performances he witnesses from his seat at the scorer's table on a nightly basis.

    "There's two things that excite me about the team: team defense and playing defense on the ball is the most impressive thing," Wilkins told CBSSports.com. "You see a lot of teams rely too much on help; the Hawks defend out front. Secondly, ball movement from side to side. They share the ball. They give up a good shot for a great shot."

    In short, the Atlanta Hawks are for real.

    Let me repeat that, so it sinks in: The Atlanta Hawks are for real.

    Heading into a home-and-home back-to-back with Milwaukee this weekend, the Hawks have won 14 of 15, and their 13-2 record at Philips Arena is the best in the Eastern Conference.

    Of particular note, they have won five straight against teams with winning records -- the Bulls, Cavs, Rockets, Mavs and Clippers. Their collective winning percentage of .685 prior to playing the Hawks is the highest of any five teams Atlanta has beaten consecutively in its history. Three of those wins -- against Cleveland, Houston and Dallas -- came on the road with starting point guard Jeff Teague sidelined with an injury.

    "I think that we have a system established here and we have a group of guys that understand the concept of teamwork and doing things as a team," said Al Horford, the biggest star on a team notably lacking in star power. "When you have a group of guys like that, it makes everything easier."

    Other than Horford, Paul Millsap and the little-used Elton Brand are the only current Hawks with an All-Star appearance on his resume -- and Horford doesn't even consider himself a true All-Star. This story comes courtesy of the second-most famous Hawk who just happened to be in the building on Tuesday night, Clippers coach Doc Rivers.

    Rivers, who played with Wilkins on the last Hawks team that generated this kind of excitement, was coaching the East All-Stars in 2011 while still with Boston. Before the game, Horford came up to him with the rarest of admissions.

    "The first thing he did was walk up to me an say, 'I'm not really an All-Star, so I don't mind if you don't have to play me,' " Rivers said. "How many All-Stars do that? I was thankful because the other 11 wanted to play. It was funny; he viewed himself as a great player. He knows he's really good and a great player, and he's an All-Star. But to have the humility to come up to a coach and say that, they have a bunch of guys like that and that's why they're so good."

    They're so good for a lot of reasons, and a lot of them are complicated.

    The Hawks have five players averaging double figures in points and seven averaging 8.0 or more. They have no players averaging 34 minutes a game, yet they have five players averaging more than 30. They're seventh in the NBA in both offensive and defensive rating, and they're built to last, too. Kyle Korver is the only starter over 30 years old.

    The coach who makes all of this work is Mike Budenholzer, who obviously was paying attention while sitting next to Gregg Popovich on the San Antonio bench all those years. While watching film of the Hawks' offense this week, the Clippers' Blake Griffin confided that it's like preparing to play the Spurs -- the constant ball movement, perpetual cutting and screening, the weak-side actions that build trust that the ball will find its way side-to-side multiple times in a single possession.

    Wearing a ball cap and sweats as he addressed the media before the Clippers game, Budenholzer spoke in cliches and revealed little. This is in contrast to his mentor, Popovich, who fashions words into carefully sharpened machetes dripping with the blood of his cowering victims -- and reveals little.

    Budenholzer, perhaps stung by being arrested on a DUI charge soon after getting the job, is oddly suspicious of the Atlanta media -- a small, mostly docile fraternity that is nonetheless suspect of the Hawks' success, having witnessed so much mind-numbing failure and boredom over the years. The Hawks' history in Atlanta -- for years at the old Omni, and now at Philips -- has been mostly forgettable. The bursts of success haven't been long enough to distract the transient fan base from its first love, college sports, or the teams they left behind in cities where they used to live.

    "We had a two-year run in Atlanta when I was here, and then we stopped winning," Rivers told CBSSports.com. "It's got to be consistent. You can see the city is turned on by this team."

    Somehow, it seems so Hawks-like that the very architect of this rare attempt at building a foundation that will last -- another San Antonio graduate who so deftly plucked Budenholzer off the Popovich tree -- has disappeared. Danny Ferry can only do what many Atlantans are doing for the first time in years -- watch the Hawks on TV and enjoy their success from afar.

    During a June conference call with members of the team's fractured, dysfunctional ownership group, Ferry made a potentially career-killing mistake. Just weeks after Clippers owner Donald Sterling was banned for life and ordered to sell his team for making racially insensitive statements that were recorded and broadcast by TMZ, Ferry made the unconscionable choice to make such comments on a company business call.

    Referring to a scouting report prepared for him, Ferry said that free agent Luol Deng has "got some African in him." Deng, from the Sudan, was described by Ferry as duplicitous -- someone who "has a nice store out front but will sell you counterfeit stuff out of the back."

    The call was recorded and leaked to TMZ. By then, it already had launched an internal probe that uncovered insensitive emails sent by majority owner Bruce Levenson, who agreed to sell his stake in the franchise. Ferry was placed on an indefinite leave of absence.

    Ferry, who declined to comment, has remained in Atlanta with his family while meeting with community leaders and trying to make amends. He recently returned from an NBA-sponsored trip to Africa, where he went in an attempt to further his education and sharpen his cultural awareness. He's remorseful about the mistake and has said it does not represent his views.

    The episode happened at the worst possible time, according to Rivers, who would know: during the offseason, when players were scattered around the country.

    "I had my guys around," Rivers told CBSSports.com. "I could see them and put my hands on them and talk to them every day. Bud had a much harder challenge, because they were away from everybody and so they were getting stuff from other people. I thought that was very difficult. And Bud and whoever else had to work on bringing them together and getting into them and talking to them."

    That's the thing -- who, exactly, was the whoever else? The mark of a successful front office is one in which the coach and GM are in lock step, but Budenholzer -- elevated to head of basketball operations on the post-Ferry organizational chart -- was on his own, just 16 months into the job. Minority owner Steve Koonin was elevated to CEO and hired the organization's first chief diversity officer, Nzinga Shaw. The sale of the team is slowly moving forward, complicated (as most Hawks business has been for years) by the competing interests among so many ownership factions.

    There was healing to be done, and as far as Rivers was concerned, it needed to start with the players.

    "Mine was in some ways easier," Rivers said. "It was the owner; it was the head guy, and I didn't have a real relationship. Bud had relationships, and so that was a hard thing for him to go through. He went through it great, but I don't know, that had to be very hard for him -- and the players. You forget about the players in this whole thing, too.

    "We're the ones, the people above the players, that are supposed to get the stuff right," he said. "We're not supposed to make the mistakes. And all of a sudden the people above them are making all the mistakes, and that should never happen. When that happens, you have to get it right with them."

    Horford said the players "understood that was something that was above us. We couldn't control that. Our job here is to represent the Atlanta Hawks and to work. And so when that happened, we just kept working. We kept working even harder. We were here in September, all of us, working together and we decided to focus on our team."

    Ferry hopes to return, but all bets are off once a new ownership group is in place. Rivers, speaking from experience when it comes to how a race scandal can rock a franchise, was careful not to exonerate or condemn him.

    "I'm not smart enough to ever know, is it ignorance or racism," Rivers said. "I don't think any of us is that smart. I don't know if I get upset; I've just never liked when people think they know which one it is. It happened. I was happy that it came out and I was happy that it was resolved, and that's all you can do. You move on and you learn."

    While there's no excusing Ferry's poor judgment, there's also no denying the job he did in building what might be the best team in the Eastern Conference. He dumped Joe Johnson's supposedly untradeable contract and unloaded Marvin Williams, the embodiment of past organizational folly when he was selected in the 2005 draft ahead of Chris Paul. And that was just the beginning.

    Ferry drafted Mike Scott in the second round; signed Macedonian forward Pero Antic; replaced the erratic Josh Smith (since waived by the Pistons and signed by the Rockets) with Paul Millsap for less than $10 million a year; got Korver from the Bulls for next to nothing; and drafted German point guard Dennis Schroder, who piloted the team to those three straight road victories over Cleveland, Houston and Dallas while Teague was hurt.

    The Hawks have three second-round picks incoming from trades Ferry has made, plus the right to swap with Brooklyn in the 2015 draft -- potentially, a lottery pick. The Deng incident cannot be erased -- it will follow Ferry for the rest of his basketball career, if and when it resumes. But an argument can be made that, if still on the job, Ferry would be the odds-on favorite to win executive of the year.

    "This is my eighth year, and the kind of guys that we have and what Coach Bud is doing and what we have going on, it's different," Horford said. "And I'm very happy to be a part of it."

    Slowly, so are the fans. Always fighting to capture the city's imagination, the Hawks are still 22nd in the league in attendance -- but it's coming around. The sellout crowd for the Clippers this past Tuesday was lively and engaged. And the organization's new emphasis on diversity was on display at halftime, with the ceremonial lighting of a menorah on the last night of Hanukkah.

    "Being the hottest team in the NBA right now, people are going, 'Wait, hold up. This is a pretty for-real team,' " Wilkins said. "So I think consistency from a winning standpoint is beneficial. Fans are very into it. They're up, they're emotional, they're proud of what they see. It's a great product."

    One that's been a long time coming.
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