Exits: Waiting to pick up the roses

The Atlanta Hawks goal was to get to the playoffs. Instead, they extended the run of one of the best shows this season.

I’ve never been to Atlanta. I’ve been through Savannah, wandered its public squares, an intact architectural history of the city’s decision to acquiesce, to not get burned down. I stayed in a haunted cabin, I didn’t know as much until every time Dylan and I stepped out the front door a repurposed hearse, filled with tourists on a ghost tour, was idling at the curb, collectively giving a little gasp at our decidedly corporeal forms. I was day drunk at Flannery O’Connor’s house, losing it to the iMac on one of the desks with the screensaver that said “Flannery O’Connor’s iMac” flashing across it. I ate really good food and met really nice people.

I’ve never been to Atlanta and the closest I got to the Hawks this season was talking to some of them for a story over the phone while they were on the road in Phoenix. From hotel rooms, or in the parking lot outside practice as the sun went down, desert heat laying off just a little bit.

I mean to paint my unfamiliarity not as willful ignorance, but as a kind of dancing around a central point. That the Hawks, before this season, were a basketball blind spot. Not just for me, but for a lot of people watching up and down the east.

Trae Young seemed deeply aware of that all playoffs.

The Hawks did a deft job of climbing and hanging around the NBA standings this season, despite Covid outright and its league-related protocols. Lloyd Pierce got them half the way, saw the rising potential in Kevin Huerter, John Collins, Clint Capela, the franchise-lifting possibilities of Bogdan Bogdanović, even if he didn’t see eye to eye with Young. Nate McMillan came in and took the wheel, tilted it gently rather than white-knuckle spinning it, 10 and 2 and steady on. He didn’t not ask the same things of Young that Pierce did, he only asked them differently. Sometimes that’s enough.

What the Hawks wanted, where they pictured themselves — at least when I talked to them before they got there — was to make the playoffs. It makes sense that a young team full of guys who never set foot there, plus a couple vets who had a decent sense of the toe holds it took, would aim for a general distance. Like pointing to the space between two places and saying, “There”. It’s a good strategy because “there” has a lot of room, isn’t boxed in by a destinational pin, it was a middle distance and not a middling one. It had something for everyone. In it, Capela found that what he’d been offering the Rockets, physicality and a knack for calculating angles, wasn’t actually lost on a team that wanted to play defence. Collins found room to be weird and rangy, Huerter adjusted his sights to more reliably snipe from the corner, and more than fearlessness, clutch shooting, even playing some defence, Young found a stage.

He could be vaudevillian, or just a villain, he could turn on a dime into the hero. He could become the living embodiment of the drama masks from one minute to the next with the refs, then slyly cast a wink to the audience watching, hanging on his every move. He took bows, big ones, in front of New York City and under the basket, he smirked and snarled and shrugged. He felt the spotlight settle on his shoulders and decided he liked the heat and the weight, a lot. He was the lead in the production of The Atlanta Hawks Go To The Playoffs and he saw the play extend past its original run, past where anyone would have guessed.

Young learned to love the big moment, saw how much space there was within that make or break sliver of time and milked it for everything. The team, untroubled by expectations beyond that first goal, to make it there, had nothing but room to roam and do what the best playoff teams have to — learn and grow as they go. They grew past the Knicks, past the Sixers, they only couldn’t get past the Bucks because Milwaukee was doing the same and with the added anchor of several running starts seasons before, plus the pure physicality and rending skill of a guy who’d decided the 3rd time was going to be the charm, the thing he’d been asked to prove since he first set foot on court.

Young wants it too, now that he’s got to that almost point, past where he imagined. Atlanta will be back here because in a season that demanded deep rosters in exchange for deep runs they somehow wriggled past that prerequisite on excess of energy alone. But it’s Young back here, and in general back next season, that is the most compelling to me. Because he didn’t go from understudy to star, he went from watching to leading, pulled the show around himself and made it the kind of pageant this season needed. When the playoffs started all eyes were on the Lakers and the implicit drama of LeBron James and Anthony Davis, the will they or won’t they. Teams like the Hawks have traditionally been the warm-up acts. But it turned out that the league was over blockbusters, the big budget productions that couldn’t really get going on their own steam. I don’t believe NBA fans only want to see the biggest teams in the playoffs, I just think people get used to things and set their expectations accordingly. Now that we’ve all seen something different, it will be harder to go back to thinking it can’t be. To thinking players like Young, Capela, Collins, Huerter, but mostly Young, need to toil under a bigger star for some blanket requisite number of seasons before taking the stage for themselves.

The Hawks built, that’s the thing. This wasn’t a fluke for them. They wanted Young, pawned off Luka Doncic to get him, he and this was their hoped-for long-game and where another team might’ve wavered, grown impatient, they laid their resolve heavy as an Atlanta summer’s humidity (so I’ve heard). Granted, firing the coach mid-season is a fair bit expeditious, but so is seeing it pay off in the way McMillan so lightly stepped into things.

Maybe the Hawks weren’t a blindspot, maybe they were instead a well-timed laying in wait. Studying plays on the locker room whiteboard, a coach’s clipboard, like x’s taped on a stage for lighting cues. Mouthing lines to themselves so often they become like religious ceremony, incantations for hope, that thing with feathers. Waiting offstage, the overflow of light just splashing their feet, for the signal that meant now. Waiting for curtains, waiting for applause so loud it becomes an undulating wall, sound turned physical. Waiting to prove it. Waiting to cradle the bouquet, pick up the roses, to bow.