The Atlanta Hawks are a Fragile, Perfect Machine

It is difficult to think of a team as consistently, persistently arsonistic as the Atlanta Hawks that has also been so under-discussed. There was a spell there, Januaryish, when a sufficient number of double-digit wins had piled up that the discourse, with guarded glee, had no choice but to certify the Hawks' for-realness, and so it happened. But the subsequent rise of the Spurs and Cavaliers and the Warriors' sustained rampage have shunted the Hawks into the background, which is—even in their undeniable, un-flukey, fully dominant breakthrough season—where they seem to belong. This is where the franchise has been for going on a generation, after all, and there is still the sense that this somehow doesn't fit. Surely, in greater Atlanta's bars and living rooms, optimistic fans are whispering about the 2004 Pistons, but only whispering. No need to jinx it, no need even to take the chance.

No need to worry about it either, though, because the Hawks are really fucking good. Their offense is a wind that comes from all directions, but that also hits a lot of three-pointers. Much has been made of the league-wide adoption of the Spurs' pace-and-space approach, but the Hawks' spin on it is the purest, in the sense that it has no focal point for extended stretches. At its best, it's a team-as-Voltron system. Passing and movement are the protagonists, and though it's always shifting, everything is in its right place. Mike Budenholzer is Peter to Gregg Popovich's Christ. He lacks his mentor's charisma, but he understands the teachings as well as anyone.

Of course, the Hawks are not some team of nobodies running through the league due solely to superior coaching. Folks who are concerned with sorting talent into tiers bicker over whether or not Al Horford is a star, but even if the Hawks are starless—and, as they have three All-Stars on their roster between Horford, Jeff Teague, and Kyle Korver this is maybe an argument best left to the tier-bros—they compensate with depth and purpose. It's no small thing to have two bona fide NBA players at each position, and it's even more significant for damn near every one of them to be able to shoot and defend.

The Hawks are testing the theory that the sum of the parts equal the whole. While their rivals have LeBron James and Steph Curry, who are take-over-a-game great, Atlanta relies on collective strength. Each player's particular skills are necessary and emphasized. An until-recently-middling veteran like DeMarre Carroll has shined in two Hawks seasons because he's counted on to do the things he's best at. In his case, that's hassling the opponent's playmaker and drilling threes. What makes the Hawks work so well is that every one of his teammates has nailed a similarly well-defined assignment.

This is basic personnel management, at some level, but it has achieved a sort of unconscious sublimity in Atlanta, as each of Carroll's equally ostensibly unspectacular teammates has become indispensable simply by doing their well-defined, perfectly understood jobs. The Hawks are in some respects a new realization of the positional revolution Bethlehem Shoals heralded in 2006. Their primary concern is not who does what, but that everything gets done, and no single player carries a heavy burden.

The drawback of this distilled teamness is that many Hawks need to be playing well at any given time in order for the mechanism to function. If Teague is humming but Horford and Paul Millsap aren't, the squad struggles. They are perilously close to ordinariness at all times, and over the past couple of months, their standard of play has dropped a smidge. If peaking is a real phenomenon, they appear to have peaked prematurely.

More concerning is that they're already down one man with Thabo Sefolosha set to miss the rest of the season with what might be a police brutality-inflicted broken leg. (This means, happily for neutral observers, that the delightful Kent Bazemore will get heavier minutes, but Bazemore is more fun than he is Thabo.) Also, Millsap has a sprained shoulder, which the Hawks are saying will heal fully by their first playoff game, but is also the kind of injury that tends to linger. Without Sefolosha and with a slightly diminished Millsap, Atlanta is playing roster Jenga, hoping it can recapture its mid-winter form while also shifting players around. It's a dangerous game for a team that needs to be precisely calibrated in order to mount a title charge.

Heading into the postseason, the Hawks are trying to cultivate clarity. Though they've dropped out of the contender conversation, their unlikely project can still work. What was once machine-like is now fragile and human, but that's a matter of perception more than anything. The Hawks have been both this whole time: a fragile machine, comprised of flawed players functioning at their absolute best. They will play perfectly, or they will fall apart. Either is eminently possible. This is the fun of it.