Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion (22 page)

“I think a big part of that is Trevor Ariza has come in and helped us, ‘Jet’ Terry’s come in and helped us, I think Pat’s maturity—those guys all talk and are all very frank and honest with each other,” McHale said about his team’s improved chemistry and accountability. “The maturity level of our team, even though we have ten guys with two or less years of [NBA] experience, our team is more mature this year from the Arizas and the Terrys and just their interaction with everybody, and I think that’s a big thing. I think that helps James, and James helps us. It’s a nice relationship. Everybody’s got a part in that.”

The Atlanta Hawks and the No-Star System

In a season where the preseason expectations were that Cleveland, reloaded with LeBron James and Kevin Love, would romp through the East, it was another heavily Spurs-influenced team that instead took the conference by storm.

To say no one saw Atlanta’s sixty-win season coming would be an understatement. The Hawks, hindered by injuries a season earlier, had limped to a 38–44 record in 2013–14, garnering the 8-seed in the weak Eastern Conference almost by default before taking the top-seeded Indiana Pacers to the limit in the first round of the playoffs. The Hawks were a nice, modestly successful franchise, but hardly looked like a burgeoning powerhouse, even in a watered-down conference that was in considerable flux.

The 2014–15 season was Hawks head coach Mike Budenholzer’s second with the franchise after spending nineteen years with the Spurs, the last seventeen as an assistant coach under the legendary Gregg Popovich. Budenholzer brought a lot of the same team-building philosophy and mentality to the job, including his mentor’s notable terseness with the media, but he certainly didn’t have legends like Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, and Tony Parker on his roster, nor the years of continuity that allow the Spurs to not only maintain their culture but also execute so seamlessly on the court.

Things were further complicated over the summer of 2014, when the franchise found itself embroiled in two different racism scandals. First, then-owner Bruce Levenson self-reported to the NBA a text he had sent in 2012 concerning the Hawks’ struggles in growing its fanbase. It included Levenson wondering why there was such a high percentage of black fans at Hawks games versus crowds at other NBA venues, and whether the team’s in-game presentation, which included heavy doses of hip hop music, was driving away white fans. As the league was in the midst of excising Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling over racist audio recordings involving a mistress (and Levenson was an outspoken critic of Sterling over that scandal), the Hawks’ owner fell on his own sword and agreed to sell his ownership stake in the team.

Soon after, audio tapes of a Hawks management conference call leaked in which then–general manager Danny Ferry was reading from a scouting report provided by a source at the Cleveland Cavaliers that disparagingly described potential free-agent target Luol Deng as
having “some African in him, and I don’t say that in a bad way other than he’s a guy that may be making side deals behind you, if that makes sense.” The report also made a comparison to a merchant who sells counterfeit goods, and that Deng “has a little two-step in him—says what you like to hear, but behind closed doors he could be killing you.” Ferry soon was suspended indefinitely by the team and ultimately was replaced after the 2014–15 season, with Budenholzer
taking over as director of basketball operations and assistant general manager Wes Wilcox bumping up to the general manager role.

Ferry’s removal was notable not just because of the way he delivered the report’s racist remarks about Deng on a conference call with team higher-ups, but because he had done a quietly outstanding job in building the Hawks’ roster. Atlanta wasn’t considered a major free-agent destination, but Ferry and his staff made a series of savvy moves in 2013 that were starting to pay off significantly.

       
•
   
The team elected to match a four-year, $32 million offer from the Milwaukee Bucks for restricted free-agent point guard Jeff Teague, even though Teague’s progress had been somewhat halting during his rookie contract after being drafted nineteenth overall in 2009.

       
•
   
They re-signed shooting guard Kyle Korver, who had been acquired the year before from the Bulls, and who described the trade to the Hawks from conference power Chicago as “a bit of a bummer.” Korver re-upped for four years and $24 million.

       
•
   
They signed athletic-but-raw small forward DeMarre Carroll on a two-year, $5 million deal.

       
•
   
They drafted German teenage point guard Dennis Schroder at No. 17 overall.

       
•
   
They also signed versatile power forward Paul Millsap on a two-year, $19 million contract.

Perhaps most notably that summer, Ferry also hired Budenholzer, whom he had both played under and worked with as an executive with the Spurs. Ferry, after his first season as general manager, elected to move on from Larry Drew after three seasons as head coach, even as the franchise had made its sixth straight playoff appearance. There was a perception that the Hawks had run into a glass
ceiling as a perennial lower playoff seed, and needed a new approach to bust through it.

The seeds of Budenholzer’s approach, cribbed from the space-and-shooting approach fashioned by the latest Spurs teams, started to get planted during his initial campaign in 2013–14, but a season-ending injury to de facto center Al Horford—the team’s MVP and a poor man’s Duncan in terms of his understated impact on both ends—helped undermine that season. Getting Horford back in 2014–15 was huge, but all of the players having a second season in Budenholzer’s system created a multiplier effect that made the Hawks into a surprising force.

Still, the lack of a supposed star was a storyline that was hashed out all season. The Hawks only had one thirty-point scorer the entire season (Millsap scored exactly thirty against his old team, the Utah Jazz) and, perhaps more tellingly, had a seven-game stretch in December 2014 where a different player led the team in scoring each game, and all seven scored at least twenty points. In January, when the Hawks didn’t lose a game in the midst of a nineteen-game winning streak, the NBA tipped its cap to the team’s construct when it named all five starters as the Eastern Conference Player of the Month.

In sum, the Hawks were an extremely balanced team where no one was sure whether they had the type of player who could single-handedly win playoff games, when scouting, familiarity, and extra rest cut down the advantages of a team with a fluid offensive system like Atlanta’s. Because they believed in the system and were getting the results, they were unapologetic about it.

“It’s really fun to play on this team,” Korver said. “Every time down the court, we all matter, because we play as a group. We all matter every single time. You might not shoot the ball, but you’re definitely at least going to set the screen or make the pass or make the cut that opens up whoever it is that’s going to get that shot. It just makes us play hard because you matter. Right? When you matter in
life, you do a little bit better when you feel like you matter, and we feel like we matter. No matter who’s out there, we all matter.

“I mean, it’s easier on teams when you have superstars. I mean, they’re really good. And you give them the ball, and you say ‘make a play.’ And a lot of offenses are created to feed off that guy. We don’t have that guy, so we have to play a little bit differently. There’s different ways to do it, so this is what we do.”

It also helped that they had two very unique features: all five of their starters can shoot the three, and they have Korver, perhaps the most uniquely destructive offensive player in the league.

While Budenholzer inherited a top shooter (through the first twelve seasons of his career, Korver had made 43.4 percent of his nearly 4,000 3-point attempts) who was coming off an excellent first year in Atlanta, the new schemes the Hawks began running to maximize his strengths (and ability to help his teammates get shots) created an offensive monster.

Korver made nearly 50 percent of his threes in 2014–15, and many of those came off sub-variations of pick and rolls, with Korver first sprinting from a corner or settling into an action after setting a screen himself and receiving the ball on a handoff or flip. When these actions are run with a big player who can shoot, such as Millsap, Horford, or even with reserve big man Pero Antic, it puts opposing defenses in a huge bind. With many teams also having to try to defend these actions with big men that are not as comfortable guarding in space, there are no good answers.

Korver’s constant motion and ability to shoot on the move add another element to the Hawks’ success: he compromises defenders who have to track his every move. Per SportVU data, Korver is right at the absolute top of the NBA in terms of highest “gravity” score, meaning that his primary defender leaves him to help defensively less than any other player in the league. Even if Korver doesn’t get the ball on a possession, the defense is effectively stuck chasing him
around and defending the rest of the Hawks four-on-four, which provides more space and creates additional headaches for the opponent in their defensive coverages.

“He creates so many opportunities,” Budenholzer said of Korver. “Really, the interesting thing for his teammates is he creates so much space and it makes it difficult, hopefully, for the defense to make decisions about taking away other options, taking away other opportunities—or if you take that away, Kyle may be free. It’s just such a game of space and shooting and attacking the basket and attacking the rim, putting pressure on the defense, and he probably does that, creating opportunities for his teammates because he’s such a good shooter. For himself, what he can do in terms of moving without the ball, coming off screens and sprinting in transition and rising up into shops, he’s just a very unique—not just shooter, but how he can move and catch and shoot and move with great speed and rise up.

“Probably the last thing I saw offensively was his passing. He’s really underrated as a passer. He comes off of screens, they try to take away the shot, he’s creating opportunities for other people. I just think he’s a really good basketball player that sometimes is mislabeled as just a shooter.”

“He’s [also] an amazing screensetter,” Budenholzer added. “He loves setting screens. He loves getting his teammates open. So when you just kind of put all of that together, it’s a big part of how we’ve built our offense and our identity. He fits. Our other guys fit with him. He fits with them. He’s huge, and defensively, I think he’s really underrated. His length, his commitment to it, his understanding of rotations, being early to rotations, his work on the defensive boards. He’s really a complete player.”

Korver was not the sole reason for the Hawks’ massive jump, though. Teague, who had more or less plateaued over the previous three seasons as he grew into a starter’s role and point guard usage rates, took a huge leap forward. No one advanced metric tells
the whole story, but when they all basically show similar levels of improvement with career-best rates, it’s telling. In the 2014–15 season, Teague easily had the best PER, box plus-minus, and win shares per forty-eight minutes rates of his pro career. He also was competently deputized by Schroder, who became an important, ball-dominant scorer off the bench on a team that didn’t have that much reserve firepower, and also was able to close out games when Teague was struggling or the matchup favored Schroder’s penetration skills.

Millsap, already thought to be a value at less than $10 million, may have been the “best” player on the Hawks while Horford, as the team’s anchor, rim protector, and nineteen-foot face-up jump-shot splasher, arguably was the most valuable. Arguably, because of the emergence of Carroll, whose offense evolved to such a degree to complement his defending and overall effort that he suddenly found himself among the league’s most effective “3-and-D” wings.

“He’s one of the ultimate competitors in our league, he plays so hard on every possession,” Budenholzer said of Carroll, who subsequently left the club in summer free agency to sign with the Toronto Raptors. “That’s probably more important than anyone, as basic and fundamental as it seems, so that stands out. He’s been growing as an offensive player. Everyone knows how good a defender he is and how he can impact a game defensively, but his shooting was improving, his ballhandling was improving. You could just see a player who was on the rise.”

Also notable was the team’s chemistry, which stemmed from a locker room where an unusually high number of players had spent three or more years in college and/or had come from outside the United States. Of the starters, only Teague, with two seasons at Wake Forest, fell short of either metric. Horford (originally from the Dominican Republic) and Millsap each played three NCAA seasons while Korver and Carroll both played four. Off the bench, there was
defensive stopper Thabo Sefolosha (Swiss and a noted positive locker room guy), Schroder (German), Mike Scott (four years at Virginia), Mike Muscala (four years at Bucknell), Kent Bazemore (four years at Old Dominion), and Pero Antic (Macedonian). The Hawks also had veteran Elton Brand, another strong locker room guy who had played two years at Duke.

In composite, in a league with a high number of inexperienced and still-developing young American players, the Hawks didn’t have any. Instead, their locker room was filled with mature and high-academic types, and you could sense a different vibe from other NBA teams when you spent any time with them. They weren’t the only team that seemed to like being around each other, but there was a calmness that was palpable. And while the Hawks didn’t go out specifically targeting guys who weren’t one-year college players or from overseas, the guys they collected in order to play the style Ferry and Budenholzer wanted ended up being that way.

“We really value guys who are really unselfish, high-character guys, guys with high basketball IQs,” Budenholzer said. “I don’t like to paint with a broad brush, and if you’re one-and-done and have those characteristics, we’re interested. If you played in Europe and have those characteristics, we’re interested. . . . it’s not anything that we categorically don’t take, or we only take or anything like that. It’s just we have some things that we really value, and maybe it tends toward those kinds of guys. But we have a good idea what we’re looking for, and we know how we can hopefully find guys that fit with us.”