BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: Upset Brewing?
Friday, May 02, 2008
Upset Brewing?
Like most people, even more NBA fans, even those in Atlanta, I didn't pay any attention to the Atlanta Hawks this season, and didn't give them much chance of winning even one game in their best-of-7 against the #1 seed Boston Celtics. After all, Atlanta only eeked into the playoffs as the 8th seed because the East was so lame this year; at 37-45 they would have been in 12th place in the West, 13 games behind the 8th seeded Denver Nuggets. And it's safe to say Atlanta would have won even fewer games in the West, since they'd have played tougher competition. The experts all agreed; of the 10 cited on the ESPN series page, all 10 picked Atlanta, with just 2 giving the Hawks a chance to win even a single game. The other 8 all picked a Celtics sweep.
The series certainly started out that way; Boston won the first two at home by 23 and 21. And they won game 5 at home by 25. However, to everyone's surprise, Atlanta won games 3 and 4 at home, and they won game 6 at home tonight, to force a game 7 in Boston on Sunday. The Celtics have to be heavily favored; they've won all 3 home games thus far in the series by an average of 23 points, and they won almost twice as many games this year as Atlanta. They'll probably wipe the floor with them in game seven, but those of us without any real rooting interest in the series can always hope the underdogs will come through. Plus it's fun to root against Boston; they've had the best all around football and baseball teams this decade, they don't need a good basketball team too. What's anyone ever won in Atlanta?
However the series turns out, Atlanta's game four win contained the single best play of the entire post season (thus far), when Joe Johnson broke the ankles of some clumsy Celtic defender, paused to watch him flop around on the ground, and then dropped a trey right over his corpse, as part of his team's huge fourth quarter comeback. I've seen this shot at least a dozen times thus far, and given the disparity between the teams, the crucial time of the game, and the frantic roar of the bandwagon-hopping home crowd, I'm enjoying it more every time I see it.
