There is no team in the NBA today hotter than the Atlanta Hawks, winners of 18 of their last 20 games overall and sitting atop the Eastern Conference. At 25-8, Atlanta boasts the league's third-best record and have won four straight. Tonight will be the final game of a three-game Western swing that has already seen them take down Utah and Portland, quite impressively. Two weeks ago, they beat the Clippers 107-104 in ATL.
L.A. has won three in-a-row themselves, though all three games came against weak opponents (New York, Utah, Philadelphia). Still, those are games you can't afford to drop if you're vying for top-four Western Conference playoff seeding. In the loss to the Hawks in late December, the Clips once held a 13-point lead in the third quarter but were unable to put Atlanta away.
DeMarre Carroll is the least-dangerous offensive player among the Hawks' five starters, but you probably couldn't have convinced the Clippers that night, as he poured-in a career-best 25 points on 9-12 shooting, including 5-6 from deep. As a team, the Hawks connected on 12 of their 23 attempts from three, which is, uh, suboptimal if you're the Clippers.
Atlanta has earned the nickname "Spurs East" for their style of play, which is, naturally, Spursian. Their head coach, Mike Budenholzer, spent nearly two decades next to Gregg Popovich on the Spurs' staff and has installed a nearly identical offense to what the champs have been running forever. The Hawks, sans a true "superstar" thrive on ball-movement and a bombs-away mentality from beyond-the-arc. They're No. 8 in the league in three-point percentage (36.9%) while taking nearly 25 attempts from three per-game.
They've also become one of the league's stingiest defensive units, ranking seventh in the NBA in defensive efficiency (allowing 100.7 points per 100 poss.) after finishing 14th in that area a season ago.
Of course, the primary matchups to watch tonight will be at the point guard, power forward and center spots. Both teams' three best players are the starters at these positions. Jeff Teague, who should absolutely be a shoo-in for the Eastern Conference All-Stars, came off-the-bench in the last meeting as he was working his way back from a strained hamstring. He's been ablaze since then, averaging 24 points, eight assists and five rebounds a game during the Hawks' winning streak. Needless to say, Chris Paul's going to have his hands full.
Paul Millsap is producing All-Star caliber numbers on perhaps the league's best bargain contract (two years, $18 million!). He's developed a respectable three-point shot (33.7% this season) over the years while contributing eight boards per game. He's also (quite surprisingly) sixth in the league in steals at 1.8 a night. Know who else will have his hands full? Yep, I'm looking at you, Blake Griffin.
Meanwhile, Al Horford just keeps chugging along as one of the league's most underappreciated big men. He's rounded into form of late following last season's torn pec injury that killed his season prematurely. His per-game numbers are far from eye-popping (14 points, six rebounds), but he's deadly from midrange, which means DeAndre Jordan is going to have to come out a bit further from the basket than he typically likes to do. If he decides to give Horford open 15-footers all night, the Clippers are going to get murdered.
But...let's also not ignore the fact that Atlanta's going to have to deal with those same Clippers on the other end. In the last meeting, Griffin had 21 and 11, Jordan racked-up 15 points and a whopping 22 rebounds and CP3 chimed-in with 19 points, seven assists, six rebounds and five steals. LAC rarely struggles to find ways to get it done on offense, but the key to stopping Atlanta is running their shooters off the arc. Matt Barnes, J.J. Redick and friends are going to have to be on-point with their close-outs on guys like Carroll and Kyle Korver. Forcing them to dribble takes them out of their respective comfort zones and disrupts what the Hawks love to do on offense.
Winning this game would (obviously) provide a major morale boost to a Clipper club in need of such a thing. Following up their resounding win on Christmas night over the Warriors with an embarrassing home defeat at the hands of the Raptors effectively killed any good vibes they may have gained previously. The current three-game winning streak over a few scrubs is nice, but a win over a team like the Hawks could really help get LAC's ball rolling in the right direction.
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