Atlanta Hawks: 5 Questions Heading Into The Offseason

5. What The Hell Happened In The ECFs?

As tempting as it’d be to answer that question with “LeBron James” and move on, that’s not quite sufficient enough of an explanation for what took place in the 2015 Eastern Conference Finals.

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If you had told me a Cavaliers team with a banged up Kyrie Irving and no Kevin Love would not only beat, but sweep the Atlanta Hawks team we watched during the regular season, I would’ve thought you were crazy.

And yet, here we are.

After dropping the first two games at home, everyone pretty much knew the series was over. But aside from an ugly overtime loss in Game 3, the Hawks were pretty uncompetitive, losing by an average of 13.3 points per game. (Last night’s 30-point defeat obviously skewed the numbers a bit, but still.)

A large part of that has to do with LeBron’s excellence, since he averaged an unholy 30.3 points, 11.0 rebounds and 9.3 assists for the series. Between a one-legged DeMarre Carroll, a completely flustered Paul Millsap and not enough bench depth (Kent Bazemore and Mike Scott guarding LeBron, anyone?), James abused Atlanta from the post, attacked the basket and passed perfectly out of double-teams.

It’s a stretch to say this 60-win Hawks team lost because they were too well balanced or because they didn’t have a go-to scorer, but it’s also fair to to say that one of the biggest reasons they lost is their opponent did have such a superstar.

However, we should also point out that the Hawks played atypical basketball based on what we saw all season. They’d been carrying out that unfortunate trend since the last few weeks of the regular season, but the Cavs finally made them pay for it.

It was a team-wide epidemic of suckdom. After sinking nearly 50 percent of his threes during the regular season, Kyle Korver shot just 35.5 percent from beyond the arc in the postseason — and then was taken out of the series with an inadvertent ankle injury that will now require surgery.

Al Horford disappeared in the conference finals, averaging only 11.0 points on 9.0 shot attempts per game for the series and getting himself ejected from Game 3 after dropping the people’s elbow on Mathew Dellavedova.

DeMarre Carroll, the Hawks’ MVP through the first two rounds, hyperxtended his knee in Game 1 and never scored more than 10 points in the series…after reaching the 20-point plateau in seven prior playoff games.

Paul Millsap — who may require offseason shoulder surgery — was an unmitigated disaster with his shot and failed to keep Tristan Thompson off the offensive glass. Dennis Schroder was a mess of a ball-stopper and only Jeff Teague can say he played decently in the series.

The problem? The Hawks just couldn’t make the uncontested shots they made hundreds of times during the regular season. This is a trend we saw throughout the postseason, but in the conference finals, the Hawks made an atrocious 31.5 percent of field goals with the nearest defender being 4-6 feet away (15.9 percent from three-point range), per NBA.com.

They were also pretty terrible on shots that came with the defender being 6+ feet away, converting only 48 percent of such attempts (29.6 percent from deep).

Those were by far the lowest marks on uncontested shots among any team in the conference finals and represented a distant departure from the elite percentages the Hawks posted on such shots during the regular season.

Between injuries, LeBron James taking over and the Hawks missing open looks, it really was a perfect storm for the Atlanta Hawks.

Next: No. 4