With just about every competitive squad in the league, you can isolate a player that stands at the heart of everything the team hopes to accomplish. More often than not, that player is simply the team’s most talented (Chris Paul, LeBron James, Brandon Roy), but in some cases, it’s a secondary star who compensates for shear production with massive on-court influence (Chauncey Billups, Brandon Jennings, one of the Boston Celtics).
Or, in slightly less frequent and more bizarre circumstances, a team is left with no focus at all, depending on a balance of power, production, and personality to turn what could be a tornado into a whirling dervish neatly dressed in a tuxedo and a bow tie. The Atlanta Hawks are a team without a singular focus, without an anchor. That type of situation could be a cause of trouble for any number of rosters throughout the league, but somehow, someway, Atlanta makes parity look easy.
A number of pivotal parts could make or break the Hawks with their steady contributions or lack thereof. There is no transcendent talent on which Atlanta can hang its hat, regardless of how cool a customer Joe Johnson is, or how much of an impact Josh Smith makes defensively. This is one of those rare beasts that lacks a true superstar…and yet the Hawks are sitting at 4th in the East, and their lack of a star could be the precise reason why they pose such incredible match-up problems for so many of the league’s elite teams.
Now, if you throw LeBron James onto the Hawks, of course they improve. If you throw Kobe Bryant onto the Hawks, of course they improve. But there’s no way the current system in Atlanta forms organically around those players as it has since the Hawks acquired Joe Johnson. Stars of that magnitude come with a certain expectation, whereas Joe, who is about as low-key as low-key stars get, and somehow still flying under the radar, had few. The Hawks were adding a very good player for a lot of money, and that was that. It wasn’t expected to put them over the hump, or into the hunt, or to the head of the pack, or to the front of the race. In the strictest sense, it hasn’t; though the Hawks wouldn’t be the Hawks without Joe Johnson, it’s not as if his addition to the team instantly vaulted them into playoff contention. It took Johnson’s Hawks three seasons to top 30 wins and four seasons to make the playoffs, meaning their climb toward playoff contention and now fringe title contention, is based more on the internal development of a core and a system than it is on some grand acquisition or a “Eureka!” moment in Josh Smith’s subconscious.
Joe Johnson is important, but so is Josh Smith. So is Al Horford. And so are Jamal Crawford, Marvin Williams, and, sigh, Mike Bibby. The way that Atlanta basically treats all positions as interchangeable and switches on every pick is the most obvious systemic metaphor you could ask for. On the floor for the Atlanta Hawks on a nightly basis are five basketball players. They vary in talent and occasionally in size, but it’s five basketball players executing a plan based on simplicity and balance. Where one ends and another begins isn’t quite as important as how they function as this amorphous, adaptive whole, and though that might leave them somewhat lacking in star-powered marketability, it was the genesis of an intriguing basketball product that shouldn’t be obscured by the conventional star model.
