Empty the Bench

It’s not often a seven-game NBA playoff series can be aptly described as “boring,” but that’s exactly what the Atlanta Hawks and Miami Heat accomplished in taking turns blowing each other out before the Hawks finally, thankfully, found themselves as the last men standing and stumbled into the second round.

They won’t last long against a well-rested, confident Cleveland Cavaliers waiting for them Tuesday night.

The average margin of victory in the Hawks-Heat series was nearly 20 points, which says… well, I’m not sure what that says other than that both teams were prone to not just having bad but absolutely terrible nights and were incapable of stringing together steady, consistent, playoff-level performances against a middling opponent.

Coming in we knew the Heat were a one-trick pony and that if the Hawks could successfully tame Dwyane Wade, they would advance. That it would take absolutely ridiculous basketball every night from Wade to keep his largely undistinguished supporting cast in it, and that the Hawks were deeper, more playoff-battle tested, and hungrier after pushing the champion Boston Celtics to the limit last season.

Well, the Heat got sometimes-great, but mostly just good basketball from Wade, and the Hawks did advance. Barely. That’s not a good sign as they head into Round 2 against the NBA’s best team led by the NBA’s best player. (LeBron James was deservedly named as this year’s MVP.) The Cavaliers were loose, defiant, and dominant against the withering Detroit Pistons in their first-round sweep that wrapped over a week ago, and given that the Hawks’ long slog past the Heat will have ended just 48 hours previously, the odds of a runaway Cavaliers’ blowout in Game 1 are high.

Currently sporting a 41-2 home record this season (including the playoffs), it’s likely they’ll head back to Atlanta for Game 3 riding a comfortable 2-0 advantage, putting a ton of pressure on the Hawks to win that game and avoid a possible sweep or, at a minimum, almost-definite series defeat. They shocked the NBA last season by coming up big in a similarly compromising situation against the heavily favored Boston Celtics, but that was then, this is now.

As hungry as those Celtics were last season–and yes, they were starving–these Cavaliers are playing scary basketball right now. I don’t think the Hawks are up to the challenge, especially after their lackluster effort against the Heat; hell, I don’t think the winner of the Magic-Celtics series will be up to it either, but that’s a discussion for another day.

For now it’s Cavaliers-Hawks, though by this time next week there’s a damn good chance we’ll already be looking ahead to the Eastern Conference Finals–it’s only a question of how long it’ll take for the Hawks to succumb to the inevitable. An 8-0 start to the postseason for Cleveland? It’s very possible.