Column: Hawks, Warriors Have Plenty Of Playoff Doubters

Yet, there's hardly anyone outside Atlanta who believes the Hawks will make it to the NBA Finals, much less capture a championship. Golden State went 67-15 in the loaded Western Conference, a record bested or matched by only 10 teams in NBA history. Of those that previously accomplished the feat, eight went on to capture the title, which would normally lead us to believe that the Warriors are a heavy favorite. Never mind they finished a whopping seven games ahead of James and the second-seeded Cleveland Cavaliers, even while essentially taking the final month of the season off to get rested for the postseason. At Philips Arena, where the Hawks practiced in preparation for Game 1 Sunday against the Brooklyn Nets, there was a quiet determination to prove the skeptics wrong. Following in the footsteps of the defending champion San Antonio Spurs, who used a team approach to rout James and the rest of Miami's Big Three in last year's finals, Atlanta is again trying to prove the sum of the parts can outshine individual greatness. [...] they might have the deepest bench in the league, even though Thabo Sefolosha is out for the year with a season-ending injury sustained during his arrest by New York City police. Budenholzer earns extra points for keeping the Hawks together after a tumultuous offseason in which racially charged comments forced owner Bruce Levenson to put the team up for sale and general manager Danny Ferry to take an indefinite leave of absence that lasted all season.

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