ATLANTA – Four years ago, Boston and Atlanta were in much different places when they met in the NBA playoffs.

The Celtics, a champion in the making. The Hawks, a team on the rise.

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This time, they’re in a similar situation: playing to stay together.

The Celtics are possibly making a last stand with their aging Big Three – Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen. The Hawks have a younger core but desperately need a long run in the playoffs to justify keeping all the important pieces intact, especially dynamic forward Josh Smith, who has one more year on his contract and a checkered relationship with his hometown team.

Game 1 in the best-of-seven series is Sunday night in Atlanta, which has home-court advantage despite being the lower-seeded team.

“Both teams are playing for their survival as a group,” Celtics coach Doc Rivers said Saturday. “If we win the series, and keep winning, you’re going to want to build on this group. If we win, you may not see that (Hawks) team anymore.”

Atlanta has made three straight trips to the second round, including a tough six-game loss last year to the top-seeded Chicago Bulls. But the Hawks have never won more than one playoff series in any given year since moving from St. Louis in 1968, which has turned the city into something of a basketball wasteland.

When it comes to attendance, Atlanta generally ranks near the bottom of the league no matter its record (this year, the Hawks were 23rd overall and second-worst among playoff teams). Many of the fans who do turn out in this city of transplants tend to root for the other team, which was certainly the case for Boston’s two visits to Philips Arena this season.

Atlanta star Joe Johnson is hoping the fans will be more like there were in the 2008 playoffs, when the Hawks won all three at home before raucous, supportive crowds to surprisingly force a Game 7 against the top-seeded Celtics.

“There was so much excitement here in Atlanta,” Johnson remembered. “Just the way the crowd was into it and made this a very hostile environment. Man, it was pleasing to play in this building. It was a lot of fun.”

What does he expect this time?

“I know it’s going to be loud,” Johnson said, breaking into a sly grin. “I just hope it’s going to be in our favor.”

Neither team is at full strength. Allen has not played in two weeks because of a sore right ankle, and he’s not sure if he’ll be ready to go in the series opener. In fact, if this wasn’t the playoffs, the 36-year-old shooting guard would already be having surgery. Instead, he took a cortisone shot a few days ago and said Saturday the ankle “feels a lot better.”

“As I stand here, just moving around on it, walking around, it feels great,” Allen said at his team’s suburban Boston practice facility, before the team flew to Atlanta. “Now, transferring it out on the floor and moving around on it is the next step.”

The Celtics won’t get any sympathy from their opponent. Atlanta already played most of the season without center Al Horford, who had hoped to be recovered from pectoral surgery in time for the playoffs but has already been ruled out for the Celtics series. The guy who took his starting spot, rugged Zaza Pachulia, missed the last seven games of the regular season with a sprained left foot.

While coach Larry Drew has tried to be coy about Pachulia’s status for the playoffs, saying again Saturday that it will be a game-time decision, the players have already accepted having to start the postseason without their top two centers.

“With us not having Al and Zaza, it’s going to be tough,” Johnson said.

If Pachulia is indeed out, Drew will have to decide on which way to go with his lineup. He could stick with third-stringer Jason Collins as the starting center and leave everyone else in the roles they’ve played so well, including Smith at power forward and Marvin Williams coming off the bench with a highly effective second unit. Or, the Hawks could go smaller and quicker with their first five, moving Smith to center and promoting Williams to the starting lineup.

No matter who’s on the court, Smith figures to spend plenty of time tussling with Garnett at both ends of the court. That figures to be one of the key matchups in the series, along with the one at point guard, where Atlanta’s Jeff Teague gets the difficult task of trying to contain Rajon Rondo. Boston’s superb floor leader averaged more than 14 assists a game and dished out 20 in an overtime win over the Hawks on April 11.

The teams are much more closely matched than they were before Boston’s playoff victory in 2008 – the Hawks finishing one game ahead in the East standings, the Celtics winning two out of three meetings, none of which was decided by more than five points.

Another seven-game marathon is not out of the question.

“They’ve got three Hall of Famers on that team,” Johnson said. “They’re a great veteran group that knows how to get it done.”

He feels good about his own team, too.

“We’re a lot better, a lot deeper, than we’ve ever been. I think now’s the time,” Johnson said. “The main thing I want to do is try to bring a championship here to Atlanta. The city is well overdue. Why not give it a try?”

DETROIT –

With the focus on trying to gain home-court advantage in the first round of the playoffs, the Atlanta Hawks cannot afford a slip-up when they host the resurgent Detroit Pistons on Friday.

The Hawks are tied for fifth in the Eastern Conference but sit just 1 1/2 games behind third-place Indiana with a back-to-back coming up against two of the league’s worst road teams in Detroit and Charlotte. The Pistons have won three straight and five of six.

Detroit started its 5-1 stretch by beating Washington on March 26 and toppled the Wizards again Thursday night. Tayshaun Prince scored 14 points Thursday – his sixth straight double-digit game – and has averaged 19.0 points during that span. Guard Rodney Stuckey returned after missing three games with a hamstring injury and scored 15 points off the bench in less than 19 minutes.

The Pistons are looking to match their longest winning streak of the season (Feb. 3-10).

Atlanta broke out of a mini-slump by hammering league-worst Charlotte by 27 points Wednesday. Josh Smith continued his sensational play with 24 points and nine rebounds despite sitting out the fourth quarter. Smith is averaging 26 points in his last nine games.

The Hawks’ bench combined for 52 points, helped by the return of guard Jannero Pargo. After missing 10 games due to an appendectomy, Pargo returned to the rotation and scored 12 points in 15 minutes.

Atlanta is the only team in the league to beat Chicago, Miami and Oklahoma City this season.

Pistons F/C Ben Wallace surpassed 7,000 career defensive rebounds Wednesday, becoming the 21st player to reach that milestone.

The Hawks have beaten Detroit six straight times at home.

The New York Knicks take on the Atlanta Hawks in an important Friday night (March 30) game. The team is on a nice three game winning streak, showing guts and grit that I had worried would go away with all the injuries.

Thus far, the Knicks have overcome the loss of Bill Walker, a new injury to Jared Jeffries, Amare Stoudemire dealing with new back issues and Jeremy Lin going through leg problems. The team hasn’t folded though, beating the Detroit Pistons, Milwaukee Bucks and Orlando Magic over the past week. I think the win over Orlando in itself proves that Carmelo Anthony can really lead this team if he stays committed to the mission.

Now the Knicks have to take on a tough Hawks team that is actually suffering its own problems. The Hawks lost center Al Horford for the season and have limped through the season ever since that loss. The up-and-down progression for the team includes two straight losses this week to the Bucks and Chicago Bulls. It gives them extra incentive to play New York hard on Friday night, which could make this a very competitive contest.

The Knicks and Hawks last played on February 22, when New York ran away with a nice 99-82 win. I thought the team put forward a very balanced attack, with eight different players scoring at least 7 points each and that it is exactly what the Knicks need against the Hawks. Stoudemire only went for 7 points in that game, so if the roster can find that scoring from someone else, I think that the Knicks actually stand a really good shot at running the winning streak to four games.

It is questionable whether Lin is going to play against the Hawks, but hopefully he is ready to take the court again. It may come all the way down to game time for him to make that final decision, but the Knicks could certainly use him as an additional weapon on offense. I think that if Lin plays, the Knicks will easily win this game with the depth that the bench possesses right now. Without him it might become a struggle, but one that Steve Novak and J.R. Smith could use to their advantage.

At 26-25 on the season, the Knicks are now just two and a half games behind the Philadelphia 76ers for first place in the Atlantic division. Catching up to the 76ers would certainly prove sweet, especially because it would make the Knicks one of the top four seeds in the 2012 Eastern Conference Playoffs. I think that would give the team a very favorable chance to make at least the second round. Hopefully the Knicks play as well against the Hawks as they did against the Magic and that the team continues to show that it’s got the talent to compete with the best this postseason.

More From YCN:

Knicks Crush Blazers

Tyson Chandler Holds Franchise Record

Knicks Stomp Lakers

Lin Saves Knicks

Amare Stoudemire Trade Rumors

Sources:

NBA Standings

Full Knicks Schedule

New York Knicks Website

*Ryan Christopher DeVault is a fan of the New York Knicks that has followed the team since the days John Starks, Charles Oakley, and Anthony Mason instilled their defensive will on the rest of the league.

It’s something right out of minor-league hockey.

The Hawks played three games in three days over the weekend – two games in Atlanta sandwiched around a game in Washington, D.C. – owing to the necessity of scheduling 66 games in a lockout-shortened season.

As fate – or maybe it should properly be called misfortune – would have it, the Hawks played the longest game in the NBA in almost 15 years on Sunday in the finale of that trio and came up with a 139-133 victory over Utah in four overtimes at Philips Arena.

Hawks All-Star Joe Johnson led the way in numerous categories. He played a team-high 55 minutes, 23 seconds and scored a game-high 37 points on 14-of-28 shooting. After the game, his response about how it felt might sound surprising for someone who has suffered through tendinitis in his left knee, an ailment that has caused him to miss games this season.

“It’s not really that exhausting like people would think,” Johnson said. “I know it’s our third in a row, but winning cures everything. The more you win, everything else takes care of itself. You tend not to hurt as much.”

The game took 3 hours, 16 minutes to play – a full 1 hour, 11 minutes longer than the Hawks’ win over the Wizards the day before. It was the third-longest in league history and the ninth to go to four overtimes, according to The Associated Press. The last time a game went to four overtimes had been Nov. 14, 1997, when Phoenix and Portland did it.

As long games go, it’s not quite like the Class AAA baseball game between the Pawtucket Red Sox and Rochester Red Wings that lasted 33 innings, more than eight hours and was played over parts of three days (it was suspended at 4:09 a.m. on April 19, 1981, and completed on June 23 of that year). But for basketball, after playing three games in three days, the Hawks’ could prove more tiring – irrespective of whatever Johnson might say.

Four members of the Jazz played more than 50 minutes, including Gordon Hayward, who logged a game-high 57:28. Three Hawks broke the 50 barrier, including 6-foot-11, 275-pound center Zaza Pachulia, who hauled down 20 rebounds.

During their 2010 season, the Atlanta Falcons led the NFL in drives of 10 plays or more. Asked what those drives felt like, right tackle Tyson Clabo responded, “like a good burn.” One can only imagine how Pachulia and Utah’s 289-pound Al Jefferson, who played 51:19, felt.

“We just gutted it out,” Hawks guard Willie Green said in a video posted on the team’s website.

As Johnson mentioned, winning makes everything feel better. Utah had to deal with the flip side of that. Hayward called it a “tough game to lose.”

“I played fifty-seven minutes, and man, that’s a lot of basketball,” Hayward said. “I could’ve played 10 more overtimes if I had to. You’re just out there competing and that’s all there is to it. Tomorrow morning will probably be tough, but we’re professionals, so you have to just keep playing hard no matter how long it takes.”

With a game on Tuesday in Milwaukee followed by one back in Atlanta on Wednesday against league-leading Chicago for five games in six days, Hawks coach Larry Drew gave his squad a well-deserved day off on Monday. The team was scheduled to fly later in the day for the game with the Bucks, where the Hawks hope to win their fifth straight, which would represent their longest winning streak of the season.

They pulled back into fifth in the Eastern Conference with Sunday’s win and sit 1½ games behind Southeast Division rival Orlando for third. With 12 games remaining, home-court advantage could be key for the playoffs, as it was last year when the Hawks downed the Magic in the first round. The lower-seeded Hawks won all three of their home games in that series.

Drew liked the resilience his team showed on Sunday.

“That was something,” he said. “It’s all happened to us this year thus far. We’ve gone through injury, emergencies with families. We’ve gone through scheduling zig-zagging all over the states, 11-, 12-day trips. Now we go into a back-to-back-to-back, and on the third night, we go into…was it four? Four overtimes. This team didn’t have any quit in them.”

INDIANAPOLIS – The Atlanta Hawks are back on track, and Josh Smith is a big reason.

Smith had 27 points and nine rebounds, leading the Hawks to their third straight victory, 101-96 over the Indiana Pacers on Tuesday night.

“Josh has been on a roll as of late,” coach Larry Drew said. “We’ve been going through him offensively and defensively. He’s been an anchor for us. Tonight, I felt he played another phenomenal ball game. He was just solid.”

Smith scored 13 points in the first quarter, 11 in the third, and fell three points shy of his season high. He passed the credit onto his teammates.

“It’s great when your teammates lift you up,” Smith said. “That really helped in the third and fourth quarter. We’re coming together and figuring out a way to win ball games.”

Jannero Pargo had 16 points, while Marvin Williams and Zaza Pachulia each scored 12 for the Hawks.

David West scored a season-high 24 points for the Pacers, who have lost two straight. Danny Granger had 19 points and eight rebounds, and George Hill scored 15 points off the bench for Indiana.

The Hawks led by as much as 16 points in the first half, but Granger’s three-pointer tied it at 62.

West’s basket gave Indiana its last lead at 71-69 before Williams answered with a three-pointer.

The Pacers returned home after losing Monday to the Chicago Bulls on the road, 92-72, snapping a season-best, six-game winning streak.

“We didn’t defend the three well and didn’t do a good enough job on the defensive glass,” Pacers coach Frank Vogel said. “It cost us the game. I don’t think we were ourselves the last two games.”

HEAT 108, NETS 78: In Miami, LeBron James scored 21 points and capped his night by banking in a halfcourt shot, Chris Bosh added 20 points and Miami snapped a two-game slide.

The win came with a cost: Dwyane Wade turned his right ankle late in the first half and did not return, finishing with 13 points.

CELTICS 97, ROCKETS: In Boston, Kevin Garnett grabbed 13 rebounds to pass Shaquille O’Neal and move into 12th on the NBA’s career list, and Paul Pierce scored seven of his 30 points in overtime to lead Boston.

Boston has won five straight since the All-Star break, including two in a row in overtime. Houston has lost four in a row.

PISTONS 88, LAKERS 85, OT: in Auburn Hills, Mich., Rodney Stuckey scored 34 points, and Detroit overcame a tying shot by Kobe Bryant at the end of regulation.

Bryant, who had tied the game at the buzzer to force the extra session, missed from three-point range in the final seconds of overtime.

MAVERICKS 95, KNICKS 85: In Dallas, Dirk Nowitzki scored 28 points and bailed out Dallas after it lost the lead following a 7 1/2 -minute scoreless stretch in the fourth quarter. Nowitzki made a 14-foot fadeaway jumper with 4:34 left, starting a game-clinching, 14-0 run by the Mavericks.

BOBCATS 100, MAGIC 84: In Charlotte, N.C., Corey Maggette scored a season-high 29 points and Charlotte overcame a 20-point, first-half deficit to win for just the fifth time in 36 games.

The Bobcats came in having lost 21 of their last 22 games.

CBSSports.com wire reports
March 6, 2012

INDIANAPOLIS — The Atlanta Hawks are back on track, and Josh Smith is a big reason.

Smith had 27 points and nine rebounds, leading the Hawks to their third consecutive victory, 101-96 against the Indiana Pacers on Tuesday night.

“Josh has been on a roll as of late,” coach Larry Drew said. “We’ve been going through him offensively and defensively. He’s been an anchor for us. Tonight I felt he played another phenomenal ball game. He was just solid.”

Smith scored 13 points in the first quarter, 11 in the third, and fell three points shy of his season high. He passed the credit onto his teammates.

“It’s great when your teammates lift you up,” Smith said. “That really helped in the third and fourth quarter. We’re coming together and figuring out a way to win ball games.”

Jannero Pargo had 16 points, while Marvin Williams and Zaza Pachulia each scored 12 for the Hawks.

David West scored a season-high 24 points for the Pacers, who have lost two straight. Danny Granger had 19 points and eight rebounds, and George Hill scored 15 points off the bench for Indiana.

“They kept us off balance with good ball movement and we couldn’t seem to adjust to their schemes,” West said. “We just weren’t able to figure them out in the time to stop them.”

The Hawks led by as much as 16 points in the first half, but Granger’s 3-pointer tied it at 62.

West’s basket gave Indiana its last lead at 71-69 before Williams answered with a 3-pointer.

The Hawks outrebounded the Pacers 45-37 and grabbed 14 offensive rebounds.

The Pacers returned home after losing Monday to the Chicago Bulls on the road, 92-72, snapping a season-best, six-game winning streak.

“We didn’t defend the 3 well and didn’t do a good enough job on the defensive glass,” Pacers coach Frank Vogel said. “It cost us the game. I don’t think we were ourselves the last two games.”

The Hawks visit Miami on Wednesday.

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) The Atlanta Hawks are back on track, and Josh Smith is a big reason.

Smith had 27 points and nine rebounds, leading the Hawks to their third straight victory, 101-96 over the Indiana Pacers on Tuesday night.

”Josh has been on a roll as of late,” coach Larry Drew said. ”We’ve been going through him offensively and defensively. He’s been an anchor for us. Tonight I felt he played another phenomenal ball game. He was just solid.”

Smith scored 13 points in the first quarter, 11 in the third, and fell three points shy of his season high. He passed the credit onto his teammates.

”It’s great when your teammates lift you up,” Smith said. ”That really helped in the third and fourth quarter. We’re coming together and figuring out a way to win ball games.”

Jannero Pargo had 16 points, while Marvin Williams and Zaza Pachulia each scored 12 for the Hawks.

David West scored a season-high 24 points for the Pacers, who have lost two straight. Danny Granger had 19 points and eight rebounds, and George Hill scored 15 points off the bench for Indiana.

”They kept us off balance with good ball movement and we couldn’t seem to adjust to their schemes,” West said. ”We just weren’t able to figure them out in the time to stop them.”

The Hawks led by as much as 16 points in the first half, but Granger’s 3-pointer tied it at 62.

West’s basket gave Indiana its last lead at 71-69 before Williams answered with a 3-pointer.

The Hawks outrebounded the Pacers 45-37 and grabbed 14 offensive rebounds.

The Pacers returned home after losing Monday to the Chicago Bulls on the road, 92-72, snapping a season-best, six-game winning streak.

”We didn’t defend the 3 well and didn’t do a good enough job on the defensive glass,” Pacers coach Frank Vogel said. ”It cost us the game. I don’t think we were ourselves the last two games.”

The Hawks visit Miami on Wednesday.