ATLANTA — With two minutes left in a Nov. 29 game, the Hawks up by 14 and the mighty Cleveland Cavaliers, who entered the night with a league-best 17-2 record, pulling their starters off the floor, it began. The Hawks’ “404 Crew” fan section at the top of section 122 in State Farm Arena started chanting, “We want the Cup!”
It was the perfect encapsulation of what the league hoped for when it instituted the NBA Cup in-season tournament— a chance to give the league’s also-rans a shot at playing meaningful games and winning … something.
No, the Hawks won’t be winning the championship this year. They probably won’t even win a playoff series and might not even participate in one, although the rest of the East is doing its best to assure that happens.
Still there may be more meaning here to Atlanta winning the group, despite a 13-12 overall record that includes a lot of meh underlying numbers. Look deeper, and you’ll see the roster Atlanta used in its consecutive wins over Cleveland was much stronger than the one it had available for most of the early season. All that’s left, ironically, is getting Trae Young going. He’s leading the league in assists, but an Achilles problem has sapped some of his explosiveness.
Atlanta’s players all mentioned the Cup environment on Nov. 29 as playoff-esque, so the quarterfinals will be a good test for a team that hasn’t had many reps in these types of settings. And don’t discount … other motivations.
“We got some boys who want to go to Vegas,” said Dyson Daniels, who harassed Donovan Mitchell into 5-of-23 shooting in the Cleveland game. “We’ve been playing really well the last couple days and want to keep that going.”
Read the rest of my Dec. 2 story here.
GO FURTHER
Hawks are quarterfinal-bound, but NBA Cup could get wild on final day of group play
