FanPost

Why the Hawks can win more than 60 games this season.


Coming into this season, the general consensus is that the Hawks are headed for a regression. The reasons offered for this sentiment are the departure of DeMarre Carroll and a belief that last season's 60 win campaign was an overachievement. Overachievement is a concept that is not physically possible because it requires you to exceed the limits of your capabilities. People use the notion of overachievement when one exceeds their expectations, the flaw with that practice is that people establish their expectations as the limits of one's capabilities. The reason why many people believe the Hawks overachieved is because the Hawks were grossly underrated, leading people to set low expectations for them.

While it's not possible to play above your potential, it's very easy to play below it, and the Hawks did that at times last season. There are 8 teams that enjoyed more success against the Hawks than they should have, they are : NY, Philadelphia, Orlando, Charlotte, Boston, Milwaukee, Toronto, Lakers. Atlanta should claim more wins from that group this season with the possible exception of Milwaukee. Toronto is an interesting case given they were the only team to beat the Hawks 3 times last season and Carroll joined them this summer. While Carroll played a big part in our success he's not irreplaceable. Overall, with the acquisition of Splitter and the development of the younger guys the Hawks will be a better team.

If you are shocked that the Hawks won 60 games last season, the reality is they could have won 68. Considering that the Warriors won 67 games in the much tougher western conference, winning 68 in the East doesn't look as impressive. For more perspective, the 19 game winning streak the Hawks had was 1 game longer than the longest winning streak the Bulls had during their 72 win season.

In this exercise of setting the highest reasonable expectation for this season, I'm going to use 68 wins as my starting point and try to identify teams that can chip away at that total. Looking around the league, only 5 teams are a credible threat to prevent the Hawks from reaching 68 wins. They are : Cleveland, Milwaukee, Miami, Clippers and Houston. If the Hawks lose 5-7 games to that group that will leave them at 61-63 wins.

I know there are a lot of factors that influence the outcome of a game such as injuries, fatigue, lack of focus; but winning 61-63 games is a reasonable expectation for the Hawks this season.

A FanPost expresses the opinion of the community member who wrote it and not that of the blog management.