Corbin Explains: The Atlanta Hawks and the circle of life

The Warriors have become a bit much. Three sure-fire Hall of Famers, two more dudes who have an excellent chance, all in or around their primes. Win after win, the title belongs to them by rights. It’s okay to watch a team basically break basketball on the court, but the meta-narrative of unceasing success year after year is just exhausting.

Every Dynasty is dull, after a while: myriad irritating-to-truly-loathsome Celtics and Lakers squads, the machine-like Spurs Vampires, the nihilistic Bad Boys Pistons. Only Jordan’s Bulls didn’t destroy the minds and spirits of everyone who watched, and only because Iron Mike was such a consummate showman that he LEFT THE GAME to play baseball and came back and kicked the crap out of everyone again. He understood what none of these other squads got: the road to glory is paved with the withholding of pleasure.

In this way, the Hawks are a noble franchise. Winning is gauche. It goes on and on in the same way and it sucks the air out of the league. The Hawks would never DREAM of living like this. Instead, they plod along year after year, they field some good squads, some bad ones, some excellent ones. They lose in the playoffs, their team leaves, they bite the bullet and rebuild. The circle of life: birth, death, rebirth. Living outsides these bounds, stretching yourself to get a taste of the land of eternity, is fundamentally sinful. It is craving, pride. It revolts any person who sees the truth of existence. The title is an excess. Building and falling year after year is the only real truth: everything else in sports in nonsense.

The Hawks are doing it right. They exiled Mike Budenholzer, the team’s extremely good coach, so he could seek the “Victory” he craves in Milwaukee. They kept some decent players, traded a pick that could have maybe been an all-time great player, got Vince Carter to teach the youngin’s skills and professionalism while they file his corns and listen to his stories about times Jason Kidd yelled at an arena worker. They drafted a grip of 3-point shooters, throwing the dice and hoping that one of them has an unknown deeply buried ball-handling ability or enough personal ambition that they learn the tedious and unrewarding art of defense.

It’s probably not going to build to a title, because nothing builds to a title, really. Your team plays year after year, drafts a player who can generate 15-20 extra wins, sells themselves on the idea that this dude can bring them to the promised land, signs a bunch of other dudes who are worth fewer wins than he is, mixes everyone around in a panic for five or so years, then, eventually, bails when the dude leaves to win a title, somewhere, and drafts ANOTHER player who might be worth 15-20 extra wins and tries again, hoping that this time the player they got is worth the extra 15-20 wins that earn your organization a title.

Sometimes, I suppose, it works, and your team ascends once or twice or entirely-too-many times, but who honestly gives a crap, titles are fake constructions that you get for winning at basketball, which is also a fake construction. Other teams kill themselves to win titles, while the Hawks do the noble thing: see beyond the climaxes and doldrums of this asinine rat race, focus entirely on the process, run the franchise one day at a time, see what happens without expecting much to come from it, and stay calm when nothing does. I suspect the effect of seeing Dominique flame out the way he did while Jordan cut a path through his enemies opened their eyes to the truth, that The Process never ends. It’s the right way to think about it, and the league would be better if everyone followed their lead.