Photo by Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia CommonsThe Hawks are 2-2 and this city has not watched them win a basketball game yet.
Go look it up. The 132-125 over Orlando was at the Kia Center, in Orlando. The 128-81 — a forty-seven-point win, the kind you tell people about for a week — was at Spectrum Center, in Charlotte.
The one time Atlanta has played in Atlanta, Houston walked into State Farm Arena on October 24 and left with a 121-114 win.
That is the entire home record. 0-1.
Tonight Miami arrive at seven. They are 0-4. Last in the East.
Now, the easy column here is dunking on a winless team, and that story is already fully booked. ESPN reported Bam Adebayo saying critics "make me the scapegoat" for the start. Stephen A. Smith had a segment up about it the same afternoon. The Milwaukee Bucks worked Miami's 0-4 into a postgame jab.
Miami's problems do not need me. Atlanta's might.
Because there is no version of tonight that makes this team look good. Beat an 0-4 club on your own floor and you have beaten an 0-4 club. That is the schedule doing you a favor. Lose, and you are a .500 team that has not won in front of its own people once.
Atlanta have dropped two straight, both to a Houston side that is 4-0 and top seed in the West.
Cleveland come in tomorrow at eight at 2-1, winners of two straight, with a Finals elimination game on the same floor at half past twelve in between.
Two home games, twenty-five hours, one building. One of them has to produce a home win.
If neither does, I will write the column about what is wrong with this team in its own building, and you can pick the headline.
The Tilt
A home win over the East's only winless team is the one result tonight that proves nothing.
— Dex Ponce
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