Hawks v. Bucks Game Seven: Tall Is Better

Watching this elimination game today was like watching an early round squash game in the NCAA Tournament, where a gutty small school manages to stay in against the monster athletes, but has absolutely no chance of winning. Time and again, a Buck player would take his man off the dribble, get into the paint, and run into a guy that was a foot taller and three feet longer. So they'd toss up high arcing shots that had little chance of going down, or get the imprint of the ball tatooed on their foreheads, and the Hawks would be out and running to easy hoops and the constant double-digit lead. Bucks coach Scott Skiles finally threw in the towle with four minutes left and the home team up by 22, and honestly, I spent more time dealing with laundry than thinking about this game.

And sure, maybe the Bucks are just too young -- Brandon Jennings at 20 might remind some of Allen Iverson, but I'm not one of them -- and lost their most essential player with the Andrew Bogut injury, but we're talking about a team with John Salmons, Carlos Delfino, Jerry Stackhouse and Kurt Thomas. That's not exactly a ton of young guys that are going to get better. Atlanta won without any of their players even looking all that good, though I suppose you need to look more charitable at Al Horford's 16 and 15. But when you do that against, among others, Primo Brezac, maybe not.

The Hawks move on to face a ludicrously rested Magic team that has had a full week off after slapping the Bobcats around. Maybe Atlanta's righted the ship here, and can steal a game on rust and momentum. But it's hard to feel confident in a team that took seven games to defeat a club that had the second-worst shooting percentage in the NBA this year (only the Nets were worse than the Bucks this year). We'll see soon.