It's been several months now since the magic of the home games in last year's first-round playoff series against the Celtics. It's a new season with several new faces, and going into tonight's game I wondered what to expect at Philips Arena. Would it be the same? Could it be the same?
Well, if it didn't match the atmosphere of the playoffs, it was still as rowdy as I've seen it during the regular season in a long time. The Hawks got down (way down) pretty early on, and whereas before the fans would have resigned themselves to an inevitable loss, tonight it was different.
Every time the Hawks strung a basket or two together, the decibel level would begin to raise. By the time the Hawks cut the deficit to a couple of possessions midway through the fourth quarter, the fans were really engaged and making a tangible difference in the home team's play.
It was great. It was what we've always wanted to see at Philips Arena, and what we got a taste for last April. The players, feeding off the energy of the crowd, making play after play to take down an opponent.
And that's exactly what they did tonight, rallying from a 23-point deficit in a first half where it seemed like nothing could go right and the Sixers looked every bit like a team prepared to challenge for the Eastern Conference title (in part because of the play of Thaddeus Young - man does he look good for a guy who should be a junior at Georgia Tech).
But the Hawks didn't quit, and after giving up a barrage of easy buckets in the first half the D stiffened, forcing the Sixers to take bad shot after bad shot. The clear paths to the lane they found in the early going vanished, causing them to rely on an unreliable perimeter shooting attack that couldn't produce enough to keep the Hawks at bay.
Congrats to Mike Woodson and his team on a hard-fought comeback, and here's to savoring the first of what will hopefully be many victories for the home team this season.
