Hawks coach Nate McMillan begins to count off, one by one, on his fingers, the assets he can bring to bear on the 2021-22 season. And one fact becomes abundantly clear. That, when this team is healthy, he just might need more fingers.
He quickly runs through the Hawks presumptive starting lineup of Trae Young, Bogdan Bogdanovic, John Collins, De’Andre Hunter and Clint Capela.
Then shifts to another veteran guard the Hawks acquired this summer, Delon Wright. There’s Kevin Huerter, coming off a helluva year (the coach’s phrasing). There’s the big guy from long range, Danilo Gallinari. The walking smelling salts off the bench, Lou Williams. Cam Reddish – if he stays healthy – and all that upside he broke out last postseason.
“There’s no way I can play all those guys. No way,” McMillan said.
Something’s got to give, and that something is ego.
When asked what one thing is most important for the Hawks this season while trying to prove their recent run to the conference final wasn’t some 100-year flood, McMillan doesn’t go to his whiteboard. There is no stratagem involved, nothing about a new and improved pick-and-roll or drive-and-dish. Now with a full year on the pulpit, the Hawks coach has even more time to preach his chosen virtue.
“If we sacrifice, if we understand that the strength is in our numbers and we’re doing it like this (holding up two fists), we can win some games,” McMillan said.
“But,” he added, raising a single index finger from his balled fists, “if we even got one guy like this, we ain’t fighting like that.”
It was in mid-season that the Hawks turned to McMillan, giving him first chair over Lloyd Pierce. The affect was like an electric jolt to a quivering heart, a franchise-wide defibrillation. A 14-20 team that under Pierce always seemed to end games with a question mark rather than an exclamation, went 27-11 the rest of the way with McMillan. He had brought the Hawks together, yes, like fingers coming together to make a fist. And they went all Mike Tyson on the Knicks and Sixers in the postseason before being stopped by Milwaukee.
The turn to McMillan was laced with serendipity. The Hawks had tapped into him at precisely the right time. Just as a young team was searching for a strong, experienced voice to follow. And just as veteran coach, who at 57 already has 17 NBA head coaching seasons with four teams in the bank, was mastering the art of balancing his old-school soul with an acquired feel for the whims of the modern player.
Understand that at his core, McMillan is as basic and forged as one of his game’s carbon steel rims. One of his guiding philosophies, slightly edited for widespread consumption, is “Don’t eff with the game.”
To expand, less colorfully, that means, McMillan said, “We play the game the right way, we prepare the right way. When we’re on this (practice) floor, you’re always trying to get better. We respect the game. Don’t eff with it. If a guy’s open, he gets the ball.
“I don’t like disrespecting the game. We respect the game. Respect our opponents – you don’t have to like them, but respect them. Respect the fan base. And play the game the right way – play hard, play the together. If you do those two things, you’re going to give yourself a chance to win.”
Sounds simple. Comes hard.
Bringing that code up to date has been McMillan’s own great leap forward.
Can you believe it? There was a time, back in the early 2000s when he was coaching in Seattle, that McMillan was so rigid he had a rule against players using their cell phones on the team bus. That kind of thing would inspire a bloody mutiny today. A coach must either evolve or wither.
McMillan said he can still hear the voices of the coaches he’s learned from, all the way back to when he was a 9-year-old being rocked in the basketball cradle of Raleigh, N.C. – “Each of those guys is a brick in the foundation I’m standing on today,” he said.
Drawing from those he’s met in college and across the landscape of professional and international hoops, he plucks one of his favorites, from Hall of Famer Chuck Daly: You have to learn to ignore. “So,” McMillan said, “I ignore a lot of things today that I didn’t ignore 10 years ago. Ten years ago, I was trying to put out all the fires.”
Who knows how the McMillan of a decade or so ago would have reacted to his young team leader and point guard strutting across the floor at Madison Square Garden telling the foul-mouthed crowd to hush up? And then taking a bow at midcourt once he had eliminated the Knicks? Well, McMillan knows. And it wouldn’t have been with the magnanimity he showed this past postseason.
“That’s where I was learning to adapt. That’s where I learned to somewhat ignore,” McMillan said with a smile. “Not totally ignore – I kind of use it, I’ll talk to him about that and try to get his vision of what he’s thinking and doing, and I’ll give him mine.
“I’m not going to take his swag away. Ten years ago, Nate McMillan would have called Trae on that.”
The Hawks’ turnaround was built upon the mutual understanding hammered out between McMillan and the Hawks transcendent star guard. Young became noticeably more tuned into running the show rather than being the show under McMillan. To appease a coach committed to bowing up at the other end, Young even dabbled in defense.
His players may not go far enough back to remember McMillan’s 12 seasons as a player in Seattle. They don’t go back far enough to remember the NBA in Seattle, for that matter. But there is a special place in basketball heaven for a guy who could glue together a very good 1990s vintage team that contained such fractious personalities as Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp. “Mr. Sonic,” as McMillan was known, was that adhesive.
When the Sonics drafted Payton in 1990, he was made the starting point guard over McMillan by acclimation. When Payton reported to camp, he was prepared to go to his default mode of antagonism. It was up to McMillan to calm the waters.
“He didn’t know me, so he came in with his guard up, (thinking) I’m going to have a problem with this veteran. And the veteran opened his arms to him and said, look, they want to make you the starting point guard and me the backup. We got to make this work,” McMillan recalled.
The point is, that when McMillan talks about sacrificing and deferring for the greater good, it’s more than talk. He has lived it. There’s credibility written all through the pages of his past.
Now here are the young Hawks at another stage, trying to deal with their first taste of success. (Although the coach is still playing the old reliable chords of perceived insult: “We did some good things. But nobody’s afraid of us. Outside of Atlanta I think people are still not talking about us,” McMillan said, accurately or not.)
What’s required to take the next step, it seems, is more of the same.
More of the same messaging for the coach who last season drove home the point about shutting out all the static from outsiders, no matter how dear they may be, in a personal way. He showed the team a text message from one of his own family members – in retelling the story, McMillan wouldn’t divulge who it was exactly, only that, “he was very close” – rife with unsolicited advice. Exactly the kind of stuff you need to block, the coach told his players.
More of the same hammering on about staying connected and committed at both ends of the floor, no matter the risk of the familiar words growing stale. Can they still resonate the same here in Season 2? “They better because they’re going to hear them every day,” McMillan said.
“For any winning team, being connected is essential for everything. We still need a lot more of understanding sacrifice. That mentality needs to spread through the team, us giving up more and understanding that more is needed from us for the bigger goal.”
McMillan will be happy to learn that those words were not his own, spouting rather from the longest-tenured Hawk, Collins.
“We have to build on the fundamentals and the basics of what it takes to win big,” McMillan said of Job One for the Hawks now.
Look out, McMillan is making a fist again. There must be a fundamental truth to hammer.
“We showed what that was last year – that’s connection. It’s believing in each other. It’s being committed to each other. The tighter those five guys on the court are, the easier it is to knock someone out.”
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