Garden Doors Open at Six

Somewhere between now and 6 p.m., the Hawks stop being the team everyone picked to upset somebody and start being the team that has to.

Two games tonight. A split screen the city hasn't had in years. Here is your Saturday.

Hawks

Game 1. Madison Square Garden. 6 p.m. on Prime Video. Hawks (46-36) at Knicks (53-29). The entire country's consensus upset pick walks into the building where consensus goes to get tested.

Forget the preview. You have read the preview. Every outlet ran one this week, every outlet picked New York, and the Hawks spent the last 48 hours hearing about it. That part is over. What matters now is the first twelve minutes.

The Hawks went 20-6 after the All-Star break — the largest post-break improvement in 27 years. They went 2-1 at MSG this season — the road team won all three meetings. They shoot 37.1 percent from three as a team, which is not the spacing crisis the scouting reports have been selling. None of that survives tip-off. Playoff basketball is a different sport. Outside of McCollum, the Hawks have almost none of it on their current roster.

Simone wrote the piece that should be read before tip-off — the Garden has never seen this version of the Hawks, and this version of the Hawks has never seen the Garden in April. Dex is already collecting receipts. One of them will look prescient by midnight. The question is which one.

Braves

Austin Riley hit three home runs in three games. That sentence has been waiting since Opening Day.

The first one — April 15 against the Marlins — broke an 18-game drought that had become the quiet subplot of a team winning without its cleanup hitter producing. The next two came Thursday in a 9-0 shutout of the Phillies. Riley drove in five. The lineup that has been winning on depth and pitching suddenly remembered what it looks like when the middle of the order hits.

Braves are 13-7, first in the NL East, on a 102-win pace. They lead baseball with four shutouts. And the Perez start Thursday told its own story: DFA'd on April 12, recalled days later, then threw six scoreless innings against Philadelphia. The rotation is not what the front office planned. It might be better.

Ellis has the column that was always going to arrive once Riley started hitting — the argument that the depth was never a patch, it was the point. Dex has the Philadelphia-facing version, which is louder and not wrong.

Falcons

Five days. Round 1 is Wednesday night. The Falcons do not pick until Round 2 — No. 48 — but the evening will not be quiet.

Michael Turner will announce the selection. The franchise's all-time rushing leader standing at a podium in Green Bay is a nice piece of theater, and it is also the most fun the Falcons have had in a draft cycle dominated by felony hearings and retirement notices. The mock consensus at 48 has coalesced around defensive line and cornerback — the two positions where last season's 4.6 yards per carry allowed and the secondary's depth chart intersect. Cunningham has talked about trading up. The board will decide whether the price is worth it.

The Pearce hearing is Monday. Penix is rehabbing without a timeline. The organization that wanted to project calm this spring has found calm to be an expensive commodity. Five days.

Atlanta United

Nashville SC visits Mercedes-Benz Stadium at 7:30. It is HBCU Night — Clark Atlanta's Mighty Marching Panthers, Morehouse's House of Funk, T.I. at halftime, the Supporters Section carrying the kind of atmosphere that deserves a team playing up to it.

Nashville (5-1-1, 16 points, first in the East) became the first MLS club to win at Azteca this season. They have conceded four goals in seven matches. Atlanta (1-5-1, 4 points, 12th) has conceded sixteen. The gap is not cosmetic.

Miguel Almirón is out one to two weeks with a knee injury. Without him, Atlanta's designated players have accounted for ten of the team's sixteen goals this season — a dependency ratio that explains the floor when one of them sits. SixOneFive picked Nashville in all five of their staff predictions. The split-screen night means a portion of the city will be watching Hawks-Knicks on one device and United-Nashville on another, and both games will be asking the same question: can Atlanta compete when the opponent is actually good.

One more thing.

The Hawks play at 6. United play at 7:30. For roughly ninety minutes tonight, both games will be happening at the same time — one at the Garden, one at the Benz. Playoff basketball and a match against the best team in the conference, running simultaneously, in a city that spent most of the winter being told its teams were rebuilding.

The Hawks are the number one upset pick in the country. United are a unanimous underdog. Atlanta, apparently, is most interesting when nobody expects it to win.