Nobody Spent a Conference Ballot on Atlanta

Somebody at ESPN sat down on Monday morning and typed a name into a box.

Fifteen people did it, four times each -- Eastern champion, Western champion, Finals champion, MVP -- and when the ballots went up just after eight o'clock Atlanta time, five Eastern clubs had been named. New York got five votes. Philadelphia got five. Boston got three. Indiana and Toronto got one apiece. Fifteen ballots, five names, and a club that finished sixth in that conference last season does not appear in any of them.

Be precise about what that is, because the loose version is the fun one and the loose version is false. The article asks four questions and not one of them is who makes the playoffs. Nobody there was handed the Hawks and passed. The finding is narrower and colder: across fifteen ballots for the Eastern Conference, five teams were imaginable as champions, and Atlanta was not one of the five. That is a measurement, not a verdict on anybody, and the difference matters more than the louder version would.

Six and a half hours later the same outlet published its thirty-team season preview, and Ramona Shelburne wrote the top of the Atlanta section. "If he stays healthy -- he's missed a combined 82 games in the past three seasons -- and continues to develop, the Hawks could be a top-four team in the East." Jalen Johnson, the 24-year-old ESPN says the franchise has been fully turned over to, played 72 games last season and averaged 22.5 points, 10.3 rebounds and 7.9 assists in them.

One masthead, one Monday. In the morning not one of its fifteen ballots had Atlanta winning the conference. By mid-afternoon the same building had printed a sentence that puts them in its top four. Nobody had to reconcile those, because nobody reads a ballot and a preview side by side, and because a conditional clause is where American sportswriting keeps everything it is not ready to commit to.

The preview runs the same contradiction in its own numbers, and the opponent is the cleanest place to watch it happen. ESPN ranks Atlanta 15th of thirty and Orlando 16th -- Atlanta ahead -- then projects Orlando 42.9 wins to Atlanta's 42.2, gives Orlando a 54.4% chance of reaching the playoffs against Atlanta's 48.7%, and lists Atlanta's BPI first-round projection as "None." Its game model makes Orlando a 56-44 favorite on Wednesday, at home. Last season Atlanta finished 46-36 and sixth in the East; Orlando finished 45-37 and eighth. The club that finished ahead is the underdog -- and the favorite spent Monday night with four players listed day to day, which is to say it does not yet know its own lineup.

Then there is the 42.2, which I do not get to walk past, because it sits under a line I signed. On October 11, in Nine Places Apart, I wrote: "Atlanta will clear 43.5, but the wins will come against teams nobody remembers." ESPN's number is 1.3 wins below my floor. I am holding the position, and here is the only thing that moves me off it: Johnson's availability. Shelburne's sentence is a conditional, and so, honestly, was mine. The uncomfortable part is the back half of my own take. I was already betting on a season nobody would be able to picture -- wins stacked against teams whose names you would not keep -- which is not that far from what the model just priced.

Atlanta has been living in this register for a long time, and it is not the one the city gets accused of living in. Not dismissed. Ranked. Priced. Set fifteenth, respectably mid-pack, and then left out of the part where a person has to say a name out loud. This is the difference between being underrated and being unimaginable, and it is the second one that costs you something. Underrated is a thing wins fix. Unimaginable is a thing you only fix by becoming a different kind of story, which is a heavy ask for a team whose ceiling arrives with a clause attached to it.

Wednesday at seven, at Kia Center, that stops being a forecasting problem. The same night, the Dream host a Finals game at State Farm Arena, which is its own story and not this one.

The useful thing about a result is that nobody has to imagine it. Somebody types it into a box, and it stays there.