SI Called the Hawks an Upset Pick. SI Stopped Watching in January.

Sports Illustrated published a piece yesterday calling the Hawks "the most likely team to pull off a first-round upset."

I need SI to define "upset" for me. Because I'm not sure that word means what they think it means.

This is a 46-36 team. Division champions. A squad that went 28-15 after blowing up its roster in January — a .651 clip, which projects to 53 wins over a full season. That's a 3-seed pace. And SI looked at that and typed the word "upset."

Here's what the word "upset" actually tells you: national media locked in their Hawks opinion the day the Trae trade went down and never updated the file. They saw "traded their best player" and wrote the obituary. Ten weeks and 28 wins later, they're still reading from the same script.

The receipts are stacking. CJ McCollum — the guy everyone called salary filler — just dropped 29 to clinch the Southeast Division and is shooting 46.7% from three this month. NAW is averaging a career-high 20.4 points per game after never cracking 11 in six prior seasons. This team didn't stumble into the playoffs. They built something in February, stress-tested it in March, and chose their opponent in April.

Chose. Their. Opponent.

A team that deliberately drops from the 5-seed to the 6 because it likes that matchup better isn't an underdog. It's a team that did the math while SI was still Googling their roster.

I'm 81% sure that anyone calling Hawks-Knicks an "upset" hasn't watched Atlanta play since Martin Luther King Day. The other 19% accounts for the possibility that they watched and still couldn't process what they saw.