There's no rest for the wretched. Minutes after the Atlanta Hawks were soundly beaten down in their 99-76 loss to the Boston Celtics at Philips Arena, the team immediately went back to work and boarded a jet plane and headed to Newark, N.J.
They will look for a bit of redemption when they take on the New Jersey Nets at the Prudential Center on Tuesday night (7:00 PM SportSouth). Ugly would be a polite way to describe what happened at the Bulb on Monday. Atlanta was outworked, outmanned and outclassed by a hungry Boston team that was playing without star guard Rajon Rondo.
Atlanta tossed up brick-after-brick-after-brick in the first quarter against the Celtics and never recovered. But then again, how can you possibly recover when you go 4 of 17 from the field and get outrebounded by at least a margin of 13-3 in the first 12 minutes of a basketball game. Boston took a commanding 39-13 lead and never looked back.
New coach Larry Drew held a 20-minute closed door meeting with his team afterward. Here's to hoping that he ripped his struggling club, which dropped two straight at Philips Arena to teams that were coming off of back-to-backs while Atlanta sat (presumably) at home and rested up.
The Hawks, who are 5-1 on the highway, fell to 3-5 at Philips Arena this season. Whatever they are doing around the ATL the night before games just simply has to stop.
"This was very embarrassing," Drew told the AP's Paul Newberry. "Very, very embarrassing. Very embarrassing. If I had one word to sum it up: embarrassing."
Heck, if there's one positive in all of this at least they head to Brick City to take on a New Jersey team that is pretty much an embarrassment themselves. The Nets, who opened the season at 2-1 has dropped eight of its last 10 games.
This will be the first visit by the Hawks to the Prudential Center in Newark. The Nets, who played in the Izod Center at the Meadowlands last season, elected to leave the aging facility for the New Jersey Devils' home rink while waiting for their new home to be built in Brooklyn.
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