FanHouse AlHorford

Shame on the NBA owners for being greedy, trying to milk their teams for an unbelievable eight exhibition games on top of an already marathon regular season and a taxing playoff march.

Eight is too many. Just ask Los Angeles Clippers coach Mike Dunleavy, who now may be without his star rookie prize Blake Griffin in Tuesday's much-anticipated opener against the cross-arena Lakers.

Griffin hurt his left knee Friday night in exhibition No. 8, a game that never should have been played if the league had listened to players, coaches, trainers and even nonsensical sports writers who have said for years that there is no need for so many meaningless games.

The Atlanta Hawks are considered one of the NBA's rising teams, as evidenced by consecutive playoff appearances for the first time in 10 years. The Hawks, however, were easily swept in the Eastern Conference semifinals by the Cleveland Cavaliers, who spent four games exposing Atlanta's numerous flaws and weaknesses. The Hawks are approaching a critical time for their franchise, with Mike Bibby a free agent and third-year forward and former lottery pick Marvin Williams seemingly without a role.

Hawks legend Dominique Wilkins, the team's vice president of basketball, said the Hawks need two key components to challenge, Boston, Orlando and Cleveland for Eastern Conference supremacy.

It's been five months since the Hawks last beat the Cavaliers -- their lone win in four tries in the regular season was on Dec. 13, 2008 -- but after watching the Cavs absolutely destroy the visitors from Atlanta in the first two games of the second round, it may as well be five years.

Cleveland won Thursday's game 105-85, but that doesn't even begin to convey how much they dominated the Hawks. The Cavs had a 30-point lead entering the fourth quarter, at which point Mike Brown pulled all of his starters. The Cavs improved to 6-0 in the postseason, winning every game by double-digits while holding their opponent to 90 points or fewer each time.

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Radio announcers for the home team are supposed to be homers, but Hawks announcer Steve Holman stooped to a new low earlier this week with his over the top calls from Game 5, from sarcastically chiding Dwyane Wade for getting hurt early in the game to blowing out of proportion routine fouls.

On the eve of Game 6, Holman's comments have created a minor furor in South Beach, even as both though the league and the Hawks have (indirectly) admitted that Holman was full of hot air.

NBA Playoff 4-5 matchups are often the best of the first round. Usually the two teams are within a few wins of each other. They're not a level of David and Goliath, and both teams are usually mortal enough to make it interesting. Such is the case with tonight's matchup of the Atlanta Hawks and the Miami Heat. As such, we're rocking the live blog action again tonight. Join us after the end of Orlando-Philadelphia for Hawks-Heat. Joe Johnson. Dwyane Wade. Make this happen.

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Every night there are some stupendous, silly, stupid, or downright outlandish individual lines from around the "lig." Doing Lines lets you know which one tops the list.

The Clippers -- at full health with the monster bigs line-up for only the third game this season -- visited Oakland so Baron Davis could get cheered and smash some Warriors management egos. Except that, sorry sir, the Warriors will be doing the ego-smashing around here.

Every night there are some stupendous, silly, stupid, or downright outlandish individual lines from around the "lig." Doing Lines lets you know which one tops the list.

I'm not sure what it would take to consider Detroit's season salvaged. I imagine it involves wins. As such, the Pistons -- with Rip Hamilton back in the starting five -- got a good lead on its eventual, mysterious salvage job with a big win in Orlando.

Hamilton tallied 31 points, six assists and three steals in place of injured Allen Iverson. Rodney Stuckey also worked well with Rip, putting up 22 points of his own. On the other end, three-point heavy Orlando shot only 4-for-19 from deep.

FanHouse's NBA Guide gives you a daily look at all the games that matter ... and some that don't. At 9PM EST, join FanHouse's Brett Pollakoff, who will Twitter live from Hawks-Suns.

HEADLINER
L.A. Lakers at Houston, 8:30PM

L.A. is all saddled up, while Houston's just saddled with a recurring nightmare. Tracy McGrady's on the shelf for a while, Ron Artest is in-and-out and the Rockets have been starting and stopping in fits.

It hasn't been a great week for Atlanta sports fans. The dreams of the Falcons were ended by the now-NFC-Championship-Game-bound Cardinals, then the Hawks started to slide, culminating in Friday night's massacre against Orlando. In that game, Al Horford wound up a little banged up, and scheduled an MRI.

Well, it turns out that the MRI revealed a bone bruise on the knee, holding out Horford today against Philadelphia (a game that the Hawks promptly proceeded to lose, their third in a row). Now word has come out that Horford will miss up to four weeks games with the injury. That's quite a significant amount of time for a team in a pretty tough decision, with Orlando streaking off into vapor trails and the Heat hanging tight, not to mention the fact that the Bobcats might actually be getting their stuff together.

In the Guide today, Ziller noted that the Hawks feature a pretty fierce starting five all of a sudden. The Nuggets' response after tonight's 109-91 Hawks win would probably be something like "Thanks for the update, there, Wild Zill. Any other breaking news you want to clue us into while we wipe the treadmarks off our baby blues?"

The Hawks took on a surging Nuggets squad and after trying to stave them off for a while, finally decided it would be better to simply knock them out and leave them for dead. The Hawks took the lead for good early in the second half on the way to a 55-38 advantage in the final two periods.

Perhaps most impressive was the fact that Josh Smith continues to struggle for the Hawks, scoring only 10 points on 3-8 shooting and the Hawks offense still fired on all cylinders. Of course, Smith's eight rebounds, six assists, 2 blocks and a steal were very reminiscent of... um... Josh Smith. And who needs Smith's points when you have Mike Bibby continuing the Bibbissance shooting 70% from the field and adding 20 points and Al Horford doing the dirty work on his way to 16 and 10.

And that perimeter shooter the Hawks have needed to round out the offense? How about Flip Murray hitting 3 of 4 from the arc off the bench? The Hawks seem to have an answer for the critics this year as opposed to just replying "But we're really athletic!" like in years past.