With season winding down, Hawks remain a huge enigma

ATLANTA — Some nights, they soar. Other nights, they crash and burn. Say this about the Atlanta Hawks: They are maddeningly consistent at being inconsistent.

With a little over a month to go in the regular season, the Hawks are comfortably positioned to reach the playoffs but know they can’t go on like this if they want to make a deep run.

Up to now, they’ve been one of the NBA’s biggest enigmas, a group that has shown glimpses of being really, really good — when they’re not looking really, really bad. They’ve got 22 games to figure it out. “We’re kind of waiting for it all to happen,” Kent Bazemore said. “We know what kind of team we can be. Obviously, we’ve shown glimpses of that. But it’s showing up every night and wearing a hard hat and leaving it all out there.”

This is a team that posted impressive roads wins at defending NBA champion Cleveland, as well as Toronto and Boston — all ahead of Atlanta in the Eastern Conference standings.

This is also a team that was swept in two games by one of the league’s worst teams, the Los Angeles Lakers, and has dropped five games at home by at least 18 points, including a 36-point blowout at the hands of the sub-.500 Detroit Pistons.

Oh, and in addition to that win at Toronto, there was also a 44-point loss to the Raptors.

“Of course, you want to be clicking a little bit earlier, a little bit sooner,” Paul Millsap said after the Hawks survived an up-and-down performance Wednesday night to beat the Dallas Mavericks, a game that pretty well epitomized the entire season.

HAWKS