This crowd rises to his feet. The Toro slammed it home. Garland left wing, three ball. Perfect. The point of the lane locked. The mobility, pow! And Alan blocked the shot at the rim. How! With the left head and a foul! Welcome to the Chase Down podcast, part of the Cavs Media family. I'm your host, Justin Rowan. The Chasedown is presented by Fubo,

the official streaming partner of the Cavs. Watch over 350 channels of live sports and TV,

including Fan Dual Sports Network without cable. There's no cost and no commitment. Try for free at

FuboTV.com slash calves. Our team previews continue. We talked about the New York Knicks last

week. Now we are diving into the Atlanta Hawks. Very excited to talk about the Hawks, really interested to see kind of where everyone is at about this team. I think they are one of the consensus winners of the offseason, at least in the Eastern Conference. But before I introduce our guest, I got to introduce my co-host, Carter Rodriguez.

Carter, how you doing, buddy? I'm doing all right. The back-to-school sniffles are running through the Rodriguez house. So, you know, we're all going down. Strap throat, boom, runny nose, boom.

We're just coughing, boom. You know, we're in it. Kids are the grossest things on planet Earth. I love my children very much. Well, for what it's worth you, still sound great, buddy. And making his return to the Chase Down podcast from Locked-on Hawks, Brad Rowland. Brad, thank you so much for joining us. How are you doing? I'll do good guys. I appreciate

you having me to do a Hawks preview and some genuine intrigue about the Hawks right now. How about

that? You know what? It is one of those times where we are back at that same kind of point, right?

I was saying before we started the podcast that the last time we had you on for one of these previews

was three years ago. We had you on the year prior as well where both teams were kind of maybe they're in the play in. I remember one of the topics was what can the calves learn about how the Hawks have done team building? Then it was going into the last Donovan Mitchell year where people or I should say the first Donovan Mitchell year, where people

weren't really sure, are the Cavs going to still be a playing team? Are they going to be, you know,

how good are they going to be? Of course, that year, the Cavs won 51 games, the Hawks 1141. They didn't

meet up in the playoffs, but every single time these teams seem to play, it always leads to very interesting

matchups and, you know, pretty frequently frustrating matchups on our end. But I want to start things off

by asking you how your opinion of the team has evolved since this time last year. Obviously,

there's been a lot of changes not only going into last, you know, last season,

but there's been a lot of changes this offseason as well. For sure. Last year was kind of a reset year for

the Hawks and almost on purpose. They didn't really push their chips in to try to win last season,

but they also had no incentive to really go into a rebuild either.

They got some good fortune in winning the lottery, even in a year where no one wanted to

actually win the lottery in 2024, but they won it.

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