Smith growing by leaps and bounds

Hawks forward Josh Smith has had a tough time against Kevin Garnett and the Celtics, but his game is certainly on the upswing. (Jim Davis/Globe Staff)

Walter Smith had about two or three seats to himself, and for the most part, he went unbothered as he watched his son from two sections behind the basket closest to the Hawks' bench.

The black band and gold trim of his watch peeked from under the cuff of his button-down shirt, striped in dark and light browns, as he fidgeted with his cell phone.

He was in the middle of a thought about maturing and slowing down the game and adjusting to the tempo, when he paused.

"Excuse me."

He tried not to let his eyes wander from what's important. He was watching his son Josh fight for a rebound with a hungry Kevin Garnett, then come down the other end and work fruitlessly for baskets in the paint, watching a couple of short shots come up empty.

His son was struggling through the third quarter of the Hawks' Game 2 loss to the Celtics last Wednesday night at the TD Banknorth Garden. Wasn't the first or the last time he would struggle. But this series, like his son's career so far, is a process of maturity.

And not long after the game, he would be on that phone preaching that to his son.

"I don't interfere with what the coach is doing," said the elder Smith, who was a guard in the ABA before putting the ball down and raising his family, driving trucks and working for Eastern Airlines. "I'm not a general manager or any of that kind of stuff.

"I look at games from a coach's standpoint, from a parent's standpoint, and from a friend's standpoint. Someone who supports him to try to see mistakes that he makes, and we talk about them later on."

The conversation that night wouldn't be much different from the ones the Smiths would have four years ago, when the Hawks were drowning in futility, 13-game winners, 69-game losers.

Josh Smith and Josh Childress were drafted in the first round that year and they joined a team that hadn't made the playoffs in six years (a streak that ended at nine this year).

The contrast between the team they were joining and the teams they had left couldn't have been much greater. Smith was a high school national champion and Childress had led Stanford to a 30-win season and a top seed in the NCAA Tournament. But Childress tried not to think about it at the time.

"You finally make it, you don't care where," he said. "You don't care how. You just want to go play."

His only burden was trying to turn a team around. Smith, though, is as Atlanta as Outkast, born in College Park but spending most of his life in Cobb County. He had a city on his back.

"It's a lot of pressure, because he's got his peers and he's got his family members and he's got hometown people watching to see if you're really that person that the newspapers say you are," Walter Smith said.

Smith was only 18 coming into the league. The days of Dominique Wilkins and dunk contests were long gone, though he'd pay homage to the Hawks legend when he won his own dunk titles. The Hawks as an organization needed a different kind of success.

"Nine years of not making the playoffs is rough," Josh said, "not just on the organization, but on the city of Atlanta."

What was rougher was wallowing through a rookie season with the league's doormat. It wasn't just the losing. It was the innovation. They lost games 13 and 14 at a time, by 1, by 3, and by 30.

They were the kinds of losses that had Childress asking himself, "Is this how it really is?"

And they were playing in a town that was known to stumble in around October to catch the Braves, and one that faded off the football map between the Jamal Anderson and Michael Vick eras of the Falcons. The Hawks were at the bottom of a totem pole that wasn't that tall.

"At that point, it was five or six years of not making the playoffs," Childress said. "You've got to win. I don't blame people for not coming out those years."

The bright side was that they were young pups, eating up a ton of minutes. But Smith and Childress were two of four draft picks playing for the Hawks that year. They would have made a great Pac-10 team, but they struggled to adapt in the Eastern Conference.

"We all leaned on each other pretty heavy," Smith said. "Because we wasn't used to anything like that and it was all such a new experience to us."

An experience full of lessons, Childress said.

"You learn from that," Childress said. "You learn from those years and you never want to experience them again, so you work as hard as you possibly can not to."

After the Hawks' season ended, Atlanta coach Mike Woodson took Smith and Childress to see Miami and Detroit in the Eastern Conference finals.

"The playoff atmosphere was crazy," he said. "I was just saying to myself, 'I want to be here one day.' "

Now that they're in the playoffs, it's easy to think about how far they've come.

"It is embarrassing only winning 13 games in the NBA," Smith said. "But you look back at that and you see where you're at right now and it was all worth it. It kept us hungry."

Earning the eighth seed this season is just a start, in their eyes. Orlando was the eighth seed last year; the Magic are a No. 3 seed thisyear. Four years and one massive facelift ago, the Celtics were an eighth seed. Now they're the top seed.

"I'm sure we won't be satisfied with just making the playoffs," said Smith. "We're going to be hungry to get a higher seed next season.

"Yeah, we're an eighth seed, we may not get out of the first round, but we can look it as though we made the playoffs and it may have took nine years for a team to do it, but we were able to do something special."

"It takes a while to get rid of the stigma, and I feel like this is the year we were able to do that," said Childress. "Hopefully from now on, we're a staple in the playoffs and we can get deeper and deeper every year."

There's no getting past the Hawks' youth. Smith has inside jokes about girls with Marvin Williams. Childress has braces. And in some ways, that is the difference between the Celtics' tunnel vision and the Hawks' view of the picture in front of them.

"We're a young team with a lot of potential," Smith said. "I'm excited and happy that we were able to make it with kind of the youth we have, because a lot of people, they count us out every season."

And every season Walter Smith is there to give his son the same talk.

"It's just a maturity thing," Walter said. "He's maturing into the game. A lot of times that's basically what the young players have to realize."

Julian Benbow can be reached at jbenbow@globe.com