ATLANTA — As the Hawks, a surprise 60-win team in the regular season, were entering the postseason Sunday as the Eastern Conference’s top-seeded team, one of the few things dampening their spirits was the absence of their teammate Thabo Sefolosha, whose ongoing conflict with the New York Police Department will unfurl as a side plot to the high-octane basketball.
And it will do so with a variety of moving parts and under the gaze of multiple interested parties.
Sefolosha, a 30-year-old small forward, and his teammate Pero Antic, 33, were arrested in the early morning of April 8 outside a Manhattan club amid the commotion that followed the stabbing of Chris Copeland, a player on the Indiana Pacers, and two other people.