With all due respect to Joe Johnson, the player who helped put Atlanta Hawks basketball back on the map, the team's best and most consistent player this abbreviated 66-game season has been Josh Smith. 

But with Smith now nursing a strained tendon in his left knee, the question becomes:  Do the Hawks still have a chance to win their best-of-7 first round playoff series against the Boston Celtics without him? 

Although Johnson has done more than people realize to resurrect the NBA in Atlanta as a six-time All-Star (remember, the year before Joe's arrival, the team went 13-69), Smith does everything for this team.  

Scoring?  Smith scored 20 or more points 30 times this season, including eight 30-point games. 

Rebounding?  J-Smoove averaged a career-high 9.6 boards per game, good for 13th in the league this season.  (By the way, his 15.0 rebounds per game lead the NBA over the first four days of the playoffs.)

Assists?  Twenty times he dished out five dimes or more in a game.  He averaged 3.9 per during the season.  That's just shy of his career-best mark and it ranks better than Miami Heat starting point guard Mario Chalmers (3.5) and universally renowned passing big man Pau Gasol of the Los Angeles Lakers (3.7).

Smith also finished the season ranked ninth in the league in blocked shots with 1.74 per game. 

The fact is ... Smith was the NBA's only player to rank in the top 40 in points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks per game. 

He played in all 66 games for the Hawks this season. 

Now ... he could be out for Friday's Game 3 in Boston and perhaps Game 4 Sunday. 

Hawks head coach Larry Drew says he still believes his team can win without Smith, Zaza Pachulia (sprained foot) and Al Horford (torn pectoral muscle suffered in January). 

He's supposed to say that; and I'm pretty sure he believes it. 

But the rest of his team will have to come up with an extraordinary collaborative effort to make up for what Smith provides each and every game. 

What's the old saying?  Sometimes you don't know what you miss until it's gone? 

Let's hope the Hawks don't have to learn that in this series, as they're officially listing Smith as day-to-day. 

But Smith has been incredibly durable over the course of his eight-year career, having missed double-digit games just twice (10 games in 2006-07 and 13 games missed in 2008-09.) 

One of the reasons the Hawks manufactured the fourth-best record in the Eastern Conference this season was the production of their bench. 

They'll need those reserves and Johnson to shine if Smith misses any significant time.  That's if they intend to bring the series back to Atlanta without facing elimination in Tuesday's Game 5.