[Blog] Hawks not dead (yet)
Hawks not dead (yet)
By Terence Moore
Monday, February 27, 2006, 10:18 PM
They should have traded a guy that they still have. The
old-school coach often clashes with the knuckleheads in his
locker room with hip-hop attitudes. Their starting center was
third on the depth chart for somebody else. They haven’t a
point guard, but only because they refused to snatch a nice one
in the draft. An estranged owner is threatening to spank his
slew of colleagues in courts. Plus, folks come to their games
with invisible skin.
Not only that, they spent most of the season declining to use
a creaky but competent point guard for unspecified reasons.
When they finally decided to fire the poor dude, they did so
when they needed anybody who could breathe on what was a
short-handed roster.
What a mess, or is that redundant when you’re talking about
the Hawks?
Anyway, since we’re in the midst of another forgettable NBA
season around town, I didn’t come to a mostly empty Philips
Arena on Monday to praise a franchise that still spends most
of its time looking more lost than found. Even so, before I
could bury it, somebody kept snatching the shovel from my hands.
Somebody named Michael Gearon Sr., among the hidden men of
wisdom in Atlanta sports history. Once, he was a Hawks president
during their building years toward prominence in the 1980s. Now
he is among those colleagues of Steve Belkin, the estranged owner
who is trying to win a bundle during his divorce from what was a
nine-person marriage.
“We’re all impatient. We’re all basketball fans,” said
Gearon, before adding with a chuckle, “And we’re all looking
at each other at times and saying, ‘How could we possibly lose
THAT game?” Then Gearon turned serious, adding, “But I think
that we all see that we’ve made great strides by bringing in a
substantial number of exceptional young players. We are the
youngest team in the NBA. Nobody’s delighted not to be winning
more than we are, but Billy Knight (the Hawks’ general manager)
only has been on the job (two years), and you have to remember
he was starting at ground zero.”
I remember. We all remember the dark days of Pete Babcock
(Isaiah Rider, Priest Lauderdale, Ed Gray, Cal Bowdler) that
set the foundation for the Hawks’ current stretch of seven
consecutive years without a trip to the playoffs. It’s just
that blowing up that foundation is the easiest of the two
difficult tasks for Knight. The hardest task is constructing
a team that is consistently decent beyond just a tease.
So what if the Hawks beat Indiana thrice, along with shocking
Detroit, San Antonio and Cleveland? They also spent Monday
night with much of that youth giving New Jersey fits, and the
Nets lead the Atlantic Division. In the end, the two Joshes
(Smith and Childress) nailed enough clutch shots down the
stretch to send the Hawks to a 104-102 thriller in overtime.
Shaky teams do such things. That’s because solid teams have a
tendency to take shaky teams for granted. That’s also because
shaky teams have a tendency to play out of their minds against
solid teams.
“Yeah, but if you look at the Braves during the year before
they became pennant contenders, I don’t think they were as
far advanced as we are, but all of a sudden their young talent
began to have an impact,” said Gearon, of the Braves going
from losing 97 games in 1990 to their current string of 14
consecutive division titles. “They got one or two pieces to
help their youth, and all of a sudden, the transformation was
there. We’re very much analogous to that development of the
Braves.”
Uh, well, hmmm. The Braves never had their equivalent to Al
Harrington, the Hawks’ veteran forward in the last year of
his contract. He should have been moved long ago to give
talented rookie Marvin Williams more time to grow. Braves
manager Bobby Cox is old school, too, but unlike the Hawks’
Mike Woodson, in his second year as a head coach, Cox has the
credentials to make the knuckleheads not even start whining.
Except for a shaky bullpen, the Braves rarely are without
pieces they need in their lineup, and they haven’t a Steve
Belkin.
That said, although it is easier to find weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq than for even the owners to pry Knight’s
exact game plan for the Hawks from his lips, Gearon says all
is well with Knight acquiring people and Woodson coaching them.
Since I trust Gearon, I’ll put the shovel away.
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