Atlanta Hawks: With start of new season near, end to ‘10 still burns

I don’t want to to talk about politics i dont like republicans or dems DC is corrupt and so is congress thats why i have sports to escape to .

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Good for you Steve my sister is a republican and I love her but not her politics or beliefs. She loves playing the blame game like all republicans. She only thinks about her well being which is centered around advancing levels in society and economic status like all republicans. Bush was not in offense a full year and he had us going into a war that the republicans still have not explained what we went to war for, and all the republicans care about is money. They want to paint the current president as doing a bad job even though he has not had any major hiccups unlike Bush. I guess they don’t care that he got there kids killed just because he could. They only care that there pockets are fat. What immoral pieces of manure the republican, KKK, tea party members are.

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Dad was President of the UAW in ATL back in the day – Brother co-writes books with Thom Hartmann of Air America Radio (now Cumulus I believe). Yeh, some raving tea bagger I am.

If anybody criticized Billy Knight for any other reason other than them feeling he was a bad GM – shame on them.

And if somebody won’t criticize Rick Sund because he’s White – shame on them.

And if somebody feels that Billy Knight was a bad GM, but defends him because he’s Black – racist

And if somebody feels that Rick Sund has done a good job, but criticizes him because he’s White – racist.

And if two people can do the exact same thing, but you defend 1 based on skin color – racist. Get over it, and let’s be part of the human race man. All this division is not caused by George Bush, but the devil, to keep us from coming together and doing what’s best for the country – regardless of skin color. Love Truthspitter.

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“Love Ya too Steve” but its all true.

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This Nov 2 the US is at the crossroads to we take same path we have been doing for past 30 years or is a change coming that all i have to say about that no more .

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The only teams in Atlanta we can count on to make the playoffs are the Hawks and the Dream.

SHAKING MY GOT DAM HEAD

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SteveW

“All this division is not caused by George Bush,
but the *[devil]* to keep us from coming together
and doing what’s best for the country”

Steve – you’re only half right.

*It’s the devil -&- **Rush Limbough**

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Grandad – Ha!

Dampier – don’t let him go to the Bucks – the Rockets or the Nuggets – or even the Hawks – but not the Bucks or Heat.

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What has happened to this blog? smdh…. Lmao@Clyde though. Clyde what about the Falcons or have you given up on them. I wont ask you about the Braves smh.

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Sund is waiting on the market to die out before making Dampier an offer. Remember 2 years ago when Randolph Morris made the call to Sund to tell him he wanted to play here? Well Sund didn’t pursue him either. Damp would have to beg to join this roster.
No surprises on how Sund operates. He keeps it simple and is no risk, and little reward as well.

There is a reason Sund states we are fighting for a Top 4 seed this year.

And Avery Johnson has surprised me twice now. He had just been quoted that Favors would be going nowhere and also stated how there was no conflict between he and Devin Harris, his first PG in Dallas.

Can’t trust anyone making quotes these days can you?

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KenS – I agree. Great points. Do you think Jamal would do a Carmelo type thing – pay me or trade me? That was the initial reports concerning his contract status. Wish he would just play hard, and let the chips fall where they may at seasons end.

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Ken, I wholeheartedly agree with you 12:36 post.

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Truth, if the Hawks were to do that deal, and Teague breaks a leg in preseason, where does that leave us? Or if Teague starts off as a turnover machine, what would we do then?

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Ok, how did Sund ‘build’ a playoff team? The team was a playoff team when he got here! And 6 of the top 7 players were brought in by Knight, not by Sund. So if Sund is 12th, Knight should be 12th A. Because this team is his model.

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Ramon,

Agreed. Sund inherited a playoff team…

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Blog Clown!

Big Ump
Rev in Tampa

Thanks for the shout outs!
Hey, if you don’t know me by know?
You will never, never, never know me.

I am The Comedian and The Entertainment Reporter.
I see all things as funny, especially in sports.

I Love this Game!

I think someone jacked truthspitter’s I.D. though.

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Throw in The Towel!

Here is the Article by David Aldrige of the BK interview:

I googled this and there is a photo of BK donning grey Hawks
T-Shirt and sweating on a tread mill with a towel around his
neck: enjoy!

”
Posted Nov 23 2009 9:49AM

A lot of thoughts about the mess in New Orleans, the re-birth of the cool in Milwaukee, a huge jump in the Top 15, the Kings’ shocking start, T-Mac’s progress, Steve Nash’s disgust with last season and other stuff this week, but before all that, a few thoughts about a guy who isn’t in the NBA right now, and should be.

Watching the Hawks in Boston on Friday night, I saw Joe Johnson taking over in the fourth quarter, and Al Horford putting up another double-double, and Josh Smith filling up the box as always (which is why he was my second pick in my fantasy draft, after Kevin Durant; feeling good about the Timorous Poltroons!) and Mike Bibby looking fresher than he’d been in the last few years, and backup center Zaza Pachulia coming off the bench and throwing his body around.

And I wondered where Billy Knight was, and if he was watching.

As it turned out, he only saw part of Friday’s game, because Friday night is Date Night in the Knight household (been there), and he had been out with his wife, Danita. By the time I caught up with Saturday afternoon, he had a chainsaw in his hands, outside his Atlanta home. Not what you may be thinking.

“I’ve remodeled my basement,” he said. “Now I’m working on landscaping for my wife, taking down trees. That’s not my forte. I’m gonna have that chainsaw and I might chip off part of the house.”

It was good to catch up, but not good, because, at 57, Billy Knight shouldn’t have all this free time. With a lot of horrible teams bringing down the quality of play in the Association, Billy Knight should be someone’s general manager this season, doing the same thing that he did in Atlanta and the same thing he started with Memphis: finding young talent that is NBA-worthy and allowing it to grow and mature. But he’s clearing trees instead, waiting for a call from somebody 18 months after stepping down as the Hawks’ GM in May, 2008.

At the time, Knight probably jumped before he was pushed, a victim of the infighting in what had to be the most dysfunctional front office in the league. The Hawks’ ownership group, Atlanta Spirit, is a collection of massive egos living in Atlanta and in the Washington, D.C. suburbs that has spent much of the past decade fighting with one another, plotting one coup or another to replace this minority owner with that one, with the ultimate goal of controlling the NBA’s Hawks and the NHL’s Thrashers, as well as Philips Arena.

The only time they spoke with one voice was when they were trying to remove Steve Belkin, the team’s former (for now, anyway) owner that had 30 percent of the team, but who — with the league’s blessing — was forced out before he could buy out his ex-partners. (Years of legal wrangling have left the various parties pretty much where they were in 2005, when the fight began.)

The Hawks’ 8-2 start this season, which already has included wins at Portland and Boston, and a rout of Denver at home, continues the team’s upward arc — a playoff appearance in ‘08 for the first time since 1999, which led to that crazy seven-game first-round series with Boston; 47 wins last season, and a postseason series win for the first time in a decade. And it’s the maturation of Atlanta’s core group — Johnson, Smith, Horford, Marvin Williams — that made that possible. (The Hawks also still have the NBA rights to Josh Childress, a Knight 2004 first-round pick who is in his second season in Greece after being unable to reach agreement with Atlanta on a new contract the past two summers.)

“I’m proud of those guys,” Knight said. “I’m very proud of the way they played this year, and all the way through. I was proud of them that first year … each year has been a progression when they were getting better and better, and that’s what we were trying to do. You know the constraints that were put on us in Atlanta, where we had to do it with a smaller budget … but a lot of teams are. A lot of teams are doing that. And I didn’t have a problem doing it that way.”

By the way, this has nothing to do with Rick Sund, who replaced Knight in Atlanta, or the group he’s brought in. They have adeptly added to the foundation Knight laid, acquiring Jamal Crawford from Golden State, drafting guard Jeff Teague and signing veteran power forward Joe Smith, making the Hawks that much deeper. But it was Knight that did the heavy lifting.

“I think he did it at two places — Memphis and Atlanta,” says Knight’s longtime friend and former boss in Indiana, Donnie Walsh, now running the Knicks. “He went in there when it was at its lowest, slowly built it up with talent, and then he was fired before that talent had the time to emerge. That may be a decision the owners have to make, but it should be stated that he really did a good job down there.”

Waiting is the hardest part for a general manager. There is always a face-saving trade out there for a veteran that could squeeze three or four more wins out of a season and constitute job-saving “progress.” Despite the hard knocks, Knight never took the easy out.

On a rebuilding team, young players are looking to establish themselves, to make a mark that will get them that next, big contract. Sacrificing numbers for team success is a difficult concept for them to grasp. And the Hawks had a team full of young players — like Josh Smith, one of the last high school prodigies, and Marvin Williams (more on him later), who played just one season at North Carolina. Johnson was trying to live up to the $70 million free-agent deal Knight gave him in 2005 to leave Phoenix.

Says Walsh: “It’s one thing to get the right players. Then you have to let them play for a while. Josh Smith today is a different guy than Josh Smith was last year. Totally different player. And so are some of the other guys on the team.”

Coaches aren’t patient, either. Their jobs are on the line if they don’t win, and it was no different for Mike Woodson, who has survived in Atlanta long past the time most coaches that won 39 games their first two seasons would have. Woodson is a Larry Brown disciple, who taught defense today, defense tomorrow and defense forever, and didn’t care who didn’t care. (It led to clashes with players and with Knight — who wanted to fire Woodson during the 2007-08 season. Things are better now; they have dinner occasionally.)

That it took all of them several years to coalesce was understandable, but it hurt Knight’s chances of survival. Yet he stuck with his plan and stuck with the players through their mistakes.

“It’s wonderful if you can get a great young player, like Shaq in his prime, or a Dwight Howard, or LeBron,” Knight says. “But if you can’t get one of those kinds of guys, or even then, you have to have a good player at every position. And that’s what I tried to do. I wanted good players who could be multi-dimensional at every position.”

Any general manager worth his salt works long enough to make his share of mistakes, and Knight wasn’t perfect, either. It’s clear now that although Marvin Williams has become a solid NBA player, Knight still should have taken either Chris Paul or Deron Williams with the second pick overall in the ‘05 draft, and addressed the Hawks’ decade-long search for a top-shelf point guard. (Utah traded up from the sixth spot to take Deron Williams at three, and Paul went to the Hornets at four.)

Knight says today that Marvin Williams hasn’t come close to reaching his potential. As for Paul and Deron Williams?

“I don’t really think about that,” he says. “That’s not how you look at it when you’re building a team. When you look back … the fact is, that’s the team you had and you’re happy with the guys you have, and you keep building the team and you go forward. Sure, if you had taken one of those guys, there could have been a whole domino effect of things that happened. But that’s not what happened. And it’s still a good team.”

That same summer, Knight ran afoul of Belkin when the co-owner objected to Knight’s plan to give Johnson the offer sheet. Belkin now says he only objected to the Hawks giving up so much — two first-round picks and forwards Boris Diaw and Royal Ivey — to the Suns. Knight says now that Belkin just didn’t want to put that kind of money onto the payroll. At any rate, when Diaw had a brilliant 2005-06 season in Phoenix (and was the runaway Most Improved Player award winner), Knight was excoriated for having been taken.

Four years later, though, the trade doesn’t look as lopsided.

Johnson has made three All-Star teams, become one of the league’s best closers and will cash in next summer as one of the prize chips in the 2010 free agent class. Diaw hasn’t replicated that first season in Phoenix, has struggled with his weight and was dealt to Charlotte with Raja Bell last year for Jason Richardson and Jared Dudley. The Suns, facing financial problems of their own, dealt one of the two first-rounders from Atlanta to Boston in 2006, along with Brian Grant, for a future Boston pick. (That pick Phoenix sold turned out to be … Rajon Rondo. If you want to make a Suns executive cry, come up behind him and yell “Rondo!” in his ear.) The second pick from Atlanta was used by Phoenix in 2008 to take center Robin Lopez.

Ultimately, then, the Suns got Richardson, Dudley and Lopez for Johnson. A good deal for them, but hardly a steal.

“Joe Johnson has been better than advertised,” Knight says.

Yet despite the Hawks’ success, and despite the success of another Knight draftee — name of Pau Gasol, acquired by Knight over the objections of some in the Grizzlies’ front office on draft night 2001 — Knight hasn’t been close to getting another job. His name was mentioned in connection with a possible front office job with Walsh and the Knicks, but nothing has come of it. Other than that, there hasn’t been much interest. There have been calls of praise — from Pat Riley, from Mitch Kupchak, from Danny Ainge. But no job offers.

“I’d like to get back to work. I’m anxious,” Knight says. “I’m waiting for a call to put my plan back into action … I look forward to getting the opportunity to work with another organization. You move full time into that city. You live there full time. I always move my family with me. You immerse yourself into that team. You spend 24 hours a day, every day, doing that. I’ve got a team of people in mind to bring with me.”

For now, he waits.

“He doesn’t tell me,” Walsh says. “But I think he’s really hurt.” ”

BTW, this is one reason I am glad were are not limited to
1500 typed characters. Never give in to a T R O L L E!
Never That!

- drmaryb The Entertainment Reporter -

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I just read another article where JJ called Teague aside during informal workouts and told him to take charge. Correct me if I’m starting to read too much into this. But it seems like LDrew and his coaching staff aren’t the only ones wanting Teague to replace Bibby as the starter, or at least replace a major portion of his mins.

Since their hasn’t been a single complaint or comment from anyone about any phase of his PHYSICAL game, it appears the only complaint among his peers and coaching staff, is with his lack of aggressiveness in taking charge. After being beaten down for an entire season, and not being allowed to make a single mistake without being ridiculed, benched and ignored, it will take a little time for him to adjust.

Whether you like Bibby, and some do almost solely on his low turnover ratio, it’s time to recognize that’s not enough to compensate for him otherwise being an almost total liability, especially on DEF. We need speed and quickness to be a team that consistently plays solid DEF and uptempo fast break basketball.

For us to get to the next level and get past the 2nd rd, we need a PG that can:
1-penetrate, break down DEF’s, and create easy scoring opportunities for others,
2-fight over screens, recover and pick up his man if picked off,
3-protect his front line players by staying in front of his man and preventing easy penetration,
4-be a threat to take a rebound or outlet pass and run a one man fast break,
6-disrupt the DEF by pressuring the ball and causing deflections and steals,
7-be such a threat that he makes DEF’s think twice and/or pay for double teaming, in ways other than hanging around the 3pt line launching 3’s,
8-consistently collapsing the DEF, drawing fouls and getting to the FT line(getting opposing front line players in foul trouble limits their mins and aggressiveness, and really helps our front line players).

There isn’t any one thing that’s going to make the Hawks a much better team and allow us to get to the next level. It’s going to be a combination of things, like:

1-Expanded and more consistent coaching,
2-more OFF structure with more options,
3-the reliance on a more traditional DEF system that involves player accountability,
4-adding more speed, quickness, versatility and depth(JTeague, Pape Sy, JoCrawford, JPowell, EThomas,
5-eliminating most if not all of the handicaps that hindered the team and caused the players to quit giving 100%,
6-getting more production from underachieving players by playing to their strengths, rather than covering up and/or forcing them to play to their weaknesses,
7-getting more overall production by significantly expanding the bench rotation,
8-reducing the mins of our starters, but maintaining similar production from last yr by having each starter become more efficient in their scoring,
9-increasing the overall DEF effort, variety of DEF options, and utilizing players with positive DEF skills, will increase our ability to score and reduce the PPG allowed.

All of these factors, plus a few others, will result in a tremendous overall improvement for the Hawks, and will allow us to be far more competitive against the elite teams, especially the one’s in our division that’s dominated us in the past.

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If I wasn’t so fatigued from my constant bashing of Sund (past and present) inactions, I would really weigh in on this article about him being ranked 12th. I suppose “Looking Good” means a good GM. But ranked 12th out of 23 sounds very average to me (at best). Clearly this writer has not factored in the good team and foundation that Sund inherited. To be fair, it should read “Atlanta Hawks – Billy Knight Former General Manager” with Sund as a footnote. I guess inactions don’t count only bad decisions, reckless spending and some virtual positioning from the upcoming CBA. His sole good decisions as a GM have always been out weighed by his numerous inactions. Unfortunate for us; this type of PR is what saves his job in spite of his shortcomings and insulates him from any disastrous finish if that was to happen to the Hawks this upcoming season. Let’s hope it does not.

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truthspitter

Fess up, was drmaryb correct?, was your blog handle jacked??
Or, were and are you just a jackass!?

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ryan

No, & never were.

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truth, maybe for some is hard to criticize “nothing”. it just seems like the writer was taking things a face value rather than looking at it historically. anyway worthless article if you are a sund supporter or not as there is no fact to it. i guess if keeping core together and re-signing up the guys bk wanted except chills and throwing in a good trade then so be it. that is the extent of his work thus far and the book is still open on his draft picks and whether we continue up or descend will be the true grade. grades before the season mean nothing. we have already gotten so so remarks by the press on this post season efforts as ho-hum; we will see what the grade really is in may.

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Doc

“maybe for some is hard to criticize “nothing”

I couldn’t have characterized it any better

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truth … thought you would like it.

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Oh yeah, my 1:22 pm works on trade machine!

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