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As of Thursday, Feb. 12, this little blog has relocated to a new home on AJC.com. It’s the same newspaper, the same Web site and the same writer (feel free to groan) — there’s just a new URL.
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Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2008 > April > 24
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Marvin’s good, but needs to be great
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Boston - Think back to the summer of 2005. Think back to the time when the Hawks held their highest pick in three decades. Think back to their rationale for taking Marvin Williams over Chris Paul or Deron Williams - that M. Williams was the biggest talent in that draft.
Three years later, we see something rather less, and surely the Hawks do, too. We (and surely they) see a guy who can work more minutes and accomplish less than any Hawks starter. (Yes, this includes Mike Bibby - most nights.) We see a finesse player, a jump shooter who doesn’t shoot 3-pointers. We see, as was feared by this observer even before the pick was made, a player who’s skilled but not outrageously gifted.
In Games 1 and 2 here, we’ve seen Williams take 16 shots (missing 11) in 67 minutes. He has scored 22 points in two games, which puts him ahead of Josh Smith (19 points) and the unfortunate Bibby (17 points, two assists), but on nights when the Hawks clearly needed more from somebody, the No. 2 pick in the 2005 draft was his unobtrusive self. He has seven rebounds, five turnovers and no assists.
The trouble with Williams isn’t that he does so much wrong. It’s that he doesn’t do nearly enough. He’s as deferential as he was at North Carolina. He doesn’t seem to want the ball at key moments. (Not that there were many of those in Games 1 and 2.) His regular-season numbers weren’t terrible - he averaged 14.8 points and 5.7 rebounds - but he became, with the arrival of Bibby, the Hawks’ fifth-best starter.
Don’t misunderstand: Marvin Williams isn’t the single, or even the biggest, reason the Hawks have lost two games by an aggregate 42 points. But he remains the regrettable symbol of the Billy Knight era, which could well be in its final days. At a time when this franchise needed a great player, the Hawks could find only a pretty good one.
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