AJC > Sports > Hawks > Blog > Archives > 2007 > January > 11
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Hawks in crisis mode
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This must be what crisis mode looks like.
Ground zero. Rock bottom. Or whatever other cliché you can come up with for a team that’s in a complete free-fall, this is it folks.
Much like the Hawks, I’m out of answers right now.
I don’t even have any clever anecdotes or nonsensical rants about college football to offer today.
Seriously. I know I’m usually the King of Yappers around here, always spouting off with this or that. But I was speechless after watching the Hornets roll the Hawks last night.
Speechless.
All I can say is the activity leading up to the Feb. 22 trade deadline needs to be fast and furious around here. The gloves need to come off until changes are made, chemistry is tweaked and the direction altered.
People point to the draft as some sort of cure all. That’s nonsense. Any draft, regardless of how plentiful the talent is supposed to be, is a high-risk lab experiment with the results to come much later.
The only way to improve a team, to alter a team’s course immediately (sans the addition of one of the league’s handful of elite, franchise players), is to make trade deadline changes and witness the results instantly. If you get it right (like Detroit when they bagged Rasheed Wallace from the Hawks and Sacramento last year when they snagged Ron Artest from Indiana) the results are obvious.
When you get it wrong (Philly getting Chris Webber from Sacramento a couple years back) it’s just another chip on the pile of mistakes that have already been made - since your team had little chance of competing for anything significant anyway, no one really cares.
But things can’t go on like this. To a man, the Hawks know it. Even if they don’t want to say it out loud (especially to the media). Everybody knows it by now.
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