AJC > Sports > Hawks > Blog > Archives > 2007 > February > 23
Friday, February 23, 2007
I blame myself!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
That’s what I get for dreaming, for thinking fireworks are in order when nothing anywhere close to that ends up happening. The NBA trade deadline was a dud. The biggest deals came over a month earlier (both AI going to Denver and the eight-player deal between Indiana and Golden State).
I blame myself for the empty feeling I had when I woke up this morning. I was foolish to think that the just because I played with the trade machine (like many of you) and cooked up deals that worked financially and that made sense to me, that any of the NBA’s real decision makers would do the same.
I don’t know why more teams decided to hold off on making deals. The Eastern Conference is so wide open, I think that any major move that would have been made by any team would have resulted in a climb up the food chain.
The Hawks were far from alone in their relative inactivity (Anthony Johnson is a nice pickup but I remember singing a song about he and Jeff Foster for Al Harrington last summer that never materialized).
After talking with an NBA executive I respect, the rationale for some of the inactivity makes a bit more sense to me (in short, why would teams like New Jersey and Portland trade away guys with big contracts or expiring big contracts when they could just hold on and wait until the contract comes off the books and then have more flexibility in the summer and beyond?).
But we don’t live in a ‘wait until next time’ world. Everyone wants it now. At least fans want it now. And who can blame them? They’ve been conditioned to expect the impossible, the overnight success and the miracle cure.
It should be clear by now to most of us that we’re not going to get that this season. In the Hawks’ case, it’s certainly not going to happen. That playoff push that seemed to be within grasp probably disappeared Thursday at around 2:59 p.m.
The Hawks’ inability to make a deal reminded me of the one thing that I often forget to consider in the build up to the trade deadline. It always takes two teams (at least two) to consummate a deal. And if, for whatever reason, one of them decides to pass, it’s a wrap.
So I’ll say it again, I blame myself (and you all can blame me as well for stoking the trade conversation starting months ago). I blame myself for thinking big things could happen when the silence leading up the storm was telling me otherwise.
