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Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Camp Insider II
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
HAWKSVILLE - It appears we’ll have to wait one more day to see the Hawks in some live scrimmage action.
They wrapped up Wednesday’s workout some five-minute drills but there was no actual scrimmaging.
“Towards the end of practice [Thursday] we’ll probably start scrimmaging,” Woodson said.
And while the Hawks’ starting five of Mike Bibby, Joe Johnson, Marvin Williams, Josh Smith and Al Horford is etched in stone, Woodson said he will be on the lookout for things he can exploit with mismatches.
“We’ll continue to approach our starting unit as it is,” Woodson said. “But there’s a chance I could tinker and look at other combinations, you just never know. I don’t think you go into a season and not look at possible changes. I’m going to whatever it takes for us to win basketball games. And if that means tinkering with the lineup or playing 10 or 11 guys against eight or nine guys, then that’s something I have to figure out as we go through the exhibition season.”
Any potential tinkering with the starting five (can’t imagine too much going on there) and the bench rotation (still has to be worked out) will make things mighty interesting going forward.
It’s clear the Hawks are looking for an edge, for some things they can exploit that perhaps went untouched last season. Woodson isn’t tipping his hand (maybe he’s trying to throw opponents off by talking as much as he has about tinkering), but he has me sufficiently intrigued as to what he might do.
MARVIN HOBBLED: Williams took a knee to the leg during a drill in Wednesday’s workout and was hobbling throughout the end of the session, but insisted that he was fine when I asked him about it as he walked to the locker room.
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “It was just a play where Frank [Robinson] accidentally caught me in the leg and now it’s a little sore. But I’m fine.”
GARDNER AILING: The same can’t be said for second-year swingman Thomas Gardner, who was in practice gear but didn’t work out due to a sore calf. Woodson said Gardner has to get a MRI on the leg before anyone can determine the severity of the injury.
SHOWING LOVE TO THE FANS: There’s a whole chapter devoted to the Hawks- Celtics playoff series in a book about the Celtics’ title run last year (Top of the World, the inside story of the Boston Celtics’ amazing one-year turnaround to become NBA champions by former longtime Boston Globe NBA writer Peter May) that is an interesting read.
May describes in great detail the dramatic swings in momentum in the series and correctly points out the role the fans in both cities played in changing the complexion of home games, for both teams, throughout.
Particularly interesting to me was a quote from one of the Celtics’ owners, Wyc Grousbeck, which has to rank as the one line I never thought I’d read about Philips Arena.
“The noise in that arena was by far the loudest of any of the buildings we played in during the playoffs,” he said.
Having been there and having covered playoff games around the league the past eight years, that’s saying something for an arena and a fan base often chided for being empty and subterranean, respectively.
And when you realize the Celtics went to face Cleveland, Detroit and LA after the Hawks and Grousbeck maintains that Philips had the best noise, that tells you just how electric that atmosphere really was, especially for those of us lucky enough to be in the building.
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What gas crisis?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
HAWKSVILLE - When he scripted the Hawks’ training camp regimen and included the entire team staying at a downtown hotel for the first week, general manager Rick Sund wasn’t thinking about long lines at gas stations.
His was a purely business move designed to tighten the operation at the start of a new season.
One of the unintended benefits of having the players, as well as head coach Mike Woodson and other members of the training staff, stay in a hotel walking distance from Philips Arena has been their ability to sit out the current gas crisis that has folks all over the metro area scrambling to fill up their tanks.
“That’s definitely one of the benefits of being at the hotel,” Hawks captain Joe Johnson said. “You keep seeing the stuff on the news and all you can do is hope it all gets worked out as soon as possible, because things are crazy for everybody.”
Not for the Hawks, who are practicing during the day and then meeting for a team dinner in the early evening and then moving on to “skull sessions” after that before retiring to their rooms for a little rest and relaxation.
Woodson said the change in structure has turned out to be a perfect move for a team trying to incorporate a few new players to the mix while also getting everyone adjusted to the policies and procedures of a new front office staff.
“It’s certainly not about babysitting these guys or anything like that because they’re grown men,” Woodson said. “But in a lot of ways this is like what we went through during the playoffs in terms of us being in close quarters and everybody being focused on the task at hand every day. From a coaching standpoint this is excellent, because we get to watch film with these guys and really hammer home what we’re trying to do as a team.”
Sund put a target on training camp shortly after being hired to replace Billy Knight. With a team full of what he likes to call “young veterans,” he’s been focused on making sure that the players comprehend just how important their role is in moving the franchise forward from its sketchy recent past.
“I think this training camp is so important and that’s why we’re at the hotel and why we’re having team dinners every night and skull sessions every night,” Sund said. “We need to be focused. We’re a little bit old school here, just for the week.”
And if it helps the Hawks ride out the gas crisis as well, so be it.
Stay tuned for more camp updates later.
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