AJC > Sports > Columnists > Archives > 2007 > February > 05 > Entry
DEL.ICIO.USHawks leave fans wanting more
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
The Hawks are neither as bad as we’d feared or as good as they’d hoped. They’re better than they’ve been in the post-Babcock era — this, admittedly, fits the utter definition of faint praise — but they’ve fallen into the habit of tripping themselves just as they seem poised to take a real step forward.
And perhaps we shouldn’t expect much more than this halting form of progress. Perhaps we should feel grateful that this is no longer the NBA’s absolute worst team. Perhaps we should be patient over these next five seasons while Billy Knight finds every excuse possible not to draft the point guard he needs, but watching games like Monday night’s can only make the Atlanta audience less understanding, less as opposed to more.
The glitzy Lakers rolled into Philips Arena just past the midpoint of an eight-game road trip. The Hawks had won five of their last seven, the latest being a riveting overtime victory in New Jersey on Sunday. But here we witnessed, not for the first time and surely not for the last, the problems inherent in a team with a growing nucleus of big-time players that lacks big-timers at the two positions that matter most.
One is center, and we can excuse that failing because almost nobody has one. (Though the Lakers, in the 19-year-old Andrew Bynum, seem to have found something, and Bynum was drafted with the 10th pick of the 2005 draft, eight slots after the Hawks took Marvin Williams.) The other, as has been noted endlessly, is point guard, and the Hawks have passed over three good ones — Chris Paul and the Williamses, Deron and Marcus — in the last two drafts. And every time we see the Hawks lose to bottom-feeders Philadelphia or Charlotte (as happened three times in January), we’re reminded that a skilled point guard is the difference between consistency and oscillation.
There was no real reason for the Hawks to lose to the Lakers, but they did. They led 2-0 and never again. They made but 28.9 percent of their first-half shots because they had no one other than Joe Johnson to run the offense, and Johnson, as splendid as he is, can’t initiate and finish the same play. Not coincidentally, Johnson had more turnovers (six) than assists (five). Not coincidentally, Johnson needed 26 shots to score 27 points.
At the end, Johnson was also given the impossible task of shadowing Kobe Bryant, and that didn’t work, either. Bryant scored 11 decisive fourth-quarter points and nursed his otherwise unassuming team home, and the frazzled Johnson wound up missing free throws and getting picked clean by Smush Parker.
“We fought with them,” Josh Smith said. “Kobe just made big shots at the end, which is what he does.”
Well, yes. The sin wasn’t in getting beat by the best in the final minutes. The sin was in leaving the game there for Kobe to win. The sin was in letting a touring visitor gain an early advantage on a team that should have been primed to consolidate recent gains.
Once again, we have to ask if the Hawks have been given the right players with which to grow. They have really good swingmen, yes. As Jon Koncak, the former Hawk, said Monday: “They don’t need eight players anymore. They only need two.”
Guess which two.
At some point this accumulation of mismatched assets must yield to a more conventional deployment. At some point these young guys have to be given the chance to win more than occasionally. Asked if he gets impatient, Smith said: “Yeah, I do. This is my third year, and I want to be able to witness the atmosphere of the playoffs.”
We all would. But that won’t happen this spring, same as it hasn’t happened any spring around here since 1999. The Hawks aren’t so bad we can ignore them any longer, but watching closely only leaves us wanting more.
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