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Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Hawks’ Landlord may be evicted
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
It’s too late now, Shelden Williams having already taken ownership of a house here, but my advice to the man known as the Landlord would have been: Rent, don’t buy.
Last year’s top Hawks draftee figures to be squeezed by this year’s top draftee. Going on minutes per game, Williams was the team’s ninth man last season. With the arrival of Al Horford, the minutes stand to shrink, not grow.
Williams says he doesn’t see it that way, but it’s hard to imagine how else this roster will shake out. Josh Smith plays power forward, and he’s a budding star. Zaza Pachulia plays center, and he’s taller and stronger than Williams, who’s listed as 6-foot-9 but who seems closer to 6-7. Horford will play both spots, which is what Williams does, only the new man will play them bigger and better. So that leaves the Landlord … where? Facing foreclosure?
It has been a weird 13 months for Williams, who was a first-team All-American for the famous Duke Blue Devils but who was widely viewed as the biggest reach of the 2006 draft. The Hawks made him the No. 5 pick even though Brandon Roy and Randy Foye were available. Today, some of the same voices around the organization who defend Billy Knight for taking Marvin Williams over Chris Paul and Deron Williams in 2005 concede they don’t yet know what the GM saw in Shelden Williams.
His rookie season wasn’t a disaster — he averaged 5.5 points and 5.4 rebounds — but it had a peculiar shape. He played a lot early because guys were hurt. Then he worked a total of 105 minutes in 14 February games. Then he played more at the end and was even named the Eastern Conference’s rookie of the month for April. At no time, however, did he justify his lofty draft position. He scored because he got fouled a lot, not because he was an accomplished finisher. (Salim Stoudamire played 460 fewer minutes and made 11 more baskets.)
“It was a different system,” Williams says, and he’s right about that. “At Duke, I was the only guy inside. A lot of plays ran through me.”
And as a pro? “I had to be more of an energy guy, rebounding and playing defense … It was different. I’d been playing pretty much the whole game all my life.”
He was speaking after a morning workout at Philips Arena in preparation for the Hawks’ summer league games in Utah. Even with Horford on the court, Williams had acquitted himself well. He’d run hard and blocked shots and gotten fouled a lot. There’s a place for him on an NBA roster. It just mightn’t be on this one.
Williams seems a vivid case study of the collegiate star who’s simply not talented enough to be much more than a professional role-filler. (Horford, by way of contrast, should be a bigger star in the NBA than he was at Florida.) Williams is smart and earnest, but he’s not big enough to be a pro center and not forceful enough to make an impact at power forward. He is, to put it bluntly, just another guy.
His fiancée, however, isn’t just another woman. Candace Parker was the MVP of the 2007 Final Four after leading Tennessee to the NCAA title. She’ll be a junior this fall, and she’s scheduled to be a bride in September 2008. (The nuptials will take place in Atlanta.) Her betrothed spent most of this summer in Knoxville, which Williams says is a nice enough town but not as nice as Durham, N.C., which is where the two met when Parker took a recruiting visit to Duke.
We can all hope the Parker-Williams partnership will be a long and happy one. The marriage of Williams and the Hawks, alas, could soon be subject to dissolution. With 10 forwards/swingmen on the roster, somebody has to get traded. Given that you’d like the No. 5 player in a given draft to be something more than just another guy, the Landlord’s lease might not have long to run.
Permalink | Comments (89) | Categories: Hawks / NBA, Mark Bradley
Hawks GM should get a grip
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Let’s see. If I’m running a professional sports team, and if I had a coach, manager, player, ballboy, secretary, janitor or anybody else who really didn’t want to work for me, I’d let that person go.
Unless …
I’m still thinking.
Uh, I’m still thinking.
What is Billy Knight thinking?
Knight is the Hawks’ general manager, and two of his assistant coaches, Larry Drew and David Fizdale, wish to skip the final year of their Hawks contracts to do the same thing elsewhere. It’s America, and they have that right, don’t they?
The thing is, it’s America, and folks also have to honor their contracts, according to Knight. Nobody forced Drew and Fizdale to agree to a three-year deal to work under Hawks coach Mike Woodson. As a result, Knight said that he won’t allow Drew to make a lateral move to the Sacramento Kings or Fizdale to make a lateral move to the Cleveland Cavaliers.
“I know in most cases around the NBA this is not the normal practice, but this is how we’re going to handle it,” Knight told our Sekou Smith. That means Knight could have a couple of assistant coaches fuming on the bench for the Hawks this season. To which Knight told Smith, “I’m not worried about it. These guys are professionals, and they are good guys … “
They’re also human. When you’re physically in one place, and you’re mentally in another, that’s not good for you or for your current employers.
Let them go, Billy.
That’s what I’m thinking.
Permalink | Comments (75) | Categories: Hawks / NBA, Quick Hit, Terence Moore
