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Monday, January 21, 2008
Hawks taking too long to figure it out
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
It’s never easy, going from bad to good, but it needn’t be as hard as the Hawks are making it. They’ve gone from being a team that lacked talent to one that lacks direction. They’re gifted enough now. They’re just not clever enough.
You wouldn’t trade the Hawks’ starting five for Portland’s. (The Blazers, as we know, have been forced to operate without Greg Oden, the best collegiate center since Patrick Ewing.) We were, however, reminded Monday that talent is only part of basketball.
Portland beat the Hawks in overtime because the callow visitors played to their strengths — spreading the floor and finding the open man, being quick and decisive as opposed to slow and uncertain — and the Hawks, even at this late date, still aren’t sure where their strengths lie. A case study:
Ninety seconds left in overtime, Hawks down two. Josh Smith misses on a drive but makes a majestic swoop to save the rebound; Joe Johnson misses on a drive but Josh Childress rebounds, and now the ball comes to Smith on the perimeter, the scrambling Blazers having played defense for 43 seconds and …
Smith casts a 3-pointer. The same Smith who has missed 41 of 54 treys on the season. The same Smith who hasn’t even attempted the shot in the game’s first 52 minutes. The same Smith who bricks this one.
No, that play didn’t wind up being the outright difference. Smith would steal the ball from Travis Outlaw and Marvin Williams would make the tying free throws and Outlaw would hit the winner over Smith’s not-terrible defense, but still … on an elongated possession near the end of a frazzled game, the Hawks’ second-best player took not the shot his team needed but the shot an opponent on the sixth stop of a seven-game trip was praying he’d hoist.
“It’s really about taking care of the little things,” said Al Horford, not speaking specifically of Smith’s missed trey but of the whole cracked mosaic. “When we do that, we’re pretty good. When we don’t — when we don’t go after a loose ball or we don’t block out — that can add up and affect a game.”
After a brief spell above .500, the Hawks have lost eight of 11. They’re 17-20 as they embark on a five-game Western swing. Everybody assumed they’d start slowly, owing to a front-loaded schedule, but the optimists among us figured they’d be further along by now.
Not many teams can put five better players on the floor than Johnson, Horford, Marvin Williams and the two Joshes, but here again we see the folly of Billy Knight’s drafting. There’s no point guard to control a game. (Yes, Anthony Johnson was suspended for Monday’s game, but he’s still Anthony Johnson, journeyman. And Acie Law IV, of whom too much was expected too soon, has developed a bad case of the timids.)
The Blazers, by way of contrast, have three point guards, four if you count Brandon Roy, whom Knight deigned not to choose with the fifth pick of the 2006 draft. Instead he took Shelden Williams. Roy played 41 minutes Monday and scored 18 points; S. Williams didn’t play a second and could be observed running sprints on the practice court afterward.
Without a real point guard, the burden falls on the coach to teach his men the difference between right and wrong, and Mike Woodson still hasn’t gotten through. Portland’s Nate McMillan has taken a team with a built-in excuse to fail and has lifted it to 25-16. Woodson’s Hawks still keep losing the same old game the same old way.
“The sky’s the limit for us,” Horford said, but you wonder how high a team with no floor leader and a coach who’s 111 games under .500 over three-plus seasons can rise. And then Horford, whose Florida Gators were a joyous example of a team with really good players but an even better mesh, said this:
“Until we figure it out, things are going to keep going back and forth with winning and losing.”
The Atlanta Hawks. Figuring things out. Will any of us live so long?
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