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Thursday, March 13, 2008
Duke better watch out for Jackets … seriously
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Charlotte — You’re going to laugh, so get it out of your system. Laugh for 30 seconds. Laugh for a half-hour. Laugh until you hyperventilate. I won’t be offended. Neither will I change my mind.
I can see Georgia Tech beating Duke Friday.
I can see the 16-loss Jackets playing on Saturday in the ACC tournament.
I can see the team that cannot reach the NCAA tournament as an at-large invitee giving itself a fighting chance to get there as an automatic qualifier.
I can see all these things happening. Maybe you see none of the above. I understand if you don’t. I’ve watched Tech all season, same as you. But what I’m seeing now isn’t the team I watched lose those seven home games. What I’m seeing now is something close to the team I thought this could/should be.
Not a great team, no. Not a Top 10 fixture, a North Carolina or a Memphis, but an 11-loss bubble team at absolute worst. A team that can get points from a lot of guys, not just Anthony Morrow. A team that can defend at a major-college level, as opposed to the amateurish bunch that kept neglecting to guard anybody.
Too many times the Jackets have left us with the impression that they lack talent, but those were false clues. They have enough players to run with the most talented aggregations in the land. (Kansas and Carolina would make anyone’s top five of probable NCAA titlists, and Tech took both to the wire.) The wonder isn’t that a 16-loss team won its ACC tournament opener by 18 points Thursday night; the wonder is that a squad capable of such a powerful performance lost 16 times.
But that’s the cracked beauty of these postseason congregations. Everybody gets another chance. The sixth seed has won this ballyhooed event five times. (Tech did the deed itself on a snow-blown weekend in 1993 in this very city, beating Duke and Clemson and Carolina en route.) These Jackets entered as the seventh seed and had to win a tiebreaker with Florida State and Wake Forest to manage that, but here they are.
Here they are, not that you’d recognize them if you knew them only from those six losses before New Year’s or from that five-game losing streak of February. They’re different, bolder, better. To see them dissect Virginia — which had, as we know, won in Atlanta only last week — was to focus not on any inherent limitations but to glimpse instead the potential.
“Everyone has a clean slate now,” said Anthony Morrow, who scored 18 points but was, significantly, only one of five Jackets to break double figures. “And Georgia Tech has historically been a great tournament team.”
The Jackets led by two at halftime, having made 56.7 percent of their shots. Six minutes into the second half they trailed 56-51 and you wondered if that early offense was going to dissolve into late-game sludge. But the freshman Moe Miller made a huge trey, and Zack Peacock scored off a curl, and the next thing you knew Tech was ahead by six, and then by 10, and then it was over. Said Morrow: “Nobody was looking at the scoreboard [when the Jackets fell behind]. We just kept playing.”
When they play like this, they’re really good. That, see, is the catch: It has taken them four months to play like this. The 18-point victory was their third-biggest of the season, trailing only December thrashings of Centenary and Tennessee Tech. But if a team is ever going to find itself, the ACC tournament is as good a venue as any.
“This season has not been a fun ride,” Paul Hewitt said, “but we know we’re just a few bounces away from being a much better team.”
The next round of bounces comes tonight against the nation’s No. 7 team. Call me crazy, but I can see a team lugging 16 losses toppling a team coached by the best in the business. I can see Tech winning.
Permalink | Comments (62) | Post your comment | Categories: Mark Bradley, Tech / ACC
Chipper more comfortable in leadership role
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Lake Buena Vista, Fla. — During the Braves’ run of goodness through much of the 1990s, Terry Pendleton emphatically was their leader. Then David Justice dominated the role until management lost its mind by trading his bat and his charisma.
Even so, Justice was gracious enough to appoint his successor, but the new guy really didn’t want the job.
Keep this quiet: Chipper Jones still isn’t enthralled with the job, but he has accepted it. In fact, he has excelled at it. You can tell as much by another spring at Disney’s Wide World of Sports featuring more than a few young eyes studying every move of this 35-year-old third baseman who keeps slugging his way toward Cooperstown.
According to Braves catcher Brian McCann, already a two-time All-Star at 24, he only listens to three people about hitting, and two of them are obvious: Howard McCann, because that’s his father who was a former baseball coach at Marshall University, and Pendleton, now the Braves’ hitting coach. The third is Jones, because he is a pied piper for McCann, Kelly Johnson, Josh Anderson and others among the Braves’ mighty kiddie corps.
Jones has responded appropriately to his idol worshipers. That is to say, he has tried to avoid anything that could harm their psyche. Then again, as the new Pendleton and Justice, he hasn’t a choice, which is why he rarely exhales these days. “You can’t ever let your hair down,” said Jones, with a slight sigh, while glancing toward the field from the dugout at Champion Stadium. “You can’t ever let up, because whatever you do or say, it’s constantly placed under a microscope by everybody. Not just by the media, but by the young guys. So it’s imperative that you dot your i’s and cross your t’s and make sure that you do everything spot-up.
“If you don’t, and if you slack up, or if you don’t do something right, those young guys will see it. I don’t want them to see me doing anything wrong.”
Whatever Jones is doing, he is doing it mostly right. Said manager Bobby Cox, in his 23rd season of seeing Braves leaders come and go, “Chipper is always watching, always focused. He’s like a lot of players, because he had to grow into [the leadership] role over time.” Added Jeff Francoeur, who has spent his two seasons with the Braves as a frequent visitor to Jones’ portion of the clubhouse, “He’s not going to be very vocal, but he is going to lead by how he plays. We need him healthy. He’s a guy who can wake up and hit .330 out of bed.”
He actually did seven points better than that last year at .337. It’s just that he also spent a fourth consecutive season with a slew of aches and pains. His long stretches out of the lineup contributed to the Braves’ second straight third-place finish in the National League East after a record 14 consecutive division titles.
Not only that, Jones’ latest round of injuries generated some rare tension in a Cox clubhouse: You had the veteran Jones, the overall Braves leader, in a public battle with the veteran John Smoltz, the leader of the Braves pitchers. Then, after a quick meeting with Cox and Pendleton, you had peace again. “I would compare it to a spat between two teenaged brothers,” said Jones, with one of his crooked grins, saying he mistakenly thought Smoltz was blasting him through the media for not playing hurt. They golfed together this spring.
Added Jones, “Nothing’s changed between us. It’s just one of those things that happens when you live, eat, sleep and drink baseball for 15 or 20 years together.”
Just so you know, other “things” have happened in the Braves clubhouse besides Smoltz vs. Jones, but Jones said he has handled them more softly. “Man to man,” he said, nodding. “Calling a team meeting, embarrassing a guy in front of everybody, doing it in jest so the whole team laughs at him. That’s not how you do it. That’s how you lose respect. You pull him aside, and you look at him eye to eye, then he knows this guy means business.”
Especially when this guy is Jones, who learned from Pendleton and Justice, two other guys who meant business.
Permalink | Comments (45) | Post your comment | Categories: Braves / MLB, Terence Moore
Not willing to pay for patience
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Last week this space posed the question: What if the Atlanta Spirit fires everybody? This week, in light of Bruce Levenson’s surprisingly vigorous defense of Don Waddell, we ponder the flip side.
What if the Spirit fires nobody?
What if Billy Knight, who has taken the wrong man with his first pick in four of the five drafts he has conducted for the Hawks, is allowed to continue as general manager? (Going 1-for-5 - the “1” being Al Horford - leaves Knight with a batting average of .200, which plops him squarely atop the Mendoza Line.)
What if Mike Woodson, whose career winning percentage is .306, gets an extension after what will surely be a fourth consecutive losing season? (Even Dan Henning, who could talk his way out of a Turkish prison, got fired after four losing Falcons seasons.)
What if Waddell, who has been in place nearly a decade and has succeeded in building the 28th-best team in a 30-team league, is allowed to continue at this plodding pace? (What with global warming, there mightn’t be any ice left by the time Waddell gets this franchise to the Stanley Cup finals.)
The Thrashers have lost 10 of 11 games and have fallen from playoff contention. The Hawks slipped from eighth in the NBA East to ninth Wednesday and have no more doubleheaders scheduled against the wretched Heat.
Even with those two wins in one night, the Hawks have lost 14 of 19 and are 5-10 with Mike Bibby. The Hawks haven’t reached the postseason since 1999. The Thrashers haven’t won a playoff game ever.
I get paid to go to games, so maybe I’m not the best judge. But I keep asking myself: If I had to shell out real money to watch these teams flail, would I want to hear some voice advocating patience?
Would I continue to subsidize this apparent absence of accountability, or would I find another outlet for my disposable income?
Permalink | Comments (98) | Post your comment | Categories: Mark Bradley, Quick Hit
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