Asked about the relationship with his new point guard, Hawks forward Marvin Williams spent hardly any time on the little spat he had with Kirk Hinrich a couple seasons back.
Ah, that was nothing, he said. Hinrich has been in plenty more heated disputes while playing his static-cling defense over eight NBA seasons. Boston’s Rajon Rondo flung him into the scorer’s table during the 2009 postseason. Back when Pat Riley coached Miami, he accused Hinrich of trying to reinjure Dwyane Wade’s sore wrist. He and Detroit’s Richard Hamilton have a long, proud misunderstanding.
Guys tend to take it personally when you guard them at the subcutaneous level. As Hinrich’s dad, Jim, the hard-boiled old high school coach, says, “He gets after it, and there are a lot of guys in the NBA who don’t like to be guarded. There are a lot of players in the NBA who don’t guard. I know he has aggravated a number of players in the NBA because he doesn’t back off.”
No, in the heat of that long-ago game, Hinrich and Williams simply exchanged some colorful colloquialisms, banked their technical fouls and moved on.
What Williams remembers far more was Hinrich as a concept. Back in 2005 during Williams’ one collegiate season, the name was drilled into him and his fellow North Carolina Tar Heels whenever they slacked.
Before moving to Chapel Hill, Roy Williams had coached Hinrich at Kansas, and had taken his former guard with him in spirit. Marvin Williams can still hear his coach’s voice, bellowing when he wanted to challenge a player’s toughness: “Kirk Hinrich wouldn’t take that.”
“Seemed like we heard it every day,” Marvin said.
It is the Hawks’ turn now to try to feed on the Hinrich example, first hand.
Setting example
The acquisition of Hinrich on Feb. 23 was not a deal that figured to compete for headlines with, say, the Carmelo Anthony passion play in New York. On a purely statistical level, Hinrich’s career averages of 13.2 points, 5.7 assists and 1.3 steals per game do not distinguish him from Mike Bibby (15.3, 5.7 and 1.2), the point guard the Hawks shed.
The Hawks wanted to get a little younger at the position — Hinrich is 30, Bibby 32. But the move had additional undertones. This largely was a late season effort to add some coarse grit to the team, to lend it some toughness in the place of any miracle infusion of talent.
“I’m hoping that our team will kind of take on Kirk’s personality,” said Hawks coach Larry Drew. “He’s a very serious player. A very focused player. He brings a business approach. If you have a point guard who brings that type of approach, somehow it rubs off on the other guys.”
The past 12 days have demonstrated both the promise and the limitations of the Hawks’ Hinrich maneuver. In his first game at Philips Arena with his new team, Hinrich hectored former Bulls teammate Derrick Rose into a 5-for-21 shooting night during a Hawks’ victory. They then lost the next three games at home, along the way being outclassed by New York and badly exposed by the Lakers.
The Hawks had only 25 games left in the regular season when they traded away Bibby, Maurice Evans, Jordan Crawford and a first-round pick for Hinrich and center Hilton Armstrong. So rushed was his indoctrination that, when he joined the team on a West Coast swing, Hinrich’s first practice was held in a hotel ballroom, tape on the carpet marking out a make-believe court.
There was initial hope that Hinrich would quickly benefit the Hawks’ main scorer, Joe Johnson, by taking over some of the more difficult defensive chores — never Bibby’s job description.
“Joe won’t have the burden of covering the point, which he has done so often,” said Hawks general manager Rick Sund. “It’s a hard cover, game in and game out. I think that will help his offense a little more.” Still, Johnson continued to struggle with his shot (just 39 percent from the field through his past five games).
In the short term, Hinrich is supposed to be a productive nuisance, as he was in that first meeting with the Bulls.
In the midst of a potential MVP season, Rose testified to the effect Hinrich can have on those around him.
“In practice, it’s the same thing you see in the game. He’s always working, diving, playing defense,” said Rose, who played his first two seasons with Hinrich.
“Watching him play really taught me a lot, especially how to run a team.”
Describing what it was like to play against him, Johnson uses an image often applied to Hinrich, as well as any number of biting insects: “He’s a pest.”
Added Johnson, “Kirk is a guy who really sticks his nose in there. He loves taking charges. He loves the challenge of defending and rebounding and that’s big from a guard standpoint.
“He takes great angles, makes your catches tough, and he’s a hard guy to get by.”
Loves taking the charge? Isn’t that like saying he loves waiting for a train — while standing on the tracks?
That’s just what a coach’s son does.
Life as coach’s son
Jim Hinrich attended his only son’s birth early in the morning, then coached Sioux City (Iowa) West High to a season’s first victory that night.
Growing up in Iowa didn’t provide many distractions. The center of young Kirk’s world was the high school gym where Jim coached (he’s retired now, after a 37-year career).
“I was always tough on him about doing things the right way,” Jim Hinrich said. “But I never really had to get after him. A lot of stuff I didn’t have to teach, he got it by watching when he was younger.”
Playing defense was coach Hinrich’s guiding tenet.
His son absorbed that as his own.
“I don’t know if it was that I just hated to be scored on, or the competitiveness in me. [Playing defense] is something that came really naturally to me,” Hinrich said.
At the AAU level, he was met with derisive calls of “Take him! Take him!” from the other bench when opponents had the ball.
While at Kansas, opposing fans decided he resembled Harry Potter and loaded up on the taunts.
“A lot of places picked up on that,” said Nick Collison, his Kansas teammate now with the Thunder. “He’s got more money now and can get a better haircut. I hope he’s outgrown that, for his sake.
“He’s a guy who has always been able to find something to put a chip on his shoulder, to talk himself into the belief that people don’t respect his game, whether it’s true or not,” Collison said. “That seems to help him.”
Playing the point for the Hawks should provide him with ample new slights and doubts to exploit.
When he was in seventh grade, Hinrich was given the assignment to write out what he wanted to do with his life. The slip of paper was to be kept in a sealed envelope, only to be opened years later when he could compare aspiration to reality. He forgot all about it. But his mother discovered the envelope one day while cleaning out his old room, opened it and read her boy’s dream: To play for the Chicago Bulls. That was shortly after the Bulls chose Hinrich with the seventh overall pick in the 2003 draft.
Other details he never thought to include in his life’s plan.
Like being traded away to Washington in the summer of 2010, the Bulls dumping his salary to go free-agent shopping.
Or spending a good chunk of his career as a backcourt tutor — first to Rose in Chicago, then to John Wall in Washington.
And certainly not coming to Atlanta — where Knicks and Lakers fans dance in the aisles, the glass ceiling hangs as low as the playoffs’ second round, and he is counted on to be the fresh breeze in a stale locker room.
Now we’ll find out just how tough this guy is.
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