Atlanta Krunk
Ballin' it up in the ATL
Archive for Atlanta Hawks
January 8, 2011 at 12:00 am · Filed under Atlanta Hawks
With the Hawks season well underway, well, somewhat underwhelmingly underway at least, one can’t help but look at the off-season and wonder whether letting Mike Woodson go was the right decision. Sadly, like my League Pass on DIRECT TV Atlanta has absolutely no playoff game, even if we show up nightly in the regular season. The Hawks aren’t off to a bad start, not by the Hawks standards fans were accustomed to throughout much of the 2000′s, and to be fair, an injury to Joe Johnson has also hindered the team to function at full strength towards the end of 2010. Still, for an organization that dismissed its coach after its first 50-win season since the Bill Clinton Impeachment Trial, such strong natured actions are not without the repercussion of close scrutiny.While the wins and losses aren’t terribly disconcerting at this point, the performance of the much hyped Larry Drew motion offense is yielding mixed results. On the bright side, assists have skyrocketed from the middle of the pack to top 10 in the league up over 2 full dimes per game, indicating a trend away from the largely iso-driven offense that became a staple of Woody sets over the past several seasons since Joe Johnson’s arrival, further perpetuated by the additional scorer/ballhandler capabilities of Flip Murray and Jamal Crawford over the past 3 seasons. The downside? Total points have also dropped, topping the 100 PPG plateau last year, but safely below that high watermark so far this season. Read the rest of this entry »
August 24, 2010 at 3:01 pm · Filed under Atlanta Hawks, NBA
With all the maximum salaries, mid-level exceptions and Bird rights clauses being thrown around in NBA off-season discussions, it’s safe to say even the casual basketball fan is walking away from this summer with a little more knowledge about NBA bookkeeping and the Collective Bargaining Agreement. Over the past few months, a lot of statistics and numbers have been thrown out as to forecast how teams will perform, what kind of future roster flexibility will be available and even what players might be on the move come this time next year and the year after. But weeding through the entire matrix of formulas and figures, one very underpublicized and underreported stat shines through in the evaluation of the 2010 free agency period: Dwyane Wade is only 6 months younger than Joe Johnson.Granted, right now Dwyane Wade is a much more high impact player than JJ, and if you could guarantee the same continued output going forward, it would seem Wade’s value greatly exceeds that of Johnson. Johnson’s deal is actually larger than Wade’s, as Wade, LeBron and Bosh all accepted reduced contracts in order to play together, however in talks leading up to their signing, no one in the NBA, from analysts to GMs to even fans, seemed to bat an eye at signing Wade to a max deal. Johnson’s contract on the other hand was declared “the worst in the NBA” before the pen had even touched paper. Considering their two vastly different styles of play, in three years can you absolutely say you would rather have Wade than Johnson? Read the rest of this entry »
August 24, 2010 at 2:52 pm · Filed under Atlanta Hawks, NBA
The 2010 off-season was a revolving door for most teams in the NBA’s Southeastern Conference. As the heat of August winds down, the winds of change in Atlanta, however, fell short of the gale force blasts sending franchise altering reverberations through cities such as Miami and Washington D.C. Not to say Atlanta’s summer was without addition or subtraction, after all, the past three months have seen a coaching change and entry draft, not to mention some free agency afterthoughts (i.e. Josh Powell). Still, the thinking among many Hawks fans is that this off-season served more as a reaffirmation of the team’s current strategy rather than the strategic overhaul some say is needed. By most accounts, the Hawks have hit a plateau as far their potential performance with their current core roster. Despite the fact that the Hawks have continued to improve their regular season win total in each of the last 5 seasons, the team is yet to move past the second round of the playoffs, stuck somewhere in between the upper echelon of Eastern Conference contenders and safely above the lottery bubble. Virtually every preseason forecaster will find the Hawks somewhere in the same playoff field, but with the same certainty they will guarantee Atlanta players are at home (as in watching on TV, not home-court advantage) when the conference semifinals roll around. Read the rest of this entry »