Let's Get Excited

From an interview with Josh Smith, talking about seeing some playoff games with Josh Childress:

I think we've seen the atmosphere and we want it so bad for our team that all summer we've been in the gym working hard trying to achieve those things just to be in the playoffs.

Man, nothing gets me more excited than hearing a guy is working hard in the offseason. For some reason, that destroys the ceiling on possibilites- I am expecting Josh S. to average 25/10 this season. Childress is going to be averaging 15 points / 8 assists. Anything is possible. An appearance in the conference championship! I just messed myself.

Josh Smith is the only Atlanta Hawk that has given me the "I can't believe that guy plays for my team", the kind that Mike Vick gives me every time I see him on TV. Rasheed Wallace gave me that feeling for that one day we had him. That was nice.

New Center

The Hawks recently signed former Team Zissou member Esteban Batista, a 6-10 Uruaguain Uruaginian guy from Uruguay. In this article, he mentions how he started playing basketball:

Esteban Batista: I was spotted on a bus because of my height and was persuaded into playing basketball and soccer as well. So this person insisted that I begin training and playing basketball and today, I owe quite a bit to that person. I listened, began practicing and here I am today.

Proof positive that any single one of us could be an NBA center if we were 7 feet tall. Also good to know that he would choose his career based on what a person on a bus told him. If we all listened to the guy on the bus, there would be fewer blogs and more shoes made out of aluminum foil.

Great Marketing

I'd like to introduce you to Arthur Triche, VP for Hawks PR. Choice quote from an article in the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer:

"We can go nowhere but up because we had the worst record in the NBA," said Triche, the Hawks' vice president of public relations. "We don't want to do that again. I'm not going to stand here and tell you we're ready to make the playoffs, but we do have a nice influx of talent."

Although this isn't nearly as bad as Brother Babcock saying his team is probably worse, we don't even need a winning record to make the playoffs in the horrendous Eastern Conference. And it's glad to know the VP in charge of PR is fairly pessimistic on the team. So I'm guessing we won't be offering guarantees to season ticket holders this year? Considering there are around 17 season ticket holders, they could afford to make that offer. Seriously, "we couldn't be any worse this year" should be the new slogan on every WB commercial.

On drafting and Joe Johnson

Ok, here's the super-secret formula to rejuvenating a crappy franchise, as authored by Arthur Blank.

1. Get an awesome player that the fans love to watch.
2. Surround him with other good players.
3. Watch the money roll in.

The Hawks formula has been, up until this point:

1. Draft some guy who isn't particularly good at anything, and maybe he will get better
2. Sign a free agent who doesn't give a crap about your team, or at least is tall
3. Pretend that fans will want to pay money for that

First of all Marvin Williams is a step in the right direction. (Chris Paul would have been a bigger step). Bogut may be horrible, and he may be decent, but he was inarguably a horrible choice to play for the Hawks. It's tough to get excited about a big white Australian, unless he's wrastlin' crocs. Williams might be all hype, but we need a guy with hype. Paul had hype and he might have backed it up, too. Not to mention he could be an actual NBA POINT GUARD, of which there are about 5, maybe 6. You won't see too many Bogut jerseys out there, and that's what this franchise needs: someone who will sell jerseys. I'm serious.

On the trade... We needed a good free agent, because we have approximately 1 billion dollars in cap space. We could have given Kobe Bryant a max contract, and you never even heard Atlanta's name mentioned in the sweepstakes last year. There isn't enough money in the world to get him here. But Joe actually wants to play here. And on that note, the Hawks should be prepared to overpay whatever he wants. Giving up the draft picks sucked, and maybe we could have gotten away with more, but what good are more picks going to do us? And unless another team actually steps in and makes the picks on our behalf, you know we would screw them up. Nobody seemed to mention that during the period of unrest while the deal was going on, it was either "we are overpaying" or "he's worth it". I don't think Joe Johnson is worth a max contract + 2 picks, but we need to overpay to get anybody worth a damn to play for us right now.

Kevin Cott, the Intern

I'd like to post a link to the work of the only decent Atlanta sports writer, Kevin Cott. He is currently the intern for the Sports Guy, Bill Simmons. I pulled for Kevin since day one of the intern contest, and he hasn't let me down. It's sad that he stands alone, but man, the AJC is horrendous. Unless you are a fan of the SEC, in which case I guess it's good. But reading and the SEC just don't seem to go together. You can find Kevin's work interspersed randomly on the Sports Guy's World on ESPN.com's Page 2 (go find it yourself), but here is a great article written by a true Hawks fan: "I Want a New Hawk". Hopefully he will agree to join this blog as a guest writer.

The Only Atlanta Hawks Blog

I recently did a search for a decent Hawks blog, and came up empty. I found one that hadn't been updated in a year, another one that is just news clips and appears to be "written" automatically, another one that just has links to buying tickets, and finally, a horrible AJC "blog" (really just a collection of short articles by yet another AJC writer who doesn't know what they're talking about).

I'm a Hawks fan by birth (read: I grew up in Atlanta). I didn't watch too much growing up, but I know who Dominique Wilkins is. But I try my best to root for the home team, despite the fact that they suck, that 95% of the fans hate them, that the owners suck, the jerseys suck, their marketing sucks, etc.

I thought it couldn't get any worse than when we had Steve Smith and Mookie Blaylock running the team. We were old, slow, boring, and would win more games than lose them on a bunch of 15 foot jumpers. But we made the playoffs. Then we traded for a horrible head case, Rider, who promptly killed the team.

Then came the sickest dunk I've seen in person my life, DeMar Johnson on top of Theo Ratliff (Sixers), and I was excited. We got Theo in the offseason, and had Shareef in the front court, Jason "J.T." Terry, and maybe Toni Kukoc or something. This lead to an actual conversation with a friend talking about how well we could match up with the Lakers. What an idiot. Theo went down after 2 games, we found out Shareef only dribbles to his right (seriously, every single time), Terry was a horrible point and not a very good shooting guard, and Toni Kukoc did not give a crap about playing for the Hawks.

I have suffered through years of Alan Henderson and Chris Crawford as two of the higher profile Hawks. Years of no real point guard. Years of a horrible and boring team. Terrible coaches (although we won't really know, as the teams were so bad). Every time I went to a game, I would estimate that half the fans had won some free tickets or were there with their families, a third of the fans were there for the other team (except when the Knicks or Sixers were in town, in which case like 90% of the fans rooted against the Hawks).

Atlanta is a town full of haters, man. And the only way to win over a hater is through mad respect. Michael Vick is one of the three greatest things to happen to me, and he has completely changed the attitude of this town towards Atlanta sports. The Hawks are close, and maybe something is gonna happen, and I'll be paying attention.

So stay tuned for ill-informed sporadic postings, mostly negative, but not about guys who care. Say what you will about Josh Childress, but he busts his ass. It's not his fault he isn't good enough to play more than 15 minutes a game against NBA professionals. Well, as you can see it's going to be a fine line between hating and not hating, but that's what you get when your team is this bad.

Update: Okay, there are a few other blogs out there, but not very strong opinions. Mostly reporting of the facts, followed by a "what do you guys think?" Well, this blog is going to be a little less fact and a litte more opinion. In fact, forget the facts.