jhay610

He's definitely a short-term solution, but we don't need him to be a world-beater. It was sad to see us empty out the backfield or split 4 out on 3rd and short so much last year.

3 yrs, 12 mil. That's a good deal. This team is in position to win right now, and he's a good fit right now.

I think the fan base would embrace an Allen Iverson type of star (or superior less dramatic players like Kevin Durant, Tim Duncan, etc.) over a superior winning % (but non-contender) team (ala Carmelo Knicks over non-Carmelo Nuggets).

QFT, my good man. QFT.

The funniest quotable I've heard around this:

Brandon Knight got under DeAndre Jordan's shot, but you didn't see him complaining.

If the Hawks could get this thing moving in the right direction, a la the Falcons, fans would come out in droves. Players would take a pay cut to live and work here.

This franchise has been run by clowns for years, and now even its ownership group is amateurish.

This is an NBA town, but the market is untapped by the Hawks. It's not a Hawks town.

ATL-BOS '08 playoffs showed what it could be -- that was the tip of the iceberg...but the iceberg is lost out at sea somewhere.

I'll play the role of contrarian I guess. To me it is clear Jones walks under him. Bryant is fading away so there is really no reason for D Jones to be under him. He contests the shot but then continues moving forward to disrupt Bryant's landing.

I don't like the play but of course I like the result.

Of course it is very ironic that Bowen is the one tsk-tsking.

Nets are fun to watch but they are stuck with a team that is literally declining year to year and they have no exit strategy. They will be fun to watch in this year's playoffs, but who really sees them as a credible threat to come out of the East?

This thing will go really sour in two years' time.

Disagree. I don't buy the transplant BS that is supposed to make us feel better. I'll bet most of these fans were from Decatur, Marietta, anywhere in the SWATS, etc. The same phenomenon happens to the Falcons when they don't have a competitive product on the field.

The Hawks have been a mediocre franchise for my whole life (born in '81) and really since they've moved to Atlanta. They don't have that cache around here. This city is full of front-runners for whatever reason, and the Hawks are viewed as a 'loser' product. Call a spade a spade.

This comes up all of the time. To be relevant in this city you must be either 1) championship elite (Falcons now) or 2) very good/2nd tier with a superstar (Vick-era Falcons).

Top 4 are clear as others have stated. 5-10 are muddy. I always gave an edge to Ryan v Flacco but it's not accurate to make that argument at this moment in time. Ryan played very well in the postseason but Flacco was near-perfect. He threw no INTs and had 11 TDs in the postseason.

I don't care who you are throwing to or what line you have in front of you, that is impressive.

Kaepernick has an absolute cannon for an arm and blazing straight line speed. With further experience and seasoning I would expect him to climb on this list. Luck looks like the next Peyton.

Post-mortem: John Abraham was a shadow of his normal safe and was absolutely a non-factor. Unsurprisingly, the Falcons were not able to apply pressure to the passer in either playoff game and were shredded.

Congratulations, Mike Smith!

So, Teague gets killed all year for getting beat off the dribble, but it happens to Josh and it is the fault of Teague and Horford for not helping Josh? Are people really saying some of the stuff they are saying in here?

I said that it is primarily Josh's fault but I am also pointing out that NO ONE saw the ball. That is a breakdown of a fundamental basketball principle.

I fail to see how that is so obtuse.

Maybe Uggla will have a good year. His defense is good and his power is pretty good for a 2b. 2 uptons, uggla, and heyward strike out A LOT. I didn't realize Bourn struck out so much though so he and BJ are a wash.

Actually, it is well known that Uggla has been one of the worst fielding 2B in the league over his career, although last year was something of a career year for him in the field as he rated a little above average.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/u/ugglada01-field.shtml

nah there is a difference. Lou looks and shoots much better when he's off the ball and not at PG. I like Lou just don't like what he is with this team. PG's learn on the job with added reprehensibility. For some reason this team always messes that up by bringing in guys like Flip Murray and Jamal Crawford. I remember Acie Law came into his 2nd year much improved from his rookie year and still had the short leash and lost his minutes to Flip (who could do whatever and still get 25+ minutes to chuck). Then he started playing like a bum.

Wow! Still pushing Law after all this time? LOL #1 fan club for life

I don't know why we went away from having Deshawn guarding him but my guess is that LD wanted the bigger Josh on him. That is a mistake to me as Deshawn was doing as good of a job as possible on him.

I get your point on Zaza but it's sad that we can't depend on our 13 million dollar "star" player to not even remotely slow down, let alone stop Carmelo from getting an easy layup. But to me that's the least of the problems with Josh from last night as to how he cost the team the game. The over and back -- and the hero 3 -- and then there's the "and 1" that of course he barely hit the front of the rim on -- or his TWO rebounds -- or his SIX 3pt attempts are far bigger issues.

All points taken. Honestly a change of scenery may be the best for all parties. Things have gotten stale and it can't be a good sign when your fan base audibly groans every time you pull up for a shot outside 10 feet.

My guess is that they were told to not rotate or switch but to play man up so that we didn't leave JR Smith or Steve Novak wide open for an easy look if Carmelo were forced to pass it on his drive. Unfortunately our "max" player was unable to even slow Carmelo down and gave him an easy layup.

This is very possible, and would point to a coaching problem. I would expect Carmelo to beat Josh out on an island in that scenario most times. To me that is down to knowing your personnel -- we don't ask Zaza to run Iso-Joe's for the same reason. Maybe LD thinks Josh is a great on-ball defender. I sure as he!! don't.

So in your eyes the "MAIN" culprit was the "HELP" defender, and not the guy guarding the ball handler? Maybe Al should have helped, I can't remember for sure who he was guarding but I believe it was Novak and there's no way he should leave him otherwise we'd be screaming that he left Novak wide open for an easy shot... but there's no way in hell I will ever name a help defender as the primary culprit when a guy gets beaten off the dribble.

I'm not absolving Josh of all responsibility -- he got beat way too easily, but the basket was a failure in team defense. See my post above.

It looks like Al had JR Smith, but he should have had his head in the lane. Depending on Carmelo's depth, he would have had to recover and close out to his man or there would have had to be a rotation to cover it. There may have still been a basket, but the point is to force the offensive team to make several passes to get an open jump shot instead of simply driving straight to the basket for a lay in. Maybe there's a bad pass, maybe a shot is missed -- anything but two dribbles and a lay in.

All I am saying is I don't think it's completely on Josh. It should have been expected that one of the best scorers in the world would shake loose an average on-ball defender. Josh is great at playing the passing lanes and blocking shots from the helpside, but he is not very good on the ball. I think we can all agree on that.

So it's either a coaching problem or a brain lapse by one or more defenders.

Another thing that I should have mentioned is that both Teague and Horford, who had helpside on that last play, had their heads turned away from the ball and were watching their men as they were lead away from the play. You are supposed to square up your back to the basket and split your view so that you have an eye on your man and an eye on the ball at all times. That is elementary school level stuff.

As soon as Carmelo made his move, Horford should have been sliding over to cut off his lane, teague should have rotated down to cut off the first pass, and the rest of the defense should have rotated around in scramble mode. A well-coached high school team will be able to master this concept.

Sometimes even the pro's have a lapse on the fundamentals, but you should definitely not ever let this happen on a game-deciding possession in the 4th qtr. Inexcusable.

One thing that should be corrected for the record -- yes Carmelo beat Josh on that last bucket, but there should have been help ready when Carmelo caught it face up from the elbow.

Horford was the main culprit -- he had followed his guy to the other side of the paint. The rule is that you put your head under the basket when you are two passes away opposite the ball, all the more when you have a playmaker like Carmelo facing up a weak on-ball defender.

So, I don't put that on Josh.

Also, LD had me really heated when he was just chillin' watching 4 bench scrubs get their brakes beat off for a 16-0 run.

Josh's illegal screen was on Teague for leaving before the pick was set.

The other stuff -- the over and back and the late three, as well as getting beat so easily to the rack (at least turn Melo one time instead of letting him sprint you to the rim), is all on Josh.

What about the Lakers' coach? He should be available soon (ha)

Great story about Koncak macdaddy!

I don't think the 'choke' label is fair. This team overachieved -- the defense was always a big question mark and that was exacerbated by the loss of Grimes. We have tried a number of solutions but we still need an effective pass rushing end to complement Abraham, and really we need to replace him as well posthaste. Also needed is a new feature running back.

I am bitterly disappointed with how the game unfolded. From Roddy slipping on the INT to Matt Ryan dropping a shotgun snap, we gave too much away to a good team. Harry Douglas somehow falls down running wide open down the sideline and an official extending a 49ers drive with a finger to the face call on Kapernick -- it just seems like these types of breaks tend to go against us as Atlanta sports fans (infield fly rule?).

The media waited all year for the Falcons to stumble so they could say 'told you so'. The fact is, the Falcons answered a lot more questions than they raised this year. Last year, the Falcons not only lost the benchmark games, they got blown out (thinking N.O. and NYG away). They were demonstrably a level below Super Bowl contender.

This year, they were 4 pts and 10 yards away. Even with this leaky defense, they were in position to play for a title.

The trio of Tony G, Roddy and Julio in tandem with M. Ryan is elite. The rest of the team needs work. If Tony G retires, he is irreplaceable. It is imperative that TD wins the offseason so Tony G can be convinced to get on board for one last go.

I am hurt because this is an opportunity wasted -- at 17-0 and 24-14 with a Super Bowl trip on the line, to squander it is painful. Drew Brees and Aaron Rodgers will be back. Cam Newton is improving. San Fran appears to be in position for years to come. NYG is always dangerous and RG III and Russell Wilson are emerging. But the Falcons went all the way to the wire and were right there at the end, despite not being given much credit for all of their accomplishments this year.

"Choking" to me would have been to go out there and get dominated on both sides of the ball, or Ryan throwing poorly or making bad decisions due to nerves. Just throwing away the moment by being clearly overwhelmed. None of that happened. M. Ryan showed he can make enough plays against the best an NFL defense can offer. Julio is elite. This team still has a window, but they need to hit some home runs in the offseason.

Very sad for Tony G. What a class act and consummate pro, as well as an asset to the community. Understated. Classy. In stark contrast to Ray Lewis.

My heart hurts for him individually more so even than an NFC Championship game loss as a Falcons fan.

Maybe because he got his rear end handed to him by Brook Lopez for most of the game?

Joe was the best Hawk since 'Nique. Write that down.

And as Northcyde has touched on already, the Celtics-Hawks series was one I'll remember, as a Hawks fan, for the rest of my life. Philips was electric in Games 4 & 6. You can go an entire lifetime as a fan and not see something like that -- a team that had been so abysmally bad for so long, that was not given one iota of a chance against the Boston juggernaut and had been blown out on the road in each of the first two games -- to come out and shock the world was really special.

Everyone knows he is not in that upper elite class but he was an All-Star and the only reason to watch in the early days. On any given night he could do something special. He helped drag this franchise from its hopeless depths as a perennial doormat back to relevancy. He did not walk out or skip town even after the little riff with fans after the Orlando series; he was traded.

For all of that, I thank him and I will be cheering tonight.

Allow me to first preface this by saying I think that Mike Smith is an excellent coach and I am happy for him and the whole organization for getting the proverbial 500 lb gorilla off their back and earning a playoff win. I have, however, been a bit critical of his in-game decision making (1 pt vs 2pt, 4th down decisions, playing his starters for the entire meaningless Tampa Bay game [see here]) and clock management.

There were two calls that struck me as odd in this game. The first was after the Falcons scored with 2:11 left in the 3rd qtr to go up 26-7. I know the old adage about not chasing points until the 4th quarter, but if you allowed yourself to think ahead, you could figure Seattle to only get the ball 3-4 more times, barring turnovers, freak plays or a clock eating drive by your offense (which would obviously be welcomed and would further underscore the point). Field goals were off the table for Seattle, no questions about it.

Given those circumstances, why would you not go for the two point conversion in that spot? The difference between five and six points is virtually zero, but the difference between six and seven was massive. When asked this question after the game, Mike Smith was dismissive and curtly requested the next question. It was clearly not even a part of his thought process. He has previously (I believe after the loss at N.O., when he was criticized for failing to go for two after an early 4th qtr score) stated that you don't even entertain the thought until under 7 minutes in the 4th qtr. The fact that he has a hard and fast rule about this causes me to shudder.

Second scenario: why call a timeout with :13 to play, only to bring your kicker onto the field on the next play? Why not run the clock all the way down? You surely will not get the ball back on a miss, and you haven't enough time to clock it if there is a botched snap or hold. Here was his response to this question:

“With 13 seconds and you don’t get out of bounds with the ball or the ball is sacked you have no opportunity to run another play. It takes 16 seconds to run a play after you’ve been tackled. That’s the norm in the League so when you’re under 16 and we saw what happened in the first half with regards to Seattle and not being able to run another play on a sack. Once we had the yardage we felt comfortable with it. We were going to go ahead and kick it. If we weren’t in range in the range that we had then we would’ve had to work the sidelines and initially we thought with the play that we had called that was probably going to be the case. Tony broke the tackle and got us inside the yardage to kick the field goal.”

It sort of seems like he either misunderstood or skirted the question.

Is it too much to ask of a coach to be able to dynamically assess an evolving situation and in short order ascertain the best course of action? Maybe it is given everything else he is responsible for. I can give him a little bit of a pass here because a 49 yard field goal is certainly not a lock, and he may have needed time to weigh the benefits of perhaps a short pass to the sidelines versus the risk of losing the opportunity to kick said field goal due to an adverse outcome.

However, if he already had this 16 second rule in his mind (and it seems he did) and knew he was not going to risk another play, then why not say, "hey, you know what, we have a reasonable shot at this field goal where the play was blown dead. I see that the game clock is under :16, so I am going to let this run this down to about :02 before I ask for my timeout."

I know that Mike Smith has a heck of a lot on his mind and that he is in a pressure cooker in those last few moments. I am just not so sure that we shouldn't expect somebody, whether it's Mike Smith (such decisions ultimately fall under the remit of the Head Coach) or someone on staff specifically charged with such decisions (if a head coach's ego could withstand it) to be able to quickly determine the best course of action in that spot.

Certainly Pete Carroll was no better and ultimately cost his team more with his role in the Seahawks' failure to score on two red zone drives in the first half. It is always mind-boggling to me just how few head coaches actually even approach optimal play from a probability standpoint. Of course, the job of an NFL coach covers a lot more ground than these decisions, and many of these guys are exceedingly adept at those areas.

Food for thought.

Abraham was indeed slowed and left the game in the 2nd qtr. He did not return and faces a week of rehabbing to try and get out there at half speed again.

The Falcons had major problems generating any kind of pass rush, as Russell Wilson could have run a lemonade stand in the pocket and still have time to run for 10 or 15 yards when out of product.

In my book this remains a bonehead move and there was definitely a price to pay. Happy to win and move on though.

DrReality -- How do you know? As far as I know, the Falcons have not released an official injury report on Abraham. My guess is he is not 100% on Sunday. He could not put any weight on his ankle last week.

Dolfan, my point kind of flies in the face of this kind of 'old guard' thinking.Of course, both Tom Coughlin and John Madden know more about football than I will ever know, but it's exactly this type of rigid traditionalism that I am arguing against. The idea that 'that's how the game is meant to be played' and 'keeping the starters sharp' is exactly what I am opposed to here.

I think the risk of injury to a key player in a trivial game is a far greater adverse outcome than any supposed edge retention that could be attained by playing them. I am not so concerned about the outcome -- even though I think it has cost the Falcons their best defensive end -- and I don't think a win or loss on Sunday will speak to that either.

I am more concerned with the process, and advancing the thought process on the subject. To me, it is reminiscent of baseball writers trying to portray the sabermetrics crowd as geeks sitting around in room full of calculators, crunching numbers, when 'real baseball guys' make decisions with their 'gut' and their 'heart'.

I just don't see the benefit of risking your starters in the 4th qtr in a game like that, and I can't accept 'that's the way the game was meant to be played' as a valid argument for it. I just can't see how playing the full four quarters of that pointless contest will in any way better prepare them for a playoff game a fortnight away. The pace and tone of the game was that of a preseason contest, and I think we can all agree that those are not reliable predictors of regular season success. The opportunity to play as the number one seed is so rare that you have to gear your entire line of thinking towards maximizing it.

It's odd that coaches tend to err on the wreckless side of the issue because they are normally so risk averse -- for instance, they all punt far more often than statistical analysis would suggest is optimal, because a) most of them cut their teeth doing things 'by the book' and b) if you are perceived as taking a risk and lose, you get killed for it (even if the decision was correct) and will quickly find yourself headed out the door. However, for whatever reason, playing the regs in the last week is considered the correct strategy by the old guard.

Finally, just to head off the argument -- the idea bandied about by the pundits that 'the hottest team going into the playoffs wins the Super Bowl' is rooted in hyperbole, not statistics.

Tough call with Al's toe. If only he was a size smaller.

The Pistons executed very poorly down the stretch and deserved to lose that game, but the Hawks didn't really do enough to win it, either.