niremetal

As much as Diesel and others will deny it, his defense this year has been very good. Just observing him, it's easy to see that - even when he gets switched off onto a quicker or bigger player, he finds a way to contest pretty every shot taken by the guy he's guarding/switched onto. Without fouling, too. Check out the 82games.com pages for the Hawks, Cavs, Celts, and Magic. If you click on each player’s name and scroll down, you see a row labeled “Defense: Pts per 100 Poss.” The two numeric columns show how many points per 100 possessions the team allows when the player is on the court versus when he is off the court. Marvin has the best net rating (-9.6) for that not just on the Hawks, and not just among the SFs on those teams, but amongst ALL rotation players on those 4 teams. Now that obviously doesn’t mean that Marvin is the best defender on the Hawks, much less among all the players in the East elite. No one stat can possibly capture that. But it means that we “lose” more points when Marvin leaves the floor than when any other player leaves the floor – ie it means that going from Marvin to his subs has been the biggest “step down” defensively in terms of points allowed. It’s true that our offense gets better when Marvin leaves, but not by nearly as much (points alw’d is -9.6; points scored is -4.0). Anyway, Marvin isn’t scoring as much, but the advanced stats pretty much all show that his defense so far this year is actually even better than last year’s. He’s not producing offensively, but really…who takes fewer shots if we want our SF to score more? Of course, the lesson from that particular stat might just be “we need a better defensive SF off the bench,” which many people have said. But all the advanced stats I’ve looked at on hoopdata, 82games, basketballvalue, basketball-reference, etc all indicate that Marvin has been one of the league’s best defensive SFs this year, and has shown a slight improvement from last year on that end. The offense, of course, is another story. And I actually would like to see us swap Mo into the starting lineup for Marvin. That would provide us with more balance coming off the bench, because our second unit is a defensive train wreck. It seriously seems like recently, every time the second unit enters the game, the opposing team scores on each of the next half-dozen possessions. Mo is the best defender on the second unit, but he’s undersized and somewhat foul prone. Teague is still a foul waiting to happen, Zaza seems to have lost his confidence, and Jamal is…well, still terrible on the defensive end. He at least seems to be giving more of an effort, but he gets caught out of position way too much. On the other hand, the role of Marvin on the first unit right now is “stand in the corner and wait for a bail-out pass, and then go play defense.” Mo can do that just fine, and JJ is big enough to cover most SFs, at least for some stretches of the game. I would like to see that lineup change, but I don’t see it happening with Woody. I think we’ll come to regret that if our luck with injuries this year runs out, because unlike last year, Marvin hasn’t been involved in the offense enough that he’d be ready to step up when injuries happen like he did last year.

Dude. I was pointing out that even if you take away the ppg, he's still the only one in the whole league averaging 8rpg and 4apg. I have no clue how the hell you read that as an insult rather than a complement. It's no different than someone pointing out that even if you subtract his goals scored, Gretzky is the NHL's all time leader in points. It makes the accomplishment more impressive, not less.

Actually, you can take off the 15ppg. He's the only one averaging 8rpg and 4apg.

Oody-way.

Those were two different games, bud. We won the one where he got 20 free throws and we lost by 1 on the road in the game where he scored 31 - a game in which, as you said, Smoove wasn't playing, and that was the last stop in a 5-game WC road trip. The next time you tell someone who dares to suggest Marvin has redeeming qualities that they are "making excuses," take a look back at your post here.

Marvin had several dunks like that in his year at UNC, and has had a couple in the NBA. The biggest difference is that passion and energy seems to have been sapped away. We don't see this kind of fire from Marvin anymore:

Exactly, players can't get charged for making public statements like "I would love to play with Player X" as long as they don't go to personally wine and dine a player under contract. Cavs fans are hilarious. Was it tampering when LeBron expressed his desire for Z to come back? "How dare the Hawks players talk about Z! They're tampering with our tampering!"

Agree with you on Nelson. Not so much on D'Antoni. Donnie Walsh didn't hire him for nothing. He is a great coach when it comes to getting the most out of the players at his disposal and at making in-game adjustments, and his teams' defense has never been as atrocious as some people seem to think if you adjust for pace, especially considering the mostly terrible defensive players at his disposal. His offense is NOT like Nellie's or Doug Moe's or any of the other coaches whose systems just focus on outrunning the other team. There is much more nuance to his system than to most uptempo coaches' and he is a master at making adjustments, which is why his teams consistently do better than projected and can adjust quickly after injuries and trades.

Number One My suggestion: [Couldn't come up with anything good.] Number Two My suggestion: With the game decided, Atlanta Hawks head coach Mike Woodson and referee Bob Delany break out in a rousing rendition of "Afternoon Delight."

I still can't get over his absolutely mind-boggling decision to bench JJ in that early game against the Lakers where he went off for 18 points in the first quarter. JJ left, the Hawks lost their lead, and JJ didn't have the same touch after he came back from the bench. And the ultimate irony is that he actually pulled JJ earlier than usual that game. That's the most frustrating thing to me about Woody's substitution patterns. They seem to be completely disconnected from what's going on in the game in real-time. He'll leave a starter in when he's struggling to do anything right, and pull him when he's killing it at both ends.

You talk a lot of sh!t about the players on a blog, but seriously - watch what happens if you try to clown Bibby in person. Team Dime is still around.

0 2010-02-22 ATL @ UTA W :thumbsupsmileyanim:

But Josh is not a stupid person. His basketball IQ is much, much higher than this thread indicates. He is one of the best transition defensive players in recent history because he so often seems to correctly predict how the play will unfold. Clearly, he is a very sharp guy. I think the problem is that he has not had the right type of guidance in his life as a player. People who affirmatively tell him "this is what you're best at, so this is what we want you to do" instead of "Josh, what the hell are you doing?" Josh's sin is, and always has been, not recognizing the limits of his talent and too often trying to do things that are not his game. He plays on the edge at all times, taking more than the usual number of risks and assuming that his natural talent will allow him to get away with it. That's honestly the same mentality that the all-time greats have always had - they think they're capable of anything. There's nothing inherently wrong with that mentality. It's up to his coaches and mentors to define for him the limits of his game. Confident, supremely physically gifted young players can't be left to figure it out for themselves. It was a mind-boggling decision by Josh to shoot that trey with 9 seconds left (plenty of time to rotate the ball several times more to create an open look for JJ/Jamal/Bibby). But it also is a sign of poor coaching/planning that he was put in a position to take the shot in the first place. He wasn't setting a screen at the time of the shot - Horford had set the screen. Josh just seemed to be left out on the floor without specific instructions, being allowed to drift without purpose. My guess is that play was a good analogy for his career as a whole.

No, it doesn't work that way for players who are on QOs. The rule is that they have to consent to any trades that happen during the year that they are playing under the QO, and players will basically never agree to such trades because their Bird Rights are stripped away if they are traded. http://members.cox.net/lmcoon/salarycap.htm#Q82 http://members.cox.net/lmcoon/salarycap.htm#Q87

We would have lost him for nothing this coming summer. His haters might consider that a not-so-bad outcome, but we couldn't afford to get nothing for him. We basically gave him a hair more than the mid-level (as mrhonline showed, that's really what the contract was) in order to make sure we didn't lose him for nothing this coming summer. Based on how well he played last year before his injury, it's tough to question that logic.

What are you talking about? That's how it works in NBA Live.

Priest Lauderdale

That's a pretty bad worst-case scenario. As much as some of the JJ-bashers around here would love to think so, Craw is not good enough to be a #1 option for a playoff team. He's having the best shooting year of his career right now because he's getting the most open looks of his career. If JJ leaves, defenses will collapse on him and he'll most likely go back to being a 40-41% shooter. And then there's the defense...our perimeter defense would be a shambles without JJ. Combine that with the loss of his offensive game, and it's tough to see the team doing much better than 41-41. Much as I love my boy Horford, I'm pretty sure that neither he nor Smoove have the tools necessary to step up and average 18+ per game for a full season on a playoff-bound team. And if we trade Horford or Smoove to get a "real" big (why is the "real" modifier still there? who are these "real centers" out there better than our All-Star at the position?), who would that big be who would help bring us out of the lottery? We won't be players in the 2011 free agent market assuming we extend Horford and the new cap is pretty low (both of which seem like safe bets). That means we won't have cap flexibility for the next few years unless we blow up the team and start from scratch a la 2004 (which is, of course, "just quitting"). When you don't have cap flexibility, you can't afford to lose key assets and get nothing in return. So we can't lose JJ for nothing. If we lose JJ, it has to be as part of a sign-and-trade where we get a lottery pick or two. And if that happens, the best thing to do with Jamal is try to package his expiring deal with either Marvin or Bibby to get a star perimeter player to replace JJ. If we do those two things, maybe we can bounce back to contention in a year or two. If we lose him for nothing though, we could be stuck in that not-quite-contender-but-not-bad-enough-to-draft-a-star rut that a quarter of the league is in during any given year.

And projecting past 2010 is a useless exercise anyway because no one can pretend to know what the cap rules will be 1.5 years from now.

I agree with the latter, but not the former. Ilgauskas has been woefully ineffective against Howard defensively.

There's player hating and then there's just being a jackass. I'll give you one guess as to which one that post qualifies as.

I think that this site would be boring without those predictable threads. It's sad that most people around here have fixated on one player as the Source of All Evil for the team (especially considering that there is much disagreement on who is said Source), but c'est la team.

These are both in the imports thread. So what was the point of posting this?

Yeah, he did in court last year. I was living in DC at the time, and actually went to 3 days of the trial. There were lots of little disputes early on, mostly really petty stuff like use of luxury box suites and who got the team's complementary tix on the road. It got worse, with Belkin telling Stern at one point that he thought one of the other owners (Peskowitz, I think) might be engaging in tampering, and suggesting that the NBA investigate (they disagreed over whether it was an "accusation" or just Belkin acting as a concerned owner looking out for the Hawks' interests). The non-Belkin owners all knew each other beforehand, but I think only one of them (Levenson, I think) knew Belkin. Oil and water doesn't even begin to describe it. These guys all wanted to own an NBA team, but that was the only thing they had in common, it seems. The original ownership group was thrown together very hastily, and Belkin had it in his mind that he was the "managing partner" in the same way that Mark Cuban is, even though he only put up 20-something percent of the capital. The other owners thought it would be more consensus-based. Something had to give.