niremetal

How many of those other SFs are the 5th offensive option? And since when did stats become the be-all? By that measure, Shane Battier and Bruce Bowen are the worst starting SFs in recent NBA history.

That is complete and total BS. People bash Joe all the time, as much or more than Smoove and Marvin, and way more than Horford. Not saying it's entirely undeserved, but it's true. But since you obviously are a hater on him (you think everyone is "in denial" about the "terrible play" of a guy averaging 21, 5, and 5? really?), you only see the defenses of him and the bashings of your more-favored players.

He said he started the game off hot, but I guess you chose to just skip over the second half of the very sentence that you quoted. Way to look for any opening to pump Mo up, since that obviously helps out your fire-breathing on Marvin.

If the Nets' winning percentage stays below .150, Lopez won't make the All-Star team. Not if Al is playing for a team with a .700+ winning percentage and is averaging a double-double. And not when Al is a better defender, better rebounder, better passer, and more efficient scorer. Really, the only justification for putting Lopez on the team is that he has a better scoring average, but that doesn't mean much when your team's only other scoring option for most of the year has been Chris Douglas-Roberts. He also has more blocks, but I have a feeling that wouldn't be true if Lopez were playing alongside Josh Smith (a fact that the coaches are going to recognize). As for Bogut, his stats are not really any better than Al's at this point, and he plays on a lesser team. And, like Lopez, he is a mediocre on-ball defender. I think Al is a frontrunner assuming that the coaches decide to overlook the ever-high marketing appeal of Shaq.

Batum was their best defensive player last year. As a rookie. So you're right. If you dismiss the impact of Batum out-of-hand, you clearly don't watch the Blazers, so it's time to end the discussion.

As long as they weren't counting NBA TV as nationally televised. Pisses me off. Putting a game on NBA TV takes away more viewers (because it removes it from League Pass Broadband) than it adds, at least for fans of the teams that are playing.

The Hawks always do a little bit better than Chad Ford predicts we'll do. So this is a good sign.

That is quite possibly the most awesome thing in the history of the universe.

Co-sign.

I don't buy that the quotes are facts, and that's all I'm nitpicking. Who knows. Maybe he didn't get the quotes personally, but instead got them from someone who he trusted and said he did talk to the players. Maybe he was bored. Maybe he thought no one would pick up on it. Maybe he's just an idiot like the people on ESPN who post quotes from "Hawks sources" that turn out to be complete BS. Happens all the time. I've worked for a judge before and have seen lawyers lie to the judge's face about something they thought they could get away with (but that any reasonable person seemingly would have known would have led to trouble), so stranger things happen. And this guy isn't even a journalist - he's a blogger. No press pass, no ethics code. It would be more accurate to say that SOME of them have SOME access to ONE team (maybe 2-3). But SBNation is fan bloggers, not beat writers or journalists. Having two good friends who contribute to other SBNation blogs, I can tell you - most of them are just fans with zero access. Yes, I would. There are a lot of "writers" out there on SBNation and on other fan (rather than news organization) blogs. They all are writers. But the vast majority of them are not journalists. They don't have a press pass. They don't get access to the locker room (even of their "home" team, much less a team from another city). They have to go through agents to get in touch with the players, and most agents wouldn't let them close. Getting a quote from one player would be a feat. Getting quotes from 5 players on an opposing team that hasn't visited town for 2 weeks? That would be pretty extraordinary for a fan blogger. Even beyond that, they aren't subject to training sessions relating to sourcing, paraphrasing, and quoting, nor are they bound by the standards of professional ethics of accredited journalists. Looking backward at his previous posts, I see nothing that tells me that the guy who wrote this "article" is different than most other fan bloggers. The players won't respond unless a bigger fish than a few contributers to fan blogs pick up on this. But I would far from shocked if this turned out to be the way that each of the players actually felt. I never said it wasn't true. I said there were a hell of a lot of red flags. And there are.

He shot 50% or better when taking 20+ shots 10 times last year. And he scored 30+ points 12 times last year. And he hit 10 FGs while shooting 50% or better from the floor 17 times last year. There were 21 games where at least 1 of those 3 happened. So...how is that rare? And how many perimeter players in the NBA have nights like that more often than JJ?

WARNING - that blog is NOT a journalistic or even major blog source. It is from a Boston Celtics fan blog. We have NO way of knowing its reliability and frankly I would be shocked if 5 Hawks rotation players took the time to sit down and talk to a Boston Celtics fan blogger during the season for a story about the contract situation of their head coach. And otherwise, the article appears to be completely unsourced. Red flags, folks. I wouldn't trust it unless the purported quotes from "the five players I spoke to" appear in a legit media source.

Yup. The thing that's most striking to me about our offense is the lack of off-ball movement. We see this far too often: If the ball goes to the post, the guys on the perimeter stand still. If it goes to JJ on an ISO, everyone else stands still. If Crawford gets the ball at the top of the key and tries to break his man down, no one moves. It's obvious that simple things like off-ball screens and backdoor cuts are not emphasized as part of the offense. Considering that we almost always have 4 good passers on the floor at any given time (Marvin and Zaza being the exceptions), that's mind-boggling.

Whatever quibbles I may have with it, that was one of the best posts I've ever seen on here.

My quibble is that Josh is not a 3/4. He is a 4. A slightly small 4, but a 4 nonetheless. The idea that he is, should be, or even can be a 3 (at least a decent one) has been abandoned by virtually everyone around here (not to mention by his coach and teammates). His skill set is almost entirely suited for the 4 position and his weaknesses are all most exposed at the 3 position. His most important assets - his running and jumping ability - are far less of a factor when he is playing a position manned by quicker and more athletic players. The areas of his game where he is relatively weak (perimeter D, outside shooting, lateral quickness) are more exposed at the 3. And of course, spending more time at the 3 means spending more time on the perimeter on D - which means that the league's best help defender and shotblocker will be further away from the basket more often. The more Josh is placed close to the basket, the more he is a factor - at both ends. This doesn't at all change your argument about the 3 being our weak link, of course - if anything, it underscores it. I just get tired of seeing these occasional posts suggesting that Josh is somehow a combo forward.

Unless I'm reading you wrong, I think you've got the numbers mixed up. A center is a 5 and a PG is a 1.

I find it hysterical that some people still think that size is the only thing keeping the Hawks from stopping D-12.

Now that's some 5-star hyperbole, there.

You see, that sounds nice. Except that JJ doesn't shoot every time he gets the ball. He doesn't even shoot most of the time he gets the ball. Does he still shoot too much? Yes. But so did Paul Pierce with Jim O'Brien. Boston fans were screaming that Pierce was a selfish player. Then Doc came to town and Pierce's shot attempts suddenly went down and his shooting percentage went up - and that was 3 years before KG and Ray came to town. No one who watched JJ when he played in Phoenix will say JJ was a selfish player or a "natural" ballhog. Hell, D'Antoni himself praised his unselfishness even after JJ left Phoenix, and no one was calling JJ a ballhog during his first few months with the Hawks (when the D'Antoni system was still engrained in his mind). It wasn't until after Harrington left that the ISO-Joe era began in earnest (although people were bitching about ISO-Lue even before that). And even if you don't believe me about JJ, what about Crawford? He's a grown man too, isn't he? So when he came to town talking like a distributor and then Woody told him publicly and privately that he wanted him instead to be the league's leading scorer off the bench. And whaddya know - Crawford's assists have actually gone way, way down compared with past years. And it's not like he and JJ were even the only ones. I'm sure you remember people complaining about Lue pounding the ball and complaining about Flip being a chucker. If it were just JJ, I would blame JJ. But this is a recurring theme among guards in Woodson's offense. Hell, it's a recurring theme in Woody's offense in general (remember Bibby's "if you don't want Josh to shoot from there, then don't put him there" comment during the playoffs?). The bottom line is this: It's the coach's job to get his players to play the way they should. Clearly, Woody is not doing that because the Hawks' inconsistency and tendency to slip into indifference on the boards and ISO offense continues, and the problem is not isolated to JJ (no pun intended). So I have a tough time buying into the idea that JJ is somehow equally at fault.

Two solutions immediately come to mind: 1) Stop the switching defense, which often puts our big men out on the perimeter and leaves our smallest guards to box out opposing big men. At the very least, don't switch when it's Bibby/Jamal/Teague's man who is getting screened. 2) Run a system that doesn't put Josh on the perimeter watching JJ/Jamal/Bibby jack up jumpers on 60% of our possessions. When he's near the basket, Josh is our best offensive rebounder. The problem is that he isn't near the basket often enough.

Woohoo! Man, it's so refreshing to have a coach who manages to turn a guy who came in talking like a pass-first point guard into JJ-lite.

Or maybe, just maybe, Woody needs to implement a system that doesn't call for ISO-Joe or ISO-Jamal (or ISO-Lue or ISO-Flip in the days of yore) to be run every third possession. Oh wait, I forgot. That won't happen. So let's just blame JJ for Woody's inability to implement/explain/get his team to buy into an offensive system that looks any different from the one he had in place when the team went 13-69. JJ isn't as good as LeBron but the one-on-one isolation focus of Woodson's system let's him play like he is. Did any other leading scorer for a title winning team ever play in a team without a system that went beyond "isolate, go one-on-one, and see what happens?" Nope. But let's blame JJ for Woody's system anyway. Yeah, let's do that. That makes sense.

What happened is Woody. When JJ arrived, he still had D'Antoni's motion and ball movement-oriented system ingrained in his brain. But once Harrington left, Woody told JJ he had to put the team on his back. Is JJ being a ballhog? Yes. But he was never a ballog in Phoenix, and it would NOT be difficult to design a system here in which JJ still got the most touches but wasn't called on to run so many ISOs. And let us not forget that JJ is merely the most obvious of an ever-expanding line of scoring guards (Lue, Flip, Crawford) who people accuse of dominating the ball and taking ill-advised and contested shots. It's amazing how people either forget or choose to ignore that when they act like JJ is the only (or even the #1) thing keeping us from becoming a ball-sharing team.

You must be hiding under a rock if you don't think there are people who take the reverse tack - they say it's to Woodson's credit that the Hawks win with such a pitiful roster, and because of the shortcomings of the players when the team loses. And you also obviously don't check other teams' message boards if you think that mentality is confined to Atlanta. It's the same with pretty much everyone in the universe of sports fans - it's because of their most-favoreds when their team wins, and because of their least-favoreds when they lose.

Not working for me either.