Seano

Interesting. Thanks for posting that. To me the most interesting part of that blurb was the part I bolded, that the Lakers are supposedly Dwight's preferred destination. So much for him wanting to come back home to Atlanta I guess. Ahh well, maybe we can get really creative and make some kind of play for Chris Paul or something.

I know Marvin Williams is on Diesel's draft board somewhere. Matbe he'll pick him in the 2nd. :P

Well your post seems kind of contradictory, because health and the the fact the guy has bad knees and cannot stay on the floor are HUGE reasons why we probably shouldn't give up Smoove for Bynum. He's played in only 60% of games over the last four seasons due to injury, so what good is the guy going to do ya if he's missing 4 out of every 10 games? Answer: not so much. If we trade Smoove, we had better get a dang good player in return, and a guy with a much better bill of health than Bynum has shown. And I like Bynum. He is very talented and would seem to be exactly what we need, but I couldn't do that trade because he's injured so much, and I'd much rather have Smoove for 70-81 games per season than Bynum for 50 or so. I feel badly for Bynum just like Oden and Yao, because it sucks to be chronically injured when you have such talent and play at such a premium position of need as C in the NBA. You just have to wonder whether Bynum's knee problems aren't becoming chronic, because it's every year now and now he's had major injuries to both knees as well as his achilles, probably because he's gimpy because his knees aren't right. Sorry, I would have to pass on this offer.

Sounds good to me, man. This will be fun! :good:

This CBA thing looms over everything and casts a dark cloud over everything too. I really wish these guys would just work it the hell out. In my opinion in a world so needy as this one, it is ridiculous to have millionaires fighting against billionaires over $$$. You cut through all the crap and get right down to the heart of it, and that is just absurd. Get it together, work it out, each side make compromises, and everybody gets rich. They all will. I have no sympathy for any of these people b*tching about money. And yeah, the draft might be relatively deads-ville this year. Hopefully the Sports Guy has got his running draft diary going on, cause that's always good. I doubt there will be much (or any?) player movement in trades, but we could see movement in draft picks and of draftees maybe. I don't know how this stuff works, like I'm assuming current rosters are frozen and will remain so until the labor issues are worked out, but I don't know if that applies to draftees or anything else, or if transactions are frozen completely or what. Anyway, I'll be at least semi-excited to see who we get in the 2nd. You never know. Obviously the odds are against it and at that point it's a total shot in the dark, but the fact is that useful and productive players are found in the 2nd round in every single NBA draft. So who knows, maybe we can luck out or something and get at least a guy worthy of development ala Pape Sy.

Kris Humphries is an unrestricted free agent, so we wouldn't even need to trade for him presumably. We could just sign him outright if we could get enough financial flexibility to be able to do that. Supposedly Jersey wants to keep him, but we'll see. After the first time in his career getting regular minutes, dude was a fricken beast the second half of the season, averaging about 15 points and 15 boards per game, almost Kevin Love-like. Still only 26 too. Was he extra-motivated playing for a contract this summer, or was that the real Kris Humphries we saw the second part of the season in Jersey there, and did he just need a chance to show people what he could do with regular minutes? I have no idea. I like him though cause he played his college ball at my alma-mater (though he should have stayed in school, came out WAY too early), plus he's dating Kim Kardashian. Good stuff right there...

Same here. Very good player, very consistent and very clutch, but not a superstar. What does superstar even mean, anyway? I mean it's such a subjective term to begin with, and one man's superstar could be another guy's merely good. Anyway, Pierce isn't and has never been in that uppermost tier of NBA players, the guys who are so good that they have the potential to lead you to a championship almost by themselves, guys like Kobe and DWade and etc etc etc. Pierce is not that, he's just a really good player like JJ is, but better. Pierce will be a very worthy Hall of Famer, but I don't think that anyone would put him at any time as being among that highest tier of star player.

I agree, Diesel. I have to confess to not being all that pleased with the Hinrich trade at the time. I felt that Hinrich was really slowing down and even looking semi washed-up in Washington, and I just saw trading for him as being much more like a token effort to placate the fans than an honest attempt at getting better for a hopefully much more successful playoff run than our last one had been. I'd also heard that Hinrich was slipping defensively, and that that had more to do with him being moved to SG than just the presence of John Wall. So I was feeling kind of dodgy on Hinrich, and besides that I was really hoping we'd complete the rumored trade with CLE for Ramon Sessions, as I thought that sounded like a hell of a deal for us. But thankfully I was totally wrong about Hinrich, and came away very impressed with his defensive abilities as well as his obvious basketball smarts. He made a difference to us defensively and in my opinion the team defense as a whole looked notably better after his arrival. Part of that no doubt had to do with us no longer having to run the black hole of defensive liability that is Mike Bibby out there any longer, but a lot of it was just on Hinrich playing very, very well on defense (for the most part anyway in my opinion). I'm happy he's here and looking forward to seeing what will happen when he's able to spend a full off-season and training camp and preseason with us, and *really* get to feeling more comfortable and familiar with his teammates and the type of ball we need to play here. And his expiring deal could definitely come in helpful to us, if we decide to move that for whatever reason. No offense against Bibby because I do like the guy, but Hinrich>>>>>>>>Bibby, and the addition of Hinrich coupled with the resultant emergence of Teague as a byproduct of that trade>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Bibby by about 1000X.

Well from the NHL's perspective, like I stated it was a money thing all the way, and they got blinded by trying to chase the $$$ in the late 80s-early 90s. They really wanted to be big time, and demographics were telling them that the US population (and their money) was shifting southward to the Sunbelt, and so that's what they were chasing after. That's why you saw Nashville, Tampa, San Jose, Anaheim, and Florida all being awarded with new franchises, while the NHL continued to abandon its much more traditional demographics, its source of strength and really its historical home base by transferring teams from cold weather (and hockey crazy) northern tier cities like Winnipeg, Minnesota, and Hartford to Phoenix, Dallas, and Charlotte. They damaged their product greatly by doing this. Not only did it become incredibly watered-down, but the league lost its credibility in the process. It's absurd to have hockey teams playing in cities in which a natural patch of ice might last maybe 10 minutes before melting, but that's what the did, and the NHL is just kind of a joke league anymore in my opinion and many others as a result of that.

No, it didn't work out well at all. Neither did the extreme over-expansion into markets in Southern California, the deep South and the Sunbelt, places like Phoenix and Tampa and the Carolinas which had no hockey tradition whatsoever because hockey is a northern sport in which ice is required on which to play it! :) It's just 'shocking' that that didn't work out, isn't it? I used to be a hockey fan. I grew up in South Dakota and was a big Minnesota North Stars fan as a kid, and even bought a North Stars partial season ticket package when I moved to the Twin Cities as a young adult. But then the North Stars shafted every one of their fans by abandoning Minnesota for the bright lights and big $$$ of Dallas (part of that disastrous NHL plan to expand heavily into the Sunbelt), and after that I was just like "Ya know what, screw this. If this is the way it's going to be, I've got much better things to do with my time". I've never gotten over how bloody ironic and mind-blowingly stupid it is for a team to move from MINNESOTA, which is a shrine to hockey and a state in which hockey is immensely popular (the Minnesota state hockey tournament is about as big as it gets in high school sports, similar to the Indiana state basketball tournament or the Texas state football playoffs) which has got more than enough ice and winter to make hockey more religion than sport almost....and to move from there to fricken Dallas, which has NO hockey or winter sport traditions whatsoever, and it's like WTF???? What am I missing here? Obviously it was all about the almighty dollar. The NHL saw dollar signs in its eyes and got far too greedy, abandoning its home and traditional stomping grounds in Canada and the northern tier states, and this is the result. I used to know every team in the league by heart, but anymore I don't even know who the hell these teams are, much less who plays on them. The Columbus Blue Jackets? WTF is that???

I'm glad they split the Thrashers from the Hawks (although I'm sorry for Thrashers fans). I'm just not a hockey fan, and would much rather the Hawks (along with Phillips Arena) be their own separate entity, rather than being tied in to the fortunes of a hockey team and having that hockey team's circumstances or problems have any effect at all upon the Hawks. In my opinion it's better to focus the entirety of your efforts on one thing, whether that be hockey, basketball or whatever, and give that one endeavor maximum effort and attention rather than being scattered all over the place.

Good points, AHF. Something like this has got to be organized and have some rules guiding it to give it structure, otherwise it will fall apart in short order as people forget or lose interest or get busy in their outside lives or whatever. I've seen that through experience with NFL and MLB fantasy drafts like this proposed one.

No WAY would I ever trade Smoove for an unproven draft pick, especially a #2 pick in a draft that is not considered particularly strong at the top. That's got shades of 'Marvin Williams redux' written all over it, so no thanks on that one. If we were to trade Smoove, we had damn sure better get back a quality and proven player and/or players along with any picks. He is one of our most valuable assets, despite the fact he can be so frustrating sometimes.

Yeah. 'Weak' draft or not, I never like it when we trade away first round picks. This draft may be weak at the top with a lack of star power and no defined alpha dog stud to rule all draft prospects, but that doesn't mean there aren't any players in this draft, because of course there are players who will be drafted and will make productive NBA players of themselves, and with that 18th pick we might/could have been looking at someone like Klay Thompson. A player like that has got warts (busted for weed possession back in March), but he's the best sharpshooter in this draft with the exception of Fredette, his basketball IQ is rated as being off the charts, and he's the son of former #1 overall pick Mychal Thompson. He's just one example though, because there will be other players when that 18th pick rolls around that we could be thinking..."Wow, it'd be kind of nice to get this guy". We've done pretty well with picks lately, so in my opinion they're more valuable to us now when they were under the BK regime, because back then it was like the guy was throwing fricken darts at a board while wearing a blindfold. So I hated the fact that we gave up that pick, but that was apparently the price we had to pay. It was either that or stand pat and do nothing at all in order to try and improve for the playoff run, and my morale and I think the morale of most Hawks fans would have been terrible had we just stood pat, because we were struggling badly then and looked to be spinning our wheels while going absolutely nowhere. And Hinrich's positive effect on our overall team defense was highly noticeable, not to mention I think he makes a heck of a mentor for young Teague, even better than Bibb's did, because Hinrich's got that kind of bulldog defensive mentality to show the kid.

It would be really cool if we could have a fantasy draft and then simulate an NBA season using our rosters. That would be way fun, and that way we could have our teams play it out on the court to determine who's best. :) It's looking like this might be a very long offseason.

Sounds fun. I'd like to play.

I still love to see us picking in the lottery, cause that's always a hell of a lot of fun and very exciting, especially when your name doesn't get picked right away and the tension mounts. That's good stuff, as well as thinking and talking about who we might get with that pick. So I love the lottery, but I would obviously only want the team to participate in it if they trade their way in there and not play their way in.

Too true. Marvin just sucks as a player, and that's pretty blatantly obvious to anyone with a set of eyes in their head. But he is still only 24 years old, despite the fact that it seems like he's been around here sucking for about 20 years now. Someone might be willing to take a flyer on a player like that, given the fact that he's still relatively young and might/could/possibly/maybe develop a better game in a different setting or environment than this one.

I wouldn't sell on Teague right now, I would hold. To further the stock market analogy, I would regard him as being like an aggressive small cap company with great potential and just primed for growth, and possibly explosive growth. I wouldn't sell a stock like that, so I wouldn't sell on Teague either. I couldn't be any more impressed by how well he played in that series, I mean he was awesome. I loved his demeanor out there, because you never know how a young guy is going to react in that type of pressure-packed circumstance, and Teague looked just as confident and comfortable as could be out there. There was not one time in which he looked to be overwhelmed by the moment, and not one time in which he didn't look like he absolutely belonged out there. They say the true measure of a player is by how he performs in the playoffs, and if that's the case, then wow. Totally impressed. He's got some serious speed, which is a threat in and of itself because it allows him to break down the defense and drive the hoop almost at will sometimes. He reminded me of Robert Pack with that type of speed and ability to drive it on the D. Teague looked really athletic too, and he's got some hops. He is very skinny, so I'd like to see him add 10-15 more pounds of muscle and then see what the kid can do. He'd be about Derrick Rose size at that point. He also obviously needs to work on his outside shot and develop confidence in shooting a jumper, because as of right now he's just hesitant to take that shot and will often pass up a wide open J. I thought he did well running the show too. The team seemed much more settled and much calmer with Teague bringing the ball up the court and setting the offense as opposed to Joe or Jamal trying to do that, and to me the offense just seemed to flow much better under Teague, and with much better passing and ball movement involved. I think he's a heck of a prospect. I feel very proud of him for stepping up like that, and very excited for what his future might hold for this team. Maybe we got lucky for once, eh? :biggrin:

Of course Gearon is running the show. If Sund had any choice in the matter, we wouldn't have sold off the 31st pick for financial considerations last summer. No GM in their right mind would sell off a pick like that, because they know it's very possible to find a useful player there, and at the very least you should be able to get a developmental project there if not a player ready to man an NBA bench immediately. That's the intelligent way to acquire cheap bench players, as opposed to piddling away money on mediocre free agents just to sit and play very little (if at all) off our bench. Selling that was a $$$ move all the way, not a winning basketball move. And Sund didn't draft "he who's name shall not be mentioned", he traded Damion James for Craw and the 31st pick, and then that momentary high at making a good trade was spoiled a little while later when we traded off that 31st pick (Tibor Pleiss) to OKC for nothing more than cash, and man did that suck. It's so damn cheap, and I think any team that behaves that cheaply deserves what it gets. It's like when the Suns drafted Rajon Rondo at #21 and then immediately traded the rights to him to the Celtics for a first round pick and the dreaded 'cash considerations', which was the REAL reason behind the deal. So in my opinion the Suns deserved to get burned for doing that, and they have been burned quite badly. :biggrin: Anyway, Sund didn't draft the guy, but he definitely deserves credit for trading for him. I hate it when the bean-counters start dictating the direction of a team and undermine their GM in the process. That's no way to run an organization.

Oh I'm pretty sure he's already there. He's in a group of busted #2s including Stromile Swift, Shawn Bradley, Danny Ferry, Darko Milicic, and Sam Bowie- though in fairness to Sam, his career was derailed by knee injuries, and he'd actually looked quite promising prior to the injury problems. All of these players though had the misfortune of being picked second ahead of vastly superior players, and Marvin is right there with them. Just a busterific pick. Heh, I like that idea. You could make a comedy show out of all Marvin's pratfalls, and show that during the halftime. The kids would LOVE that! :biggrin:

Heh. Awesomeness. :biggrin:

I still think that OKC is the best team in the league right now, and there are reasons why they rolled Denver the way they did in the 1st round. I would consider them a serious threat because they've got the two superstars in Durant and Westbrook, and then they are surrounded by all these great complementary players like Ibaka and Harden and Perkins. I like their depth and bench much better than that of Miami's, and I'd take the bench of Collison and Maynor and Cook and Mohammed and Sefalosha every day of the week over the bench the Heat run out there. They lack experience, but there's no time like the present to start gaining playoff chops and the West is wide open right now with SA already knocked out and LA on the ropes. I love their chances out West.

Wilkommen to the new posters, ja. This is what I would consider to be an excellent message board, so enjoy! And geaux Hawks!

Good post. That's a very interesting and apt comparison, but as others have noted, Josh would be doing very well to have himself nearly a career so good as Andruw's, because Andruw has hit 400+ HR's and has had himself a pretty damn fine career despite his weight gain and lack of plate discipline. The lesson I take from that was that Andruw's talent was *so* great as to allow him to shine despite his limitations, and he remains the best defensive CF I have ever laid eyes upon, prior to gaining the weight and developing the knee and back problems along with losing the mobility and range that had made him so spectacular an outfielder. He's another guy you just think, "Man, what might have been". He and Vlad Guerrero were always interlinked, because both were mammoth prospects playing for divisional rivals and both came up to the major leagues at the same time, and so there was always this great debate as to which would wind up having the better career, and obviously Vladimir settled that debate quite some time ago, but Andruw was right up there with him through the first part of their careers, and his defense elevated him above Guerrero at that time in my opinion. But the weight sunk Andruw's ship, and turned him from a Hall of Famer like Guerrero into just a very good player who didn't quite live up to what he might have and should have been.