Spinoff Thread

[Admin]

[AHF]

Speedy was never thought of as a good solution and BK never prioritized pg.  

[Admin]

I would put money on Floyd Mayweather having a Million Dollar Baby type of accident in the ring than I would on the Hawks winning a championship in my lifetime, regardless of strategy. There's more of a chance of The Pope coming out of the closet! Along those lines we as fans need to do as @kg01's priest told him years ago, just close your eyes grab the chair and embrace the pain. 

[MaceCase]

"I never prioritized PG?!"

"You're welcome, motherfucka."

[sturt]

http://www.espn.com/nba/news/story?id=2508532

 

The Atlanta Hawks, roundly criticized for bypassing Chris Paul in the 2005 NBA draft, addressed their void at point guard by signing Paul's backcourt mate: Speedy Claxton.

 

 

It is believed that Claxton will receive a four-year deal worth $25 million.

The Hawks targeted Claxton after a two-year, $13 million bid to wrest Sam Cassell from the Los Angeles Clippers fell short.  (***Didn't remember this part***) Cassell, one of the biggest difference-makers during the Clippers' breakthrough season, opted late Saturday to stay in Los Angeles when the Clippers matched Atlanta's offer.

The Hornets have been the league's surprise spenders since free-agency season began Saturday at 12:01 a.m. ET, luring sharpshooter Peja Stojakovic from the Indiana Pacers with a five-year deal worth more than $60 million. But it quickly became clear that the Hornets were cutting ties with Claxton when the team reached a three-year agreement worth an estimated $17 million with Memphis guard Bobby Jackson. Stojakovic and Jackson both worked with Hornets coach Byron Scott when Scott served as an assistant in Sacramento.

Claxton logged key playoff minutes at point guard for San Antonio's 2003 championship team and emerged as a top Sixth Man Award candidate with the Hornets last season as Paul's backup. Yet, Scott frequently played Claxton and the eventual Rookie of the Year together in a small-but-quick backcourt alignment that helped the Hornets (38-44) make an unexpected playoff bid in their first season in Oklahoma City.

The move to Atlanta will likely make Claxton an unquestioned starter, enabling Joe Johnson -- the Hawks' marquee free-agent acquisition last summer -- to play at his natural shooting guard position.

"I may be the happiest guy in the bunch," said Johnson. "Having Speedy will definitely
free me up to score a lot more."

Claxton said the Hawks "are not far at all" from being a
playoff team.

"I think they've got better pieces than we did last year,"
Claxton said, comparing the Hawks and Hornets rosters. "We've got
some talented guys here. Hopefully, we can make a playoff push this
year."

The Hawks took versatile forward Marvin Williams in the first
round last year and selected power forward Shelden Williams in the
first round this year as general manager Billy Knight waited to
sign a veteran point guard.

 

"I think everyone can see we're a young group of guys and we're
deep at the wing positions," Knight said Wednesday. "We feel we
need a veteran point guard to run our team."

The average age on the Hawks' team at the end of last season was
23.

"No disrespect to the point guards who came out of the draft
this year, but I felt we needed a veteran point guard who can be an
extension of me and my staff," said coach Mike Woodson, who as an
assistant coach worked with Claxton in Philadelphia in the 2001-02
season.

"The fans in Atlanta are going to be excited about his style of
play and how he pushes the ball," said Woodson of the 5-foot-11
Claxton.

Senior writer Marc Stein covers the NBA for ESPN.com. Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.

[CP61]

15 hours ago, BrazilianHawk said:

I don't like being bad. It's ugly and boring. Being bad for almost a decade... It'g uglier and more boring still.

How many more decades are you guys willing to live? I say enjoy what's good. Even if it's not the best team of all, I'd much rather root for a good team to win than for a bad team to lose.

 

If it takes a decade I'll barely be in my 30s. I can wait.

[AHF]

My bad.  Signing a career backup pg who averaged missing 24 games per season and never shot even 43% from the floor over a full season and who didn't even stand 6 feet tall is really prioritizing the position.  It is shocking that this didn't work out.

[sturt]

You mean Sam Cassell?

Please remember, the premise isn't about Speedy in particular, but rather, you made the assertion that BK just didn't "value" the PG position. Speedy, imo, was generally thought at the time to be an up-and-comer not unlike an Avery Johnson who had to work his way up to being given the keys so-to-speak of a team. However, even conceding the point to your side of the ledger, the Cassell factoid seriously stands in opposition to the premise.

[Guest]

On Friday, June 16, 2017 at 11:29 PM, Dolfan23 said:

I would put money on Floyd Mayweather having a Million Dollar Baby type of accident in the ring than I would on the Hawks winning a championship in my lifetime, regardless of strategy. There's more of a chance of The Pope coming out of the closet! Along those lines we as fans need to do as @kg01's priest told him years ago, just close your eyes grab the chair and embrace the pain. 

I don't even ..... you win this round on creativity alone.

Lol.  Catholicism, amirite? 

[TheNorthCydeRises]

On 6/16/2017 at 10:34 AM, AHF said:

If you are talking about the current Piston's team, I agree.

To me the better comparison is whether you would like to be the Florida Marlins with two championships and a lot of miserable years or the Washington Nationals if they keep up what they have done the last 6 years - a bunch of 57% winning teams that don't go anywhere in the playoffs but are in the playoff race every year.

The Marlins were free agent mercenaries though.  They were "championship bought" teams.  LOL . . then they liquidated those teams with the quickness.

[AHF]

6 hours ago, TheNorthCydeRises said:

The Marlins were free agent mercenaries though.  They were "championship bought" teams.  LOL . . then they liquidated those teams with the quickness.

They represent the absolute worst case for a team with a ring.  Most champions do not do anything resembling them but I'd still rather have two rings and a handful of brutal years than be a team that lands the 5th seed most years and never wins a game beyond the first or second round of the playoffs.

[Diesel]

On 6/16/2017 at 9:48 AM, AHF said:

They have had a 0% chance as constituted and have never been on the cusp of a difference making trade.

Comparing the last decade of the Houston Rockets with the hey day of the Pistons who were in the 20 something win range on both sides of their peak, give me the Pistons and that ring all day.  I don't know how anyone would choose a team with a bunch of first and second round exits over a team that made 6 consecutive conference finals, made two finals and won one ring.

That ignores the fact that injury plays a big role in who wins what.   When we played Cleveland in the ECFs a few years back, we went into that series injured in a lot of ways.  DMC then Korver.   Found out later that Millsap had a torn Labrum.   The Grizz has suffered because of injury.  GS lost the finals last year due to injury and the league.   Barkley never won a ring because of injury.   To say that a team has 0% chance when they definitely have a team that can compete is shortsided in your view. 

 

[macdaddy]

On 6/17/2017 at 9:45 AM, sturt said:

You mean Sam Cassell?

Please remember, the premise isn't about Speedy in particular, but rather, you made the assertion that BK just didn't "value" the PG position. Speedy, imo, was generally thought at the time to be an up-and-comer not unlike an Avery Johnson who had to work his way up to being given the keys so-to-speak of a team. However, even conceding the point to your side of the ledger, the Cassell factoid seriously stands in opposition to the premise.

@sturt I'm on your side of the argument that BK did (ultimately) see the need for a good PG and tried multiple ways to address it.   Hindsight on the Speedy deal though isn't great and for me just shows that his hands were tied financially because choice number one was a 37 year old Sam Cassell.   Speedy was choice #2 so he obviously wasn't thinking that Speedy was going to emerge as an all star.   

I think BK thought Joe would be like Harden is in Houston.  Once he saw that was't the case he started going after PGs and kept going after them so i agree he saw the need.   Didn't address it that well but he saw it. 

[Admin]

He saw that he needed a driver for his whacky bus but instead of getting a professional bus driver he kept trying to bring in tut tut drivers or retirees. BK had a great partial vision of what the team should look like but he undervalued the PG & C positions and kept trying to fill them with the wrong guys. 

Passing on 2 bonafied star PGs in 2005 and then never attempting to trade for a true star Pg showed how much he really valued the position. 

[Dejay]

On 6/16/2017 at 0:47 PM, macdaddy said:

I'd say BK's strategy was partly validated.  The part that wasn't was he didn't particularly care if the long, athletic guys could shoot consistently play.   That was a pretty fatal flaw in the plan. 

Fixed it for ya...

[HawkItus]

I think the Joe Pg could have worked if we had gone after another 2 who could handle the ball.  We needed a Dumars/Steve Smith type two that could handle the rock when Joe inevitably received the double.

[sturt]

2 hours ago, macdaddy said:

@sturt I'm on your side of the argument that BK did (ultimately) see the need for a good PG and tried multiple ways to address it.   Hindsight on the Speedy deal though isn't great and for me just shows that his hands were tied financially because choice number one was a 37 year old Sam Cassell.   Speedy was choice #2 so he obviously wasn't thinking that Speedy was going to emerge as an all star.   

I think BK thought Joe would be like Harden is in Houston.  Once he saw that was't the case he started going after PGs and kept going after them so i agree he saw the need.   Didn't address it that well but he saw it. 

I'll concede that that's pretty daggone old.

But having said that, did it say something so damning of BK's attitude toward PGs that he first tried to see if he could squeeze two more of these kind of years out of Cassell?

And I'll agree... once Joe was signed, it set up some limitations on what BK could do in free agency.

But then again... what were his options?

Then, here's the other thing that I think gets overlooked, but that we all recognize--ie, a GM typically does confer with his head coach for his input. Woodson's quote in the Claxton signing story above leads one to his fingerprints are all over the decision as well.

So, nah, I still feel pretty safe in the BK bunker over here, the small arms fire coming from @AHF notwithstanding. :)

 

[Dejay]

The very idea that some of us are trying to give BK any props whatsoever for some kind of 'vision' he had when he was the GM here is simply, well, in the words of Galvatron (from the Transformers' cartoon movie, youngsters), bad comedy. I can have the best plans in the world to do something but if it isn't properly executed, it only remains a wish and a would-a, could-a, should-a. That goes double when you're in charge of a multi-million dollar pro sports franchise. For all of his 'vision', no other NBA team dared to hand him the keys to the kingdom; I wonder why...

There are tons of bandwidth that was spent by myself alone on this board railing his selection of Childress over Deng or Jefferson. His shooting form alone made me take pause to the point where I never thought that any team who was serious would select him other than being some project in the late 1st round at best. And please, don't get me wound up on the Marvin pick again. When d*ck Vitale of all people was nearly beet-red from berating them on ESPN for passing up on Paul seconds after the pick, that should tell you everything you need to know about BK's prowess as a GM; or lack thereof. And him trying to do damage control by bringing in a bunch of scrubs and career bench guys to start when he should've had Paul or at worst, Deron Williams in place for at least 5+ years is like a person trying to start up a Bible study group in hell. We all painfully saw how successful he was in pulling that off with him having to jettison nearly half of his bench to get Mike Bibby to bail him out of missing the playoffs for a 10th consecutive season, even with Horford (a Gearon pick), Osh, and JJ.

Anyway, as far as which scenario I'd choose, give me the rings, the championship parades, and the notoriety of winning world titles any day of the week over a squad who wins 57% of their games, only to lose their way each and every postseason. I don't have to look at the Nationals not coming through to feel their pain every October when there's a team a few miles north of where I'm sitting at who reminds me of that very same feeling each and every time I see them on my flatscreen. What NL team didn't get the chance to run around splashing champagne on each other at Turner Field in October, especially after '96? The Marlins creating a mercenary roster to win a title, only to quickly liquidate it seconds after the parade was over is a very unusual deal because in most cases, championship teams try their best to keep things going with the same guys in order to defend their belts. Most teams in their position (see Yankees, Warriors, Patriots (I know, still too soon), Penguins) add to their roster and go for lengthy runs instead of what the Marlins did. I'll gladly take my chances on that rather than hoping that a good regular season team somehow run into a coach or manager who's even worse in the playoffs than our guy is (see Hargrove, Mike). 

I guess I'm too jaded from watching this team fail so badly when they last called themselves doing a rebuild. Other teams can pull it off because they have guys in the front office who can draft. Until the Hawks can prove that they have such a guy under their employ for the first time in decades, well...

 

Edited June 19, 2017 by Dejay

[sturt]

43 minutes ago, Dejay said:

The very idea that some of us are trying to give BK any props whatsoever for some kind of 'vision' he had when he was the GM here is simply, well, in the words of Galvatron (from the Transformers' cartoon movie, youngsters), bad comedy.

"Whatsoever?"

I think this is actually a pretty fair assessment, but then again, of course I would....