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Friday, June 26, 2009

The Hawks do NOT have a Point Guard

I don't know how to feel about it. I grew up idolizing the great point guards: Stockton, Thomas, Tim Hardaway when he was on Golden State. And now the Hawks don't have a single player you could point to and say, "I absolutely want him running my offense." I mean it was borderline last year with shoot-first Bibby who ran everything through Webber or Brad Miller in Sacto and the undeveloped Law. But now there is no doubt. Let's take a look at the candidates:

Jamal Crawford - I think the consensus is that if we rely on him to play the point, we are screwed. Crawford is a proverbial black hole with the ball. You throw it to him, and you're not going to see it back. He's basically a rich man's Flip.
Jeff Teague - Sure, he played PG in college and will continue to do so in the NBA, but it's not because of his passing skills. He's a shooting guard who is too short. This year at Wake he averaged only 3.5 assists/game, while also averaging 3.4 turnovers/game. This combines for an unimpressive 1.06 a/t ratio.

That's it. That's our PG options for now. Take this all with a grain of salt though, because Woody doesn't exactly like traditional PGs anyway. His offense more closely resembles the Mavericks from a couple of years ago. The PG is just there to dribble it up the court and pass it to Joe (most of the time) or one of the other players so they can isolate against their defender. So the Hawks actually are a better team when they are playing with basically two shooting guards. Bibby was ideal because he had enough of a passing game that he could get the ball where it needed to go without any problems, but he also had a good enough shot that teams could not play off of him thereby creating more space for the isolated player. I think that's one of the main reasons why Woody never played Law. His game was more of the drive-and-kick variety where he could finish in the lane and hit the mid-range jumper.

With Woody's offensive philosophy in mind (and trust me, I hate the idea of catering our roster to Woody), the options of Crawford and Teague at the "PG" position makes a little more sense. Woody is looking more for a PG like the ones Phil Jackson is always looking for. Just get the ball up the court, give it to your best player, and be able to hit an open 3. Too bad we don't have Phil as our coach...

1 comment:

Unknown said...

or Kobe or Shaq or Michael Jordan or even Pippen to actually make Phil's offense work. All I can say is - we're screwed for 2009-2010. I said it last year and I'll say it again - there's no reason to have any confidence that we're going to reach our potential until Mike Woodson is no longer our coach.

At that point, I'll start looking at our personnel to see who needs to go and who needs to stay, but until then - I'm not blaming one player for anything other than effort.