MVN - Most Valuable Network

Hawks Quickly Find Knight’s Replacement

Former General Manager Billy Knight is due to step down at the end of this weekend and the Atlanta Hawks have already found his replacement to come into a draftless summer of 2008. He will have no draft picks to worry about this summer, but will instead have to focus on keeping the important core of young players intact on a new playoff threat in the Eastern Conference.

Sund has been in the NBA for longer than I have even been alive. He was with the Sonics since the Millenium and before that was with Dallas for another 20 years. His experience will be his strength as he has served as much more than a general manager for many different teams, including the Detroit Pisons and Milwaukee Bucks.

Sund comes in with a great deal of respect from the league and will hopefully be able to bring some credibility to an organization that has lacked plenty of it in the past decade. Many felt the move to bring in Mike Bibby this season would surely keep Knight with the team, especially since they made the playoffs, but his resignation earlier this month was long overdue in the eyes of many Hawks fans.

Hopefully bringing in Sund will return some of the favor of the fans and maybe even get some of the playoff atmosphere into the regular season. I don’t know if anyone noticed, but the Hawks played out of their minds in front of sold out crowds and I think that kind of atmosphere night in and night out would make Atlanta an extremely difficult team to beat in Phillips Arena.

Whether or not Sund can get more fans in the seats next season will very much hinge on some key decisions revolving around some very expensive contracts. He will have to work quickly with the difficult Atlanta management to prove himself early and keep this young nucleus intact. Whatever happens, fans are already excited to see what happens now that the infamous Billy Knight will know longer be in charge.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 4:45 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.