MVN - Most Valuable Network

Hawks finally on right track

The recent Mike Bibby trade was a big eye-opener for me. Just Friday night, my buddy Vern and I were talking about other young teams in the NBA that our Portland Trailblazers may run into as they (hopefully) pursue titles over the next decade, and the Hawks were a team I called out as a possible contender.

Our conversation covered all the strong young players they’ve got, including Joe Johnson, Josh Smith, Al Horford, and Marvin Williams, with solid rotation players like Zaza Pachulia and Josh Childress. The missing piece? The point guard to run the show.

Granted, their need was not as dire as the needs that some other young teams might have. They didn’t need to find Steve Nash — Joe Johnson (like Brandon Roy in Portland) can and should spend time with the ball running the offense, so the need wasn’t to find a traditional floor-general type point guard. The need was to find a point guard that could fit in with Johnson by running the offense half the time, provide some shooting at that position, and defend the other team’s point guards.

Any upgrade from Anthony Johnson and Tyronn Lue was going to be a good one — at best, those two players are solid backups. Getting Mike Bibby, even at the expense of trading both point guards, is pretty much the best case scenario (Andre Miller would have been a good fit too, but wasn’t going to be available for the package of players the Hawks sent out).

The other interesting aspect of this trade is the mulligan the Hawks have gotten for passing on Brandon Roy, Rudy Gay, and Randy Foye with the 5th pick in the 2006 draft for Shelden Williams. To take that kind of major mistake, be able to package it with three other players not part of your team’s future core, and fix a glaring weakness like the Hawks have — well, I didn’t think the Atlanta front office had it in them (lucky for them, Marvin is playing well in his third year after they took him over Chris Paul and Deron Williams, or they’d have two major mistakes to recover from).

You could do a lot worse than a starting five of Horford (21 years old), Williams (21), Smith (22), Johnson (26) and Bibby (29), and a bench rotation that includes Zaza (23), Childress (24) and Acie Law (23). With this deal, the Hawks just went from trying to find a major missing piece (starting point guard), to simply having to focus on rounding out their bench, before they could become a major force in the Eastern Conference.

And if they can keep that roster together, they have a chance to last as an Eastern contender for a long time. I’m not predicting a deep playoff run this season, but their to-do list for the next off-season just got a lot shorter.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 2:24 pm and is filed under NBA. 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.