Sekou (relatively) scathing in criticism of Speedy

[exodus]

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Maybe I'm ignorant. I don't think there was another FA pg out there that could give us what Speedy has over that 5 game road win streak. No I dont't think there was another FA big who would step in and start at C for the price Lo is doing it. (Over paying for Ne Ne is not the answer).Lo is not that bad.

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First of all BK wouldn't have needed a pg if he had addressed the issue in any of the previous three offseasons. He didn't draft a pg in either round for 3 straight drafts. He passed on Duhon twice in order to draft Ivey and Donta.

in free agency he has passed on Blake (signed for 2 years @ 1 mill/yr), Duhon again, Brevin Knight, the list goes on.

Sure there weren't many fa pgs available last year. That is why you get a quality pg when they are available, which BK has repeatedy failed to do.

The only reason that Lo starts is because Zaza sucks. Lo is shooting 40% on the season and 30% from the line. He and Speedy are a big reason why the Hawks are last in the league in offense.

Meanwhile Nene is averaging 19 ppg this month, shooting 60%.

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Maybe your ignorant for bashing the youngest team in the NBA who is on schedule to improve their win total by 10 wins. I call that good progess.

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I am bashing BK. Show me where i bashed the team as a whole.

And since they started 2-16 last year it isn't that hard to make progress.

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So we have played Roy and Foy at the expese of whom ?

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So far this season we have given extended minutes to the likes of Bozeman, Ivey and Salim. Yet somehow you don't think we could find time for Roy or Foye? That's funny.

If we had drafted Roy or Foye then Speedy wouldn't be here. They would have targeted a free agent big.

[jerrywest]

Its also great that Smoove is surrounded by a lot of givers. If he was with a bad group of people, he would have taken a wrong direction long ago. Many players with great potential have ruined their careers because they got wrong teammates for their personalities.

[jerrywest]

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So far this season we have given extended minutes to the likes of Bozeman, Ivey and Salim. Yet somehow you don't think we could find time for Roy or Foye? If we had drafted Roy or Foye then Speedy wouldn't be here. They would have targeted a free agent big.

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Very good points.

[hawkman]

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Excuse my broken English in last post.

I break the ruls and check out this site at work whentheres is some down time.

My last post had so many typos it can hardly beread to make sense.

I need to stop posting at work. The rush/ hurry just causes too many mistakes. My brother is a Dr. in Englisg. He would kill me after seeing this.

I can't help that I'm such an optimist and will not join in on the whining.

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It's not whining if you're stating the facts coachx. BK has done some good, but he has also done a lot of bad since this rebuilding project has begun. I'll give him credit for picking JSmith at 17, but every other decison he's made can be questioned. I know the draft isn't an exact science but when you have a glaring hole at PG and you have three "can't miss" prospects available, that should be a no brainer. This past offseason we passed on potential stars to pick a solid backup in Shelden WITH THE #5 PICK. We sign Speedy to a multi year deal despite his injury history. With the JJ deal, we don't get enough protection on our first rounder because our arrogant GM assumes that we will be a playoff contender. Those are all facts are they not? All of those decisions have cost this franchise. We are well into this rebuilding and we are obviously still a very incomplete team. We still need a center and point guard just like we did three years ago. Now if you can see all of this and still be optimistic, that's all well and good. But you can't fault the rest of us for calling it what it is. It's not whining or complaining, it's reality.

[bumpyphish1]

FYI, Curtis Bunn, not Sekou, wrote that article.

[exodus]

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FYI, Curtis Bunn, not Sekou, wrote that article.

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LOL that explains a lot.

[mrhonline]

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FYI, Curtis Bunn, not Sekou, wrote that article.

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LOL that explains a lot.

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Thanks for pointing that out. I just assumed, since it was a reasonable article that it could only have come from Sekou.

Who is "Curtis Bunn?"

[coachx]

Good point Exodus. I looked at the minutes per game. I had no idea Salime Stoudmire averaged 16 minutes per game. Combine that with Ivey and Bozemans minutes and you will give Roy or Foye 20 minutes a game. About the same PT Shelden is getting.

I get your point. I just don't think there was another big we could have gotten whos any good as a FA. Knight would not give Ne Ne 11 million /year to top the Nuggetts. Even if he did they probably would have matched it. I think he was restricted FA.

So with Roy or Foy we would be missing Shelden. Therefor, Batman would get the 20 minutes a game or Lo would play more miutes. ZA ZA can't get more miutes since he fouls out in the 30 minutes he gets currently. Only then would we miss what Sheldon gives us. Sometimes you don't appreciate what you have until its gone.

This has been gone over & over for months now. I agree Foye and Roy are better talents then Shelden if your hole is back court help / wing players.

Our hole was front court help on D /rebounding and a PG. I am just not comfortable allowing a rookie SG to run a team playing PG.

However,they would have given better back up minutes then Salime, Bozeman, or Ivey. Due to injuries Bozeman and Ivey had to play. If the world was perfect Ivey and Bozeman would not be on the active roster. However, with injuries we had to scrap up something.

Exodus you make good points. Foye and Roy are both good players. However, I don't see them as long term solutions at PG. Foye could prove me wrong. He has it easy in Minnesota with KG running the offense from the foward poistion. Roy seems so much like JJ. He could play PG on offense but be hurt on defense. In my opinion, ,like JJ, Roy can play PG but is a natural SG and better at SG.

We could have drafted Roy and Foye as back ups. Right now every one is complaining about Shelden being a back up. Before the draft no one knew Smoove would be so comfortable at PF. We did know that a USA Team player was our 2-guard.

Can you atleast see where I'm coming from.

Exodus, If Shelden is not drastically better at this time next year you will be 100% right. I'm just not ready to give up on him so early, especially with the injury.

Good debate. To me both sides of the fence make rational points. I am not too blind to see that. I naturally like to look at both sides of a situation. That is the only way to understand the big picture.

[exodus]

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Knight would not give Ne Ne 11 million /year to top the Nuggetts. Even if he did they probably would have matched it. I think he was restricted FA.

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And he should have been our restricted fa. All we had to do was trade Al for Nene/Lonard. Then Denver wouldn't have been able to bid on them during the summer since they were over the cap.

You are only focusing on the summer moves and ignoring what preceeded it.

If we had Nene as a rfa the only two teams who could have bid on him were Chicago and NOK. Ben Wallace was the Bulls top choice making Chandler expendable. And it is reasonable to assume that NOK would prefer Chandler over Nene since Nene was coming off major surgery.

And NOK would know that we weren't going to lose nene for nothing so they probably wouldn't have bid on him anyway.

That leaves the Hawks basically alone in the bidding. All we had to do was offer him a deal big enough to keep him from taking a 1 year tender. We probably still would have to pay him at least $9 million/yr but that is better than spending $3 million on another backup.

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We could have drafted Roy and Foye as back ups. Right now every one is complaining about Shelden being a back up.

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Foye is starting at the point over Mike James so it isn't a reach to think he would be starting over a hobbled Lue. And Roy is the best player from this draft, at least so far. And he is doing pretty well in his time at the point, having a PER 3.7 greater than his opponents.

http://www.82games.com/0607/06POR4C.HTM

Wilcox, Gooden and Ely were all available this summer in free agency.

[jerrywest]

Not picking up Nene for Al, is the biggest blunder of BK's career. He has to pull a Smoove in the next draft to overcome it. The chain effect triggered by Nene trade would have made this franchise a powerhouse. We would have a 2nd/3rd or 4th pick instead of 5th and Marvin would have been more experienced coming into this season. We may not have made the Speedy/Lo mistakes. Daaaaayum.

[TexasPete]

We could have picked up Chris Wilcox for around Speedy money and then taken Roy. The bidding for Wilcox this summer didn't develop because of cap situations.

BK has never made a truly creative move. Even in the JJ deal he bent over. I'm sick of hearing that Shelden was the best big available. If the best big available big is a stiff like Shelden then you take a guard like Roy/Foye. You find your big elsewhere. And you certainly don't promise a kid like Shelden which eliminated his bargaining power.

Just stupid.

[coachx]

Exodus I never touched the Al should be traded for Ne Ne. I will not fault any GM for not trading for a injured guy in the last year of his contract. He only played is the 1st game of the year in his contract year. Just to many what ifs ? Not to mention he was unproven to warrant that kind of money.

You know I was refering to him as the Nuggets restricted FA, not ours.

We can play the what if game with any team in this league. Every GM has made moves where in hind site there may have been a better move. But how can you hold any one liable for trading for an injured, unproven player in their contract year ? You hold people to a standard of being PERFECT. NO GM is perfect. Every move Billy has made has not been perfect. However his moves did plug holes and fill weaknesses. The moves he has made is making the club better at the rate most reasonable people expected.

Don't forget how easy it is to play the Monday morning Quarterback role fans love to play. Hindsight is a biyatch !

[exodus]

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You can play the what if game with any team in this league. Every GM has made moves where in hind site there may have been a better move. But how can you hold any one liable for trading for an injured, unproven player in their contract year ? You hold people to standard of being PERFECT.

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It is not about hindsight. it is about obvious foresight.

If you have 3 top 10 picks you should be able to get the best player available with one of them at least. BK has struck out.

And when you have a UFA tweener forward that you can trade for a defensive center as opposed to taking the chance of letting the UFA walk for nothing in the summer, that isn't exactly a tough deal to make.

BK seemed to think he could get more for Al by waiting till summer to trade him and wound up with a mid-1st rounder. Many of us argued extensively at the trade deadline that the Hawks were unlikely to get more than Nene by waiting for summer and we were right.

We are just lucky NOK had their sights on Peja rather than Al, or we would have wound up with nothing, just like Detroit did with Ben Wallace.

There are 30 teams trying to build a team to win a title. You aren't going to succeed by being consistently wrong as BK has been.

[bonethugz]

if knight take roy or foye then somebody will say he pick some swingman again. or if we pay nene for 11 million somebody say we overpaid again. is always easy to point finger isn't it?

[Lascar78]

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Not picking up Nene for Al, is the biggest blunder of BK's career. He has to pull a Smoove in the next draft to overcome it. The chain effect triggered by Nene trade would have made this franchise a powerhouse. We would have a 2nd/3rd or 4th pick instead of 5th and Marvin would have been more experienced coming into this season. We may not have made the Speedy/Lo mistakes. Daaaaayum.

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It's true that trading for Nene would have probably gotten us a better pick, but it also would have meant no pick this year. More importantly (to me - at least at the time), I think there was a big benefit to keeping Al around and doing our best to win. Basically it's one of the reasons not to tank this year - you have to learn how to win, and that doesn't happen from one year to the next, especially when you're young. I think that keeping momentum last year and growing as a team went a long way towards the good start this year, and believing that we can win. Just like a solid 2nd half this year and finishing 9th or 10th in the East will go a long way towards getting us ready for actually making the playoffs next year.

Given how the draft and draft lottery shook out, I definitely would prefer to have Foye/Nene this year as opposed to Shelden / Indy pick, but we didn't know how things would shake out. If Nene had walked I'd have been super pissed, even though that was probably unlikely. If not, we'd have had to overpay Nene a lot more than we overpaid Speedy.

In any event, I would have liked to get Nene then and now, but this is hardly BK's biggest mistake in my opinion, and there is something to be said for having given last year's team a chance to play a whole year together and try to start learning how to win.

[exodus]

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if knight take roy or foye then somebody will say he pick some swingman again. or if we pay nene for 11 million somebody say we overpaid again. is always easy to point finger isn't it?

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Denver didn't even pay $11 million for Nene. They paid $10 million/yr and a lot of that is incentives. Without incentives it is less than $9 million/yr. And Denver's negotiating position wasn't as strong as ours would have been if nene was our rfa.

And many of us argued before the draft that Roy and Foye could easily play pg next to JJ. And in fact Foye is starting at the point with Minny and Roy is splitting his time between pg and sg even though they have Jack and Sergio.

if you are going to use a strawman argument at least make it a good one.

[exodus]

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If Nene had walked I'd have been super pissed,

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How could he have walked?

[Lascar78]

If someone made a huge offer that we couldn't / wouldn't match. You never know, especially with the ownership situation. I do think that we would have found a way to keep him, but you never know.

[jerrywest]

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If someone made a huge offer that we couldn't / wouldn't match. You never know, especially with the ownership situation. I do think that we would have found a way to keep him, but you never know.

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You forgot salary cap.

[exodus]

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If someone made a huge offer that we couldn't / wouldn't match. You never know, especially with the ownership situation. I do think that we would have found a way to keep him, but you never know.

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Only two teams could have done that. Chicago's first choice was Wallace so that eliminates them. And NOK obviously liked Chandler.

Did NOK like a healthy Chandler more than an injured Nene who hadn't played an entire season. I would say probably so but obviously i can't be sure.

No other team was even in the picture. And even if they were MrH said (i am taking him at his word although i don't know where he got it) that BK was willing to pay Nene more guaranteed money than Denver did. And the court ruling didn't apply to resigning our own free agents.

Plus the Hawks signed speedy for $6 million/yr and Lo for $3 million/yr so i don't think it is a stretch to say they could pay Nene $9 million/yr.