Changing a Culture...

[Admin]

I somewhat disagree with this

Paul Millsap can ball, and is a starter caliber player in this league. He showed that he had talent in Utah, and elevated his game when Horford went out to make his 1st All-Star team.

Before Teague collapsed in January, people were talking about him sneaking in the back door and possibly making the All-Star team.

Korver is the best spot up shooter in the league.

Lou Williams was a 6th man of the Year candidate a mere 2 years ago, and had big time scoring games for us before he went out with the ACL last season.

Those 4 alone will keep a team "competitive" on most nights.

Brand is a decent veteran who can still contribute defensively, and still has an occasional jumper left in him.

Mike Scott showed even last year that he can score the basketball.

DeMarre Carroll was a key bench guy for the Jazz last year

Even Shelvin last year was decent in the backup PG role.

This is NOT a talentless team when you match them up against the non-playoff level teams. And at home, they can beat lower level playoff teams. The problem, is that the GM basically brought in offense first type of guys who can't hold their own on defense most nights. So if they don't outscore you in the 100s, they're usually not winning the game. And this is why when Millsap misses a few games, or their defensive guy in DeMarre misses a few games, the entire team suffers.

To call this a "terrific culture", when we need to be completely healthy to win games, is just overselling what the GM has done so far. If the GM wasn't going to tank, and he had 30+ million to spend in free agency, there's no way we should've regressed this year as a team ( even with the injuries ).

The facts are that even before Horford went down, we were beating lower level teams, and winning some home games vs good teams . . . but we couldn't beat even halfway decent teams on the road to save our lives. Until that changes in the coming seasons, people really can't celebrate the "culture" as being better than what we had in the past.

People try to play both sides of the fence with the Hawks. On one hand, they say that the team is sorry, and is overachieving. On the other hand, they say that if we hadn't got everybody hurt in January and February, that we'd be challenging for the #3 seed.

Not seeing the disagreement here as I never said we were a talentless team. But there are many teams who are worse than us who also have better and sometimes much better talent.

To trash the culture here simply because you overvalue the talent here is just underselling what the coach and GM have done in 1.5 years of turning this franchise's culture around.

Not sure who you're attributing the last sentence to as I've never said we are sorry, but we do overachieve based on the level of talent that this team has. With that being said, when they are all healthy and have Horford I absolutely like their chances of competing against Indiana and Miami to a lesser degree. THAT is because of the culture and the Spurs system put in place here and not because of some glut of talent.

[Wretch]

The New Draft Wheel: The wheel isnt going away, despite some initial fears it would allow consensus no. 1 picks to game their NBA destination by entering the draft only when a glamour team was up next. Mike Zarren, the Celtics assistant general manager and the architect of the wheel, has already presented Silver with revised alternatives that would address this issue and several others, per Silver and other sources. The wheel may not end up looking much like a wheel at all; Zarren has reorganized it so that groups of randomly selected teams might hop through buckets of six picks say, picks 1-6 in one season, and 25-30 the next season over a five-year span, instead of the original 30-year system in which teams cycle through each specific pick one by one. Within each bucket, a mini lottery would determine which team gets which pick. The goal is to give bad teams hope of snagging a higher pick more quickly. Regardless of its final physical form, the wheel would eliminate the link between record and draft position. Entire article: http://grantland.com/features/wheel-of-misfortune/

I'm happy that they're doing SOMETHING and recognize the need for it, because the current system is terrible for the sport. I honestly think the solution to the problem is competitive draft order. Just base the lottery on how well bad teams do against each other and divide the lottery up so that a team can only move up so high.I think the wheel/bucket system is a great idea...with one flaw. It'll work until........Indiana gets the #2 pick in this year's draft and Milwaukee ends up with the 24th pick - and they get the 16th pick next year...while Houston gets the 4th. Winning teams have no business anywhere near the top of the draft. They don't need those picks.