Grading the Hawks Ownership
(2011-2012)
In the previous entry I
gave out grades for the Hawks 2011-2012 season. In this entry I’ll be grading ownership.
The grade is for the 2011-2012 season, but I will also look at earlier actions
which ended up having an effect on this season, as well as the current state of
the franchise.
Atlanta
Spirit Group (Ownership)
Grade:
F-
Comments:
I’m sorry, but this one is almost certainly going to be an “F-” as long as the
Hawks are owned by ASG. They’ve simply done too much harm at this point. Even
if the Hawks somehow won an NBA title, I would expect that it would come out of
good fortune and not out of anything positive done by ownership.
If you think I’m being
too harsh, you either don’t know anything about ASG’s history; think owning a
sports franchise is no different from any other business venture and don’t
understand why ASG’s failures affect anyone other than the owners; or you know
one of the members of ASG personally. Just in case anyone reading this falls
into one of these categories, let me set you straight (unless you fall into the
“sports is just another business” category, in which case you’re going to be
lost no matter what I say).
I’m not going to go
into the history in detail because that topic deserves (and really requires) an
extensive blog entry of its own. Just trust me: the ASG era has been pathetic.
It’s a story of folly, amateurism, idiocy, failure, and total ineptitude. You
can blame coaches, players, and fans for mediocrity, but ASG’s ownership has
been utter failure, and it is entirely ASG’s fault.
They spent years in
court fighting each other. They at first ignored the Thrashers and then ran
them into the ground before finally selling the team to Winnipeg. The theory
was that ASG was only interested in the Hawks and only became owners of the
Thrashers because the NHL team was tied into Philips Arena and the NBA team.
ASG may have been interested in the Hawks, but this didn’t exactly help
matters. They could hardly have fouled things up any worse if they had
completely ignored the basketball team as they had at first ignored the Thrashers.
They made ridiculously
idiotic financial decisions and have tried to run the team on the cheap as a
result. Because of the nature of the “group”; the horrible management of the
Thrashers; the fees racked up in years of legal wrangling and buying off other
owners; and, of course, BOTH of the Joe Johnson deals, the owners have fucked
themselves. Instead of selling the franchise, ASG has simply tried to make a
meager profit.
Their formula has more
or less been as follows: do the minimum it takes to maintain a team that is
reasonable to look at and is competitive enough to tolerate; exploit the
popularity of the NBA and its many stars; sell the suites to corporate groups;
keep ticket prices for good seats sky high; sell the cheap seats for dirt and
make money off the absurdly high concessions prices; spend no money on a head
coach or bench; and find a GM willing to work under these conditions.
If you don’t want to
take my word for it, just check out the AJC archives for a couple of hours. If
you see ASG as just another failed business venture you probably don’t
understand the relationship between fans and their teams and likely never will.
But just know that you are totally out of touch and should spend less time
watching cable news shows.
If you happen to know
someone in ASG personally or know someone who knows someone in ASG personally
and think I’m being too hard on them, let me put it this way: It doesn’t really
matter if they are “nice guys” or “well meaning.” You still have to admit that
their ownership of the team has been a disaster because of their own shameful
behavior and their own idiotic actions. They may be nice people in their
personal lives. As owners of the Atlanta sports teams—which is the only part of
their lives that matter to 99.9999999% of the interested parties—they have been
awful, awful, awful people.
This grade is for the
2011-2012 season, but it applies to ASG’s entire history, and will almost
certainly apply throughout their tenure, until the day it finally comes to an
end. It appears unlikely that Hawks fans will have a shred of hope until that
day.
This season there were
some things that were different about the owners. For one, there are less of
them these days, as several have fallen off. Also, ASG no longer owned the
Atlanta Thrashers (now the Winnipeg Jets). But don’t think that any more time
or resources (namely, money) would be going towards the basketball team.
Going into the
offseason last year the Hawks had a large amount of money dedicated to the core
players of the team (including $7.5 million wasted on Marvin Williams and $18
million paid to the 3rd best player on the team in Joe Johnson). It
was clear during the frantic (for the rest of the league) days following the
end of the lockout that if the Hawks were going to bring in enough help to have
any chance of contending this season ownership was gonna have to ante up. The
Hawks were going to have to do something that ASG was morally opposed to doing:
cross the luxury tax threshold.
Naturally, the choice
was to just not contend. Ownership never showed even a hint of considering
trying to bring back Jamal Crawford. As it turned out, he would be replaced
by…no one. This despite the fact that ownership didn’t have to pay a 1st
round draft pick (it had been traded to Washington in the Kirk Hinrich deal
during the previous season) or even a 2nd round pick (to the
surprise of no one, Keith Benson—the 48th pick in the draft—failed
to make the team).
The Hawks never even
seemed to try and sign a significant player to replace Crawford. Instead, they
signed 5 veteran players to the league minimum (including a non-guaranteed deal
with Jerry Stackhouse) and 2 undrafted rookies (including a non-guaranteed deal
with Donald Sloan who would be waived in January). They also waived former 2010
2nd round pick Pape Sy. Once again ownership had shown they were
more than satisfied with the status quo of mediocrity.
But then Al Horford
went down for the season. When Jason Collins was also put out of commission,
the Hawks signed veteran Erick Dampier to a couple of 10-day contracts before
biting the bullet and signing him for the remainder of the year in February. It
was another league minimum deal but it did put the Hawks just over the luxury
tax threshold.
You could make a case
that ASG had no choice but to cross into the luxury tax, but it still seemed
like a positive sign. I mean, at least in theory they could have found a way to
ignore the situation. As encouraging as this was, it was equally discouraging
that the team found it necessary to sell their 2012 2nd round draft
pick to the Golden State Warriors for “Straight Cash, Homie” a month later. In addition to the money ownership got for the
pick, they would now not have to pay any player they took with that draft pick
next year, thus the hit they took due to going over the luxury tax threshold
was negated.
Such is the extreme
level of penny pinching going on in this franchise. That shows the extent to
which the bottom line is the bottom line. This isn’t to say that the Hawks are
the Pittsburgh Pirates or Kansas City Royals of the NBA in terms of team
salaries. The Atlanta Hawks actually had the 9th biggest payroll in
the NBA last season.
The problem is that
while ASG invested a lot in the core players, the team still isn’t good enough
to compete for a title. The team needs more pieces to be a true contender. They
haven’t built a good enough team to contend, but ownership won’t spend any more
money to try and get better. My point is that regardless of how big the payroll
is, ASG has still failed to build a championship caliber team, and it is
entirely their fault that a situation has arisen where they cannot improve the
team in any truly meaningful sense without going into the tax.
I realize that these
grade are supposed to focus on just the 2011-2012 season, but in order to look
at how/why ASG continues to fail we will have to go back a few years. The Hawks
payroll was an estimated $73 million last year. That’s about $26 million bigger
than Toronto, but still at least $13 million smaller than the 3 highest
spending teams last year (Boston, Orlando, and LAL). The problem is that about
a fourth of the entire budget goes to Joe Johnson, who I believe ASG signed to
that ridiculous deal not out of an incorrect belief that it would help the team
compete for a title, but rather out of fear that without Johnson the team would
be at risk of falling below the mediocrity line.
In my belief—and admittedly
it is just a belief and not something I can prove—ASG understood on some level
that Joe’s monstrosity of a contract not only wouldn’t lead to the team
competing for titles, but would almost certainly end up rendering the team
nearly incapable of building a contender. However, I believe they felt that
allowing Joe to leave could result in the team becoming a below average or worse
team again, and they couldn’t risk the chance of the Hawks becoming totally
irrelevant.
It is my belief that
they felt like signing Joe would ensure that the team would remain competitive
enough to generate an acceptable amount of sales and interest. In other words,
my theory is that ASG deliberately/knowingly sacrificed the team’s chances of
ever becoming a true contender in order to ensure that the team at least
remained mediocre. I get the feeling that Joe himself understood the
consequences of such a deal and was kind of hoping the team would let him go
somewhere else, but in the end there was no way he could turn down a deal that
was so much better than he could get anywhere else.
Again, I know this
entry is supposed to be about grading last season, but now that we’ve discussed
the past a bit I must discuss the current state of things. The Hawks are up
against it again this offseason, with no cap room, at least 7 roster spots to
fill, and a presumed extreme reluctance to pay the tax again next year. The
Hawks almost never seem to be moving forward these days, and they may in fact
take a step backwards next year.
There have been many
horrible aspects of ASG’s tenure, but one of the constant themes has been indecisiveness.
This problem continues to this very moment. Last year the Hawks decided not to
try and sign Josh Smith to an extension. Then they opted not to trade him at
the deadline. Smith now goes into the final year of his deal and no one—not
even Josh—seems to know if the Hawks want to sign him to an extension or not.
Will they end up trading him if they decide they can’t sign him and don’t want
to end up emptied handed? Or will they misplay the situation, fail to sign or
trade him, lose in the 1st or 2nd round of the playoffs,
and then see Josh sign elsewhere in the offseason?
Obviously the Hawks
have their work cut out for them if they want to stay competitive next year, and
the way in which the Josh Smith situation is handled will likely end up having
a major impact on the future of the team. Clearly, General Manager Rick Sund
has a lot on his plate. But that isn’t the worst part.
No, the most
disturbing, yet somehow almost comically typical part of all of this is that
nobody has any idea whether or not Sund will be the GM next season either. Both
parties—Sund as well as the brainiacs in ASG—are mulling it over. Even
committed Hawks fans like myself, who have come to accept a certain amount of
ineptitude and buffoonery as simply the reality of life under ASG, have been a
bit stunned by the situation. It’s not just the uncertainty of the situation
that has been troubling. It’s been the lack of concern and urgency regarding
the situation expressed by Sund and ownership that has been truly stunning.
Under different circumstances—say,
if it was happening to somebody else’s team—it would be downright hilarious.
The team may extend Sund’s contract another year…or they may not. Sund may take
a job somewhere else regardless of whether or not ASG asks him back…or he may stay
on with the team in another position in the front office…or he may just retire.
Nobody—including, most importantly, ownership and the general manger—seems to
know or give a particular fuck what’s going to happen.
This highly undesirable
situation with the GM becomes even more troublesome when you consider what has
gone on with head coach Larry Drew in the past few weeks. During the season,
neither ownership nor Sund gave any indication whether or not Drew would be
brought back next year. Indeed, the issue remained uncertain during the first
couple weeks after the Hawks were eliminated. Finally, it was announced that
Drew had been signed to a 1-year extension.
This was all highly
questionable strategy for a number of reasons. You could start by wondering
if—given that the Hawks haven’t really seemed to improve during Drew’s 2
seasons since taking over for his mentor Mike Woodson—it might be time to go in
a different direction. Maybe it’s time to actually offer up enough money to
bring in a head coach capable of having a significant impact on the team’s
success.
But even if the team
decided they still felt good with Drew as head coach, merely signing him to a
1-year extension was perhaps not the best course of action. The whole thing was
quite reminiscent of the situation a few years ago when Mike Woodson was given
a 1-year extension. Like Woodson, Drew has had a tough enough time getting the
team to listen and buy into what he is selling. That job is made significantly
harder when ownership decides to extend the coach by 1-year rather than signing
him to a multiyear deal.
In this case, the
1-year extension basically says “yeah, we’re really not all that confident in
you as a head coach, but to be honest, we’re not sure we could do any better
without having to spend money, so we’re gonna keep you on for another year.” If
the front office shows no confidence, the players will receive that message.
They will also be much more likely to take this approach: “man, this guy
probably won’t be around after this year anyway, so fuck him.”
Out of the 6 major
American team sports leagues (NHL, NFL, NBA, MLB, and college football and
basketball), NBA coaches have by far and away the least power/leverage/control
and easily the most difficult time getting their players to respect and follow
them. The 1-year extension of a coach who is often not tough enough on his
players to begin with, and who already struggles to get the players to buy into
his system, is not going to have an easier time of it as a possible (if not
probable) lame duck.
But there is still
another factor of this situation which is worrisome. The Drew extension was
executed by Sund, who may not even be the GM going forward. Not only would the
Hawks have to find someone to replace Sund, they would have to limit their
possible selections to guys who don’t mind entering the job with a head coach
already in place, whom they had no part in hiring. That’s gonna shrink the pool
of candidates, which was small to begin with considering all the obvious
negatives of the job (including a smaller pay check than many NBA GM’s and not
a lot of support from ownership in terms of having the resources and the license
to build a decent team).
The franchise is a bit
of a mess at this point. The roster is hopelessly paralyzed and held hostage by
the absurd contracts of Joe Johnson and Marvin Williams; the GM isn’t any more
likely to be the GM next year than he is to retire (and no one seems that
worried about it); and the coach will enter the season on a 1-year deal, with
his contract set to run out at the end of the season.
During ASG’s ownership
of the Atlanta Hawks there have been countless blunders and low points. You can
see that the sort of amateurish types of issues are still going on in the
present time. It would be only a minor exaggeration to say that this is really
business as usual for the franchise under the clowns of ASG.
Unfortunately, us
Hawks fans have no good reason to hope for things to get better, both on and
off the court. Once again, the Atlanta Spirit Group members have brought all of
this on themselves. Sadly, us fans are punished as well.
