Initial feedback: A completely subjective and immediate response to the events of tonight's game, featuring a comment and rating, the latter on a scale of 1 to 10, on every player who saw the floor and the head coach, along with ephemera and miscellany as the author deems necessary.
Your ratings and commentary, dear reader, are welcomed in the comments to this post.
Boxscore
Players
Jeff Teague: Either needs a new coach to give him more confidence with the ball in his hands or needs to take it upon himself to be a better defender, non-box score stats division. 5/10
Joe Johnson: Larry Drew's legacy will be long, two-point jump shots and letting Joe Johnson play through injuries. Played a good third quarter. Gave us a Willie Green impression the other three. 5/10
Marvin Williams: Struggled to get the ball in the basket but put in a tremendous effort on the glass. Rebounding is a skill. Not many Hawks have that skill. Marvin Williams does. Only got back in the game in the fourth quarter because Willie Green got hurt. It's like Green is Williams and Williams is Josh Childress, circa 2007-08. 5/10
Josh Smith: A terrible, terrible shooting night (2-11 outside of 16 feet). A mediocre defensive night for the familiar reasons when it goes bad on that end: poor pick-and-roll defense, getting caught flat-footed when defending the ball, and refusing to block anybody out before going after rebounds. 4/10
Zaza Pachulia: His offensive rebounds and poor shooting balance each other out when he rebounds his own misses so often. The only Hawk to consistently move without the ball, 11 defensive rebounds and 3 assists to boot. 6/10
Willie Green: Vintage Willie Green. Sub-par offense, terrible defense. Miss you, unexpectedly productive 2011-12 Willie Green. What Larry Drew saw in him tonight is perhaps the most interesting thing about a poor game. 2/10
Kirk Hinrich: If the Hawks have but 11 minutes a game to give Hinrich, they certainly ought to dump his salary. 3/10
Tracy McGrady: No idea why he didn't get in the game until the second quarter. I presume he didn't return after tumbling over the baseline advertising for health reasons. Maybe because the Hawks play to include him as a throw-in when they dump salary. An ex-famous person might be worth a little extra at the trade deadline. 2/10
Ivan Johnson: Ivan Johnson played well. He played briefly, though, so it didn't impress anyone who matters. 3/10
Jannero Pargo: Personally, I'd either play Pargo earlier or when the team was down more than four points in the fourth quarter. Doesn't really matter. He missed a couple shots and returned to the bench. If only Willie Green had joined him. 2/10
The head coach
The Hawks lost at home to Golden State (without Steph Curry). Everyone but Zaza Pachulia and Ivan Johnson (for just five-and-a-half minutes) played less than their best. The Hawks scored 82 points on 94 possessions against the 4th-worst defense in the league. The Hawks scored 21 of those 82 points following a missed shots. Yes, the Warriors are a terrible (28th in the league) defensive rebounding team but they're also a terrible (25th in the league) field goal percentage defense and defensive free throw rate (29th) team. The Hawks couldn't take advantage of either of those. Mostly because a certain snubee was taking 11 jump shots and missing 4 of 8 free throws. 1/10
A thought regarding the opposition
The Hawks are totally going to sign Monta Ellis in the Summer of 2014.
6 comments:
Seems like the ratings are too generous to many people. Josh Smith took 20 shots and 8 free throws to get his 14 points. The 10 rebounds aren't that impressive in a game that featured 110 missed shots (plus plenty of missed free throws as well)-all in all, a very uninspiring double/double. Joe Johnson was utterly, utterly useless for the first half of basketball, enough that I wonder why he was even in the game. And of course, he was also running the point. And everybody, high and low, failed to ever get any kind of a body on Dominic McGuire, who came 2 rebounds shy of his career high....which was of course against the Hawks last season.
Bronn --
Fair criticism. The Warriors were fairly awful and I may be off my game myself.
Though you gave him a 1/10, I still feel like you weren't harsh enough on Coach Drew. Even if you didn't see any of the rest of the game, that final 90 seconds was atrocious.
Josh Smith is clueless on the offensive side of the ball. He needs to get the ball in the guards hands and get down the court. He continues to jack up long outside shots gather than move without the ball and create better opportunities for himself around the basket which is what his skillset is best suited for. It comes down to either Drew doesn't get simple observations like this with Smith and other situations involving other players or the team just dosn't listen.
It doesn't seem to matter, anymore, whether the opponents have a good or bad defense. The Hawks are going to shoot jump shots, and if they go in, they'll appear more efficient. Much of the time, however, those shots are not going to go in--as happens--so the Hawks will be very inefficient.
I'm not sure if the Hawks are tuning Drew out or following his misgiven advice, but either way he has failed with this group. Sure, the they don't have a championship caliber roster, even with Horford, but there's no excuse for making so little of what they do have.
Josh Smith +8 (40 minutes played)
Marvin Williams -7 (41minutes played)
Funny how Marvin performed better because he gets a pass for being the Darko Milicic of wing players.
Smith couldn't score once Lee took away his right hand, he tries to back Lee down gets double teamed. Hawks swing 3 times to Marvin--- brick.
Dominic McGuire is a 6'8 PF who started at SG to counter Joe Johnson. Larry Drew made no adjustments
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