The first few days of NBA free agency couldn't have gone much worse for Atlanta Hawks fans. Or at least for those who appreciate the brand of smart, efficient, poetry-in-motion basketball they've played for three seasons.
Dwight Howard is Atlanta-born and bred. He was a prep star in the area before foregoing college for the NBA Draft. In his 13th season, he’ll be the Atlanta Hawks’ starting centre. A local boy going coming home to play for the hometown team. Cool, I guess.
He’s also an insufferable personality who mopes when things don’t go his way, to say nothing of the fact he’s a 30-year-old big man with a bad back and bad knees, and hasn’t been a dominant basketball-playing basketball player in four or five years. The last thing you think when you watch Howard play is “poetry in motion”.
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He’ll join a Hawks team that two seasons ago won 60 games by stretching the floor with five players who could hit outside shots. They gave up a lot of rebounding and rim protection by playing this way, but 60 wins are 60 wins, and they went to the Eastern Conference Finals. Two years in a row the core of Al Horford, Paul Millsap, Kyle Korver and Jeff Teague were one of the most dangerous teams – offensively and defensively – in the NBA.
Those days are done. Horford, the cog that kept it all working, is gone.
Without Horford (headed to the Celtics and replaced by the immobile Howard) or the speedy, sweet-handling Teague (traded to Indiana before the Draft last week), the Hawks can no longer – unless some unexpected moves are made soon – put together a five-man unit that can stretch the floor and shoot lights-out from deep. They now risk falling behind the rest of the small-ball, three-point-crazy current state of the NBA. On defence, Howard will protect the rim (at least in the limited minutes his knees will allow the coaches to give him), but that helps little in a game that rarely anymore plays at the rim.
Atlanta put themselves out of contention to retain Horford – a free agent who could sign with any team – by signing Howard and spending $70 million (Dh 257 million) to retain fourth-wheel wingman Kent Bazemore, who at least picked Atlanta over more lucrative offers from Dallas and Houston. They were still in the hunt to keep Horford, reportedly even offering him a fifth contract year other teams couldn't. They would've found a way, if he wanted to come back. He didn't, and reportedly the addition of Howard was a big reason why.
Horford, though an admittedly mediocre rebounder and shot-blocker, is the rare player who can protect the rim with enough athleticism to step out and defend wings and many guards. He’s also one of the league’s best marksmen from midrange and last season exploded his career-high in three-pointers. He’s a coach’s dream with a set of skills few others in the league have, and Celtics fans are going to love him.
For Atlanta, the loss could be devastating both on and off the court. He never captured the imaginations of a fickle Atlanta fanbase the way Dominique Wilkins or Michael Vick or Chipper Jones ever did, but he was the Hawks for most of the past decade. The power forward (who at 6-foot-10 had always played admirably as a small-ball centre) was the face of the franchise. Immediately after being drafted in 2007, he helped the Hawks end an anaemic run of eight seasons without a play-off berth. In his nine seasons in Atlanta, the Hawks made nine post-seasons. Only the San Antonio Spurs have a longer current streak. The Hawks have been a winning – if not quite championship – team, and Horford has been the literal centre of that foundation.
What's worse is that he joins the club's most-hated rival. Championship- and history-spoiled Celtics fans would disagree that it's a true rivalry (as did Kevin Garnett in 2008), but the two teams have met 12 times in the post-season, more than any other two teams. The Celtics have won 10 of those series. Three times in the 1980s, Wilkins and the Hawks were eliminated by Larry Bird and the Celtics. As a Hawks fan, I hate the Celtics. I hate the colour green. It was the colour of my face when I saw they were getting Horford.
Players leave. That happens in sports. But joining the Celtics? It’s tough to imagine a more contemptuous rejection.
The Hawks have earned a reputation as a smartly run organization with a former Coach of the Year at the helm. It’d be prudent to say Mike Budenholzer and company know what they’re doing, that they prefer Howard and were OK with losing Horford, and that they see something in the tea leaves that many confounded NBA analysts – and this writer – don’t. Maybe Howard has some dominance left in those knees and another NBA Finals run in him. It’s a big maybe, but Budenholzer has at least earned the benefit of the doubt.
If the Howard signing flops, though, that benefit is gone, and the Hawks could find themselves back where they were for so long before – rebuilding alongside the league’s also-rans, one of the league’s worst teams, an afterthought.
kjeffers@thenational.ae
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