Hawks’ Billy Knight shouldn’t be fired
Friday, May 2nd, 2008Atlanta Hawks’ GM Billy Knight gets a lot of grief for the team’s eight-year absence from playoffs. On the eve of the sixth game in the Hawks-Celtics surprisingly competitive playoff series, however, the question really is: How’d such a talented group of players end up with just a 37-45 regular season record?
Head Coach Mike Woodson is accountable for that under-performance, as he showed again Wednesday with poor coaching decisions, a pre-game press conference that lay blame for a loss on his players before the game even happened, and an embarrassing “pep” talk (in which he depressingly quoted Phil Jackson instead of coming up with his own inspiration).
I’m thinking now that Knight’s gotten a bad rap. First, he had to dig the franchise out from Pete Babcock’s truly horrible roster moves. Then, this year he tried to do the right thing — fire Woodson — but ownership wouldn’t let him.
Just rate Knight’s major roster moves after the fact, and he looks pretty good. Here’s what I came up with when I rated his No. 1 picks, major trades and major free agent signs on a zero-to-10 scale (”5″ being an average, fair deal for the team):
Josh Childress, 7th pick: 5
Josh Smith, 17th pick: 8
Joe Johnson trade: 9
Marvin Williams, 2nd pick: 3
Zaza Pachulia signing: 6 (not saying he’s great, but all-in-all he’s turned out to be a savvy addition)
Speedy Claxton signing: 2 (he didn’t know Claxton would be injured but could’ve guessed)
Sheldon Williams, 5th pick: 1
Al Horford, 3rd pick: 7
Acie Law, 11th pick: 4?
Mike Bibby trade: 6
That’s a respectable 5.1 average. Yeah, yeah. He missed drafting a point guard for two straight years, but balance that out with Johnson, Smith and Horford — and with undoing Babcock’s incredible mess. Winning two (at least) against the Celtics ought to let Knight keep his job. Am I missing something?
