Archive for August, 2010

Kelly Dwyer from The Ball Don’t Lie blog recently rated the players at each position in the NBA.  Granted, this is just one man’s opinion, but it is one that I mostly agree with on his rankings.  On the Hawks, Al Horford rated fourth among centers, which isn’t bad for a guy who many Hawks fans say isn’t really a center because he doesn’t have standard center size.  To round out the Hawks budding young front court, Josh Smith rates seventh among power forwards.  Only two other teams had their starting center and starting power forward in the top 10 [...]

In Michael Cunningham’s most recent blog, Larry Drew states that Jeff Teague has to win the starting point guard spot  from Mike Bibby in training camp. “He’s got to earn that,” L.D. said. “It’s not just going to be handed to him. If he proves it, he has an opportunity. I will come back with the starting lineup we’ve had in the past. Unless somebody clearly, clearly beats somebody out, [then] that’s something I would have to take a look at. But I am going with the normal guys [to start].” Larry is taking the right approach with this.  It [...]

The Associated Press is reporting that Atlanta Hawks assistant general manager Steve Rosenberry has been hired by the Portland Trailblazers to be an assistant general manager to new general manager Richard Cho.  This is the first domino to fall from Rick Sund’s scouting staff.  Assistant GM Dave Pendergraft is also being courted by both Denver and Phoenix for their GM positions.  It is always a good sign when people in your scouting staff are being looked at by other organizations.  Steve Rosenberry had been with Rick Sund for a while.  He spent 13 years in Seattle under Wally Walker and later [...]

Michael Cunningham has some insight on Coach Drew’s offense in his latest blog entry. There was lots of motion and ball movement, yes, but what stood out was how much of the action had players cutting to the basket. It seemed there always was an option for the next man in the sequence to either accept the ball while moving to his position or reverse field and look for a cut to the basket. Not everything happens on the strong side, either, so ball-watching and inattentiveness by defenders can mean backdoor baskets. I am really liking some of the things I [...]

NBA Playbook is doing their player by player scouting reports, and they have a few players up on their website.  Mike Bibby and Jason Collins are the two Hawks players who have scouting reports up on the site at this point in time.  Here is the scouting report for Mike Bibby.  Overall, I think they hit the nail on the head with Mike.  He is clearly a declining player as you can see by his inability to create his own shot at this point in his career.  However, he does have his pluses still.  As they state, Mike protects the [...]

I want to apologize for the lack of updates during that latter portion of last week and over the weekend.  I am proud to announce a new addition to the Soaring Down South Family.  My wife gave birth to a 7 lbs, 10 oz baby boy on August 6th, so as you can imagine, that has consumed my time.  In fact, he has his days and nights a little mixed up right now, which is a challenge.  However, I am enjoying this.  Hopefully as he gets acclimated to his surroundings and gets his nights and days straight, I will be [...]

Michael Cunningham is back from his vacation and spent some time catching up with the things that have been going on.  First up, both Josh Powell and Jason Collins were officially signed.  From the Hawks perspective, they are saying that Jason Collins has worked hard to get his body into shape, and they are basically blaming last season on Mike Woodson.  From my perspective, this is a case of the Hawks throwing away $1 million.  It is very, very unlikely that Jason Collins will make an impact on this team.  Players he is the most similar to from a WS and WS/48 perspective are Jerome James, [...]

I found an interesting blog entry as I was doing some reading tonight.  Jamie Merchant has an entry at his blog titled Numeranda where he takes a look at a team’s adjusted plus/minus stats and compares it with the sum of the individual players on each unit’s adjusted plus/minus stats.  Here is his entry.  The hypothesis here is that 5 man units that outperformed collectively the sum of their individual APMs have good chemistry, whereas 5 man units that underperformed collectively the sum of their individual APMs may not have great chemistry.  Note that this is a study on team [...]