Hawkneyed Solution

By: Jay Busbee

So it’s the Fourth of July (or at least the week thereof), and here’s a question for you to kick around while you’re blasting off firework remnants.When is it time to, shall we say, declare independence from your team?

When is enough enough? At what point do you get fed up with the losing records, the managerial incompetence, the front-office short-sightedness?

I know that at least a portion of you reading this — the Wrigley Field contingent — are wondering just what kind of fair-weather fan would give up on a team after just a couple decades of suckitude. But you Cubs fans pass that whole losing-as-honor routine down through generations like some kind of genetic disorder. God love you, but you people are insane.

No, the question of when to abandon your team is aimed at the kinds of fans who don’t necessarily shed a tear when their granddaddy’s favorite ballclub finally wins the big one, the kinds of fans who can, every once in awhile, step back and say, “Hey, why the hell am I supporting these clowns, anyway?”

We’ll use as a case study my Atlanta Hawks. I grew up in Atlanta following the Hawks of Dominique Wilkins, Spud Webb, Doc Rivers, et al, and it’s now a source of physical pain what has happened to this once-playoff-worthy franchise. Most of the country regards the Hawks as either a) an absurd joke of a franchise, b) an amusing distraction on the order of watching a dog eat peanut butter, or c) a guaranteed ‘W’ on the schedule. But here in Atlanta there are a few — a dwindling few — people who actually want to see this team succeed, want to see it return to the glory days of yore.

Yes, friends, the Hawks once did have glory days, mostly during the Reagan administration. Back in those days, the Dominique Wilkins-led Hawks always seemed to run into the meat grinder of Larry Bird’s Celtics. This led to some of the greatest basketball games of history — 1988’s Eastern Conference semis’ Game 7, for instance, when ‘Nique scored 47 but Bird hit 20 in the fourth quarter — but the games always seemed to end with Atlanta slinking out of the gym as Boston celebrated.

Basketball is a cyclical game, however, and while champions go through dry patches, they tend to mend themselves. The Lakers are Sam Cassell away from making a conference championship run; the Celts with Allen Iverson could be a top Eastern Conference seed; the Bulls, with a Kevin Garnett mega-deal, are right back in the hunt too. Hell, even Memphis, which technically didn’t even exist the last time the Hawks made the playoffs, now has consistent postseason expectations.

So what happened to Atlanta? Why did a team which could always pencil in at least five games in the postseason suddenly turn into a team that couldn’t count on winning five games in a month? The reasons are too numerous to detail here, but they fall into some classic management-blunder patterns: trading a superstar for little-to-nothing in return (dealing ‘Nique for Danny Manning, who played with the Hawks for 26 games before bolting as a free agent); trading a solid player for a malcontent and expecting to turn him around (Steve Smith for wingnut Isiah Rider); draft mishaps (leaving rookie of the year Chris Paul on the board while drafting middling swingman Marvin Williams); and failing to develop talent properly (cutting loose Boris Diaw and Jason Terry, then watching them turn into key players on Western Conference championship teams).

Oh, and get this — it’s still not clear who even owns the Hawks. The ownership team tried to kick out one of their number, only to learn that that guy actually found a loophole in the ownership deal that allows him to buy them out. It’s like watching a car crash — but an extremely boring one, like someone backing into a minivan at the grocery store.

And after this most recent draft — in which the Hawks displayed all the subtlety (and less of the intelligence) of Paris Hilton on a red carpet by announcing their love for Duke’s Shelden Williams (now Atlanta’s sixty-seventh swingman on the roster) weeks beforehand — I started to wonder whether it might be time to go free agent myself.

The whole issue of rooting for a sports team is a metaphysical question. Why do we have to root for a team just because we share some geography? Why not pick the team that most clearly matches our personality? (Front-running blowhards have their choice of Yankees or Cowboys; neurotic loudmouths have the Red Sox; cutting-edge rebel types can start pulling for the Vegas NBA team, which, unfortunately, might just end up being the Hawks.)

But at what point do we, as fans, give up on a team? I have to think it’s the point at which the team gives up on us. You can see evidence of that at any level of the organization:

-The players start going through the motions, on and off the court — collecting a fat paycheck while, say, wearing headphones while doing autograph signings.

-The front office starts looking to the short-term, high-profit-margin deals — stadium renamings, ticket price jackups, corporate-box kiss-assery — while cutting out the low-revenue but long-term gain of everyday fans.

-The grass-roots face of the team — the ushers, concessionaires, and security — stops having fun. The beer guy doesn’t sing his “last-call-for-al-co-hol” tune; the ushers won’t let you slip down to the rows of empty good seats in the eighth inning of a 10-2 blowout.

-And the management either sits on its hands or serves as the marquee teams’ bitch — the salary-dump team in multiplayer deals.

You see any one of these elements coming into play, you start worrying. You see two, start taking the posters down from the wall. You see three or four, it’s time to start practicing that “I’ve been a Heat fan since way before Dwyane Wade, dude” speech.

With these provisos in mind, the Hawks aren’t yet in serious trouble, but they’re getting reeeeeeal close. Billy Knight, the Hawks’ GM , has an absolute tin ear for public relations — that, or a stone head: people in Atlanta have been screaming for a point guard at Sherman’s-coming-back volumes, and Knight continues to insist he hasn’t heard any public outcry for one. Of course, if the ownership fractures and ends up in the hands of the once-ousted, once-and-maybe-future owner Steve Belkin, Knight and everybody else will get shoved out the door and forgotten faster than last year’s American Idol contestants.

The sad thing is, the Hawks as a team are a fairly lively bunch. Their two hundred and thirty swingmen all seem to like each other, and they’ve got some quality young talent in Joe Johnson and Josh Smith. Swing a deal for an Allen Iverson, and the Hawks instantly recapture 5,000 lapsed fans a night, minimum.

But if they punt yet again — if they can’t manage more than 25 wins, and still somehow blame the fans for not pounding more of their money down this rathole — well, then it’ll be time for me to test the market.

I hear there are openings on the Lakers’ bandwagon.

Jay Busbee is the creator and head writer for SportsGoneSouth. A regular contributor to CSR, he has also written for ESPN.com, Slam, The Washington Post, USA Today, and many other publications. He lives in Atlanta with his family.

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