Last Vacation Planning post, I promise. I'm interested to the Atlanta Hawks' off-season for a couple of reasons. First, I have a friend/reader in Atlanta who has become pretty cynical about his home team. Being a positive guy by nature, I took interest in monitoring their situation and speculating about how they can extract themselves from the no man's land they dug themselves in. Because that's where they somewhat always had been: they never really sucked, but they had never really been a threat to great teams. Somehow, I think this is worse than sucking.
Last year, the Hawks continued to be irrelevant, despite playing hard. Injuries and holes in the lineups have been brutal to them. New arrival, badass scorer Lou Williams got sidelined pretty quick with a season-ending knee injury and the Josh Smith situation has been a huge distraction to them. They also had depth issues, which is an absolute killer if you want to go far in the playoffs. You don't win championships with Shelvin Mack and Johan Petro coming off the bench. They have an interesting off-season ahead, since they have only 18 million dollars committed for next season's payroll and two first round picks. They have a lot of options. Here's what I think they should do.
