- 6 months ago
In the early '90s, the Atlanta Hawks traded away their superstar and survived to become a contender worthy of battles with Michael Jordan and the Bulls. In the early 2000s, the Hawks traded away their superstar and ... did not survive. This is the story of that second thing.
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00:00In the early 1990s, the Atlanta Hawks pulled off a difficult maneuver.
00:06They traded away their superstar and lived to tell the tale.
00:10Dominique Wilkins was one of the greatest and most entertaining Hawks ever.
00:14His jersey hangs from the rafters in Atlanta, and his name is enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame.
00:20But in 1994, in the middle of a very good team and individual season,
00:25the Hawks traded Wilkins rather than wait for their aging top scorer to hit free agency.
00:31It was a sad and controversial move, and not one that paid off directly.
00:36But Atlanta got back on track pretty fast.
00:39They figured out how to win without Dominique.
00:42They survived.
00:43In the offseason of 1996, Atlanta executive Pete Babcock brought in a new legend,
00:49another future recipient of a retired jersey and Hall of Fame honors.
00:53Dikembe Mutombo, one of the greatest shot-blocking centers in the history of basketball,
01:00became the next Hawks superstar.
01:02Around this elite defensive centerpiece, the Hawks boasted an elite defensive supporting cast.
01:09Mookie Blalock was a pure point guard, the ideal setup man for Mutombo on offense,
01:14and as destructive a backcourt defender as Mutombo was around the rim.
01:18For scoring, Atlanta depended on Steve Smith, a super crafty forward with a sweet mid-range game.
01:25Christian Leitner's early NBA years had been kind of a disappointment compared to his college stardom,
01:31but he experienced a career renewal as a role player in Atlanta.
01:35And the coach remained, Lenny Wilkins, once an all-star as a Hawks player, now a veteran coach with championship pedigree.
01:44Babcock's new squad started slow, but rallied to finish with 56 wins in 97,
01:50right up there with their best seasons of the Dominique era.
01:53They were the league's eighth most efficient offense and third most efficient defense, a true powerhouse.
01:59Of course, the Hawks, like everyone else, proved no match for the Michael Jordan Bulls at the peak of their excellence.
02:06Chicago rocked Atlanta in the second round of those 97 playoffs,
02:10and then the Hawks couldn't even make it out of the first round in 98.
02:14So, while the Hawks remained good and competitive, they seemed to hit a playoff plateau.
02:20Even before 99, when they got mercilessly swept by the eighth-seeded Knicks,
02:25the Hawks were feeling pressure to try something else.
02:29Good wasn't good enough.
02:31Babcock decided he must once again rebuild on the fly,
02:35somehow make major moves without sacrificing wins.
02:40And why not?
02:41The Hawks had done it before with Dominique Wilkins and believed they could pull it off again.
02:45This time, though, the Hawks couldn't stay afloat.
02:48Far from it.
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03:03Pete Babcock always had a tough gig.
03:06He was hired as GM in 1990 and reported to the guy he had replaced, Stan Kasten, Hawks president and right-hand man of Bajillionaire team owner Ted Turner.
03:17More so than his predecessor slash boss, Babcock's philosophy was to avoid depending on luck, which is to say he was not a fan of the NBA draft.
03:27Babcock wanted to build his team from proven veterans acquired via trades and free agency.
03:34This was that.
03:35Former Denver Nugget Dikembe Mutombo was not the most important center to change teams in the summer of 96,
03:41but Mutombo signing a five-year deal in Atlanta was one of the most significant moves in franchise history.
03:48And it was proof of concept for Babcock, who helped create that cap space by boldly offloading Dominique Wilkins and a draft pick a few years prior.
03:58The Mutombo signing was the keystone move of a roster-constructed Babcock style.
04:03Almost none of the important Hawks of the late 90s were homegrown Atlanta draft picks.
04:09Late-blooming, late first-rounder Alan Henderson was the only career Hawk in the regular rotation for a while there.
04:15God, I love those jerseys.
04:18Babcock just firmly believed in improving via outside hires, which is why 1999 was such a fascinating turning point.
04:26Even before that disappointing lockout season, the Hawks' core saw some movement.
04:32Atlanta lost Christian Laettner in a sign-and-trade, so they signed Lofonzo Ellis, hoping he could become their new star at Power Forward.
04:40Cool idea, but Ellis got hurt and hardly played.
04:43After that season, with an upset sweep in their rear view, Atlannans got restless.
04:49The Hawks had to, and would, shake things up, but not in the usual way.
04:54Babcock took an uncharacteristic interest in that offseason's draft.
04:58He wanted to make a splash and decided that hurling Mookie Blalock overboard was the way to get it done.
05:03After trading their stalwart point guard to the Warriors, the Hawks held four first-round picks in the 99 draft, beginning with the 10th selection.
05:13Everyone agreed that the 10th pick should go toward replacing Blalock, and 99 was a point guard draft, but the best of the bunch all went in the top nine.
05:22Steve Francis, Baron Davis, Andre Miller, all excellent pros, none of them Hawks.
05:29The Hawks settled for Jason Terry, who was not as pure a point guard as some others, but a fine pick, a fine player, and a very solid Hawk for years to come.
05:39If that could be said of any of the remaining Atlanta 99 draft picks, the Hawks might have been in business, but I'm afraid not.
05:47These guys all became actual pro basketball players, but none were real difference makers in Atlanta.
05:53Usually that would be an adequate draft outcome, but not so for a team that had invested so heavily in one specific night of roster building.
06:02Just as a deeply unfair, but still very fun exercise, here's who Atlanta could have added.
06:09So, there's no world in which a point guardless team wouldn't have drafted Terry or William Avery at 10, but give me Ron Artest there, just for fun, and with the next three picks, we could get ourselves Andre Kirilenko and Manu Ginobili.
06:25After that, who cares? I just built, like, a sick-ass Hawks team in one day.
06:30Look at the defensive excellence in my lineup. Lockdown.
06:34All I needed was, I don't know, several decades of hindsight and a complete disregard for realism.
06:39Anyway, the actual Hawks got Jason Terry and a couple other deep bench guys for whom I have made kind of cruel photo choices.
06:47Pete Babcock followed that uncharacteristic draft haul with a much more typical move.
06:52The Hawks traded away their popular leading scorer, Steve Smith, for a high-risk, high-reward return.
07:00Isaiah Ryder and Jim Jackson were super talented offensive players who'd been kind of unreliable as teammates in Portland.
07:07They, along with center Lorenzen Wright, represented the incoming veteran talent in the 99 offseason.
07:15All of a sudden, all that remained of the 56-win Hawks core was Mutombo, now flanked by a bunch of rookies and iffy veterans.
07:24And they switched to these McDonald's-ass jerseys, which should have been the first red flag, literally.
07:30Rebuild on the fly 1999 edition did not work at all.
07:36It was so bad.
07:38Atlanta's calling card had always been defense, but suddenly a team still built around one of the best rim protectors in basketball history could not compete on that end at all.
07:49Lower numbers are better on defense.
07:51This is a very high number.
07:5228 wins?
07:55Now that's a low number you don't want to see.
07:57So Babcock's sudden transaction frenzy failed.
08:00Now what?
08:02Well, he still held the default card of every executive who's ever beefed a rebuild.
08:07Ditch the coach.
08:08Lenny Wilkins resigned before the Hawks could fire him.
08:11Atlanta had a new guy in mind.
08:13Days after Michigan State won the 2000 NCAA title, Atlanta started pursuing their head coach, Tom Izzo, making him a lucrative offer to jump up to the pros.
08:24Plenty other coaches were available, including several guys who would get hired elsewhere and go on to make playoff runs and win awards and stuff.
08:30But the Hawks stayed laser-focused on Izzo well into springtime, and they didn't get him, settling instead for Illinois coach Lon Krueger.
08:39The Hawks were just really, really sure, for some reason, that the solution to their problems lay in the Big Ten.
08:46Not the case.
08:47The Hawks got even worse.
08:49Jason Terry broke out as kind of an offensive star in the backcourt, lottery-picked rookie DeMar Johnson showed flashes of potential,
08:56and Mutombo stayed doing his thing on defense, but the parts just didn't add up.
09:00Here's Hano Modala.
09:02As the 2001 trade deadline approached, Babcock stared down his last available big move, trading away the legend.
09:09Unlike the old Dominique Wilkins trade, Babcock was operating from a position of weakness.
09:15The Hawks were bad this time, so they needed to nail the trade itself to become good quickly.
09:22Not outlandish, since they were looking to trade away a player who, even past his prime,
09:27offered elite center play in a league where basically any team with championship aspirations was gonna have to battle Shaq.
09:33Teams wanted Dikembe, and we'll never know exactly what offers Atlanta had on the table,
09:39but here's a very rough lay of the land I got from reading rumors in the newspapers.
09:45Atlanta could have gotten Glenn Rice and Marcus Camby from the Knicks.
09:49They could have gotten Sharif Abdur-Rahim from the Grizzlies, if not more.
09:52Perhaps most compelling in hindsight was the Suns' interest in Mutombo,
09:57since any deal would have probably had to include either Sean Marion or Jason Kidd,
10:02but that didn't sound likely.
10:04Dallas was in there, Portland was in there, but in the end, it was Philadelphia.
10:10The Hawks got the solid but injured Theo Ratliff, past his prime Tony Kukoc, and youngsters.
10:16Mutombo went to Philly and did indeed battle Shaq in the finals.
10:20Not a bad haul in 2001, but not enough to make the Hawks good again anytime soon.
10:27The Hawks of the 90s were now demolished, with only their architect left to sort through the rubble.
10:32Again, with the unfair benefit of hindsight,
10:35we can identify one more moment at which the Hawks could have recovered.
10:40They had the third pick in that year's draft, their highest selection in decades.
10:45And for a few moments on that evening of June 27, 2001,
10:49the Hawks used that pick to acquire the rights to yet another legend,
10:53a future Hall of Famer and champion, one of the greatest big men in NBA history,
10:58but they didn't want to wait on Pau Gasol.
11:01Pete Babcock was back to his old ways and had agreed to trade Gasol's rights to Vancouver
11:06for an already rising star native to Atlanta,
11:09the guy they didn't get in the Mutombo trade, Sharif Abdur Rahim.
11:13Sharif was very good in Atlanta,
11:15but Gasol could have been a franchise cornerstone if the Hawks just had the patience to rebuild
11:20around him.
11:21They explicitly did not have that patience.
11:24What's amazing is that they had a second crack at a similarly influential draft pick,
11:29but one that would have required more patience that, again, they lacked.
11:33As part of that trade, Atlanta acquired the rights to the 27th pick.
11:38Babcock seriously considered using it,
11:40but ultimately decided the guy his scouts preferred at 27 came with too much youth and
11:45uncertainty.
11:46The Hawks traded away the pick.
11:48Babcock would deem passing on Tony Parker as the biggest regret of his Hawks tenure.
11:54And the rest of that Hawks tenure was spent trying to avoid a full rebuild.
11:59The 0-1-0-2 Hawks had a true all-star in Abdur Rahim,
12:02but still finished with just 33 wins.
12:04Before the 0-2-0-3 season, Babcock kept pushing.
12:09He traded Tony Kukoc and yet another draft pick for yet another all-star entering his 30s,
12:14Glenn Big Dog Robinson.
12:16As the season approached, Atlanta's remaining youth corps took a tragic hit.
12:21Rapidly improving swingman Demar Johnson was badly injured in a car crash that put his
12:26career on pause for over a year.
12:29Still, the Hawks made a guarantee.
12:31Either we make the playoffs or all season ticket holders get a $125 refund.
12:38The Hawks did not make the playoffs.
12:41Pete Babcock fired Coach Lon Kruger midseason, then got fired himself at season's end.
12:46Their former employer returned about a half million bucks on rebates.
12:51The GM reigns went to Billy Knight, an executive who wanted to use Atlanta's high draft picks,
12:57but made too many mistakes with them.
12:59The Hawks would not return to the playoffs until 2008 and wouldn't post a winning record again
13:05until 2009 under a new GM.
13:08That's how it goes when you trade away a superstar.
13:11It can be done and done well as long as you have a sound plan B.
13:15The very good late 90s Hawks were an example of that plan B coming to fruition.
13:20The decade following, well, that's what happens when you trade a star and plans B through,
13:26I don't know, F, all fall apart.
13:28The 10 years'ides in theAlright Giants
13:36.
13:37So for today, чтобы 2018, week ago,
13:38Oof $000,000 are starting back in 2016.
13:40.
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