Hey Woody! You Have a Bench

To all our readers who came here over the past few days only to find no new updates since the Mavs defeat, you can rest easy knowing that we are now back. The Mavs win did not end up sending us into a free fall where we were unable to cope with our daily lives, and we didn't decide to go all Mario West (he's the one on the end) on all of you and only make an appearance for a short time only to disappear shortly therafter. No, the reason why it has been a while since our last post is due to the fact that Mike Woodson was the one who decides how many posts we get per week and he decided that he was gonna let Joe Johnson take the majority this week.

I know what you are thinking, Joe Johnson is going to write blog posts like everyone's already favorite NBA blogger - sadly the answer to that is no. What you should be thinking is how hilarious the metaphor about Woodson's inability to manage a successful blog was, especially considering the he has the same difficulty doing a job he is PAID to do.

Before you say, "here we go again another Hawks fan who thinks that Woodson cannot coach, cannot relate to his players, cannot be allowed to continue to coach (this guy was calling for it two years ago-he wins), and cannot possibly sue the Tootsie Roll Pop Owl for a face-mark infringement claim," stop and instead try to say "Woody won't want to win with the bench." In fact try to say that five times fast. If you succeed, congratulations...but it was not a tongue twister. There were, however, a lot of words starting with the letter w in that sentence - and that makes it an alliteration.

There will be a time and place for the Fire Mike Woodson post, trust me. I have been waiting to see that headline appear on AJC for a long, long time. Instead, I have become comfortably numb to the fact that the Hawks will continue to be coached by this incompetent man. Instead of wondering why Woodson is still employed, I am wondering after this weekend, what is happening to our bench players and how come none of them can get into any sort of rhythm during the games? Player rotations are not done by the players. Joe Johnson will not come over to the bench and say, "whew I'm spent. Hey Flip, why don't you go in there and cover for me for a bit." It is the coach's job to do these substitutions based on the pace of the game and any other little facets that the casual fan does not notice.

This is one aspect (of the too many to name) of coaching where Woodson has been failing miserably these days. Let's take a look at the minutes for our bench players the last few games:





(To find out what a Mario is Click Here)

Look at these numbers. The only consistent minutes belongs to Acie Law, who, after his supposedly constructive summer and great preseason, should probably be getting more than 10 minutes per game. Zaza's minutes fluctuate more than Vincent Chase's movie star status. (Cannot even get an audition to landing the lead in a Scorsese film?) Flip's minutes seem to copy the Dow Jones average with its continuously downward swing. (I can go on but I thought that was enough). Woodson has been juggling around these guys and not letting any of them get used to their roles that we need each of them to do for the Hawks to be successful.

Before the season, a certain ESPN columnist described our bench as being so bad the cheerleaders should just hurl poop at us. Meanwhile, both Sekou Smith (Hawks beat writer) and Lang Whitaker (national NBA writer and huge Hawks fan) agreed that our bench would be better than people thought. And we believed them. And early in the season, when the Hawks went 6-0 and then 6-6 with Smoove out, we all saw what he was talking about. Now? Well let's just say thanks to Woody, I will be putting up my poop shield when I attend the next Hawks game.

This problem is not likely to get better any time soon due to Woody's unexplainable substitution patterns. So get used used to seeing Joe play for 42+ minutes a night. Personally, I want to see more of what the bench can do with much emphasis focused on Acie's full capabilities. (Can he handle being the PG of the future?) The bench is not going to succeed when the players keep getting shuffled around like Menudo (last one I promise). So Woody - give these guys minutes. Give these guys defined roles. Give our starters some rest. Mainly give our team some wins.

UPDATE: So apparently Sekou had already written about the same thing and since his opinion is ever so slightly better than mine, you might want to check out what he thinks here.