Are the Atlanta Spirit good owners?

by hawksdawgs on Aug 18, 2009 11:20 AM EDT Comment 13 comments

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The Hawks have new owners! They are the same as the old ones. Steve Belkin is back making decisions. It is just that his decisions still don't matter. We are back to 2005. Everyone go sell some real estate.

It is really hard to believe the Hawks ownership has been in limbo for almost four years. This could end up lasting the entire length of Joe Johnson's contract. And in that four years, all the Hawks have done is improve. There are people, people who have some credibility, asking whether Atlanta is a contender.

It is very weird then that the ownership is maligned while the team succeeds. Over the last four years, the Hawks have been under the salary cap when they were bad and under the luxury tax when they were decent. The organization has shown a willingness to spend (whether you agree with how they spend is another matter). When the roster is filled, they will be near the max possible.

But of course, the Atlanta Spirit are bad owners, everyone is ready to get around that rally cry. Well what makes a good owner? Here are some possible characteristics.

The ability to spend money: Paul Allen of Portland is often given this label and it is taken as a huge positive. Well, Glen Taylor, the T-wolves owner, is worth over 2 billion dollars.

Spending money: It seems Phonix could still be a true contender if their owner didn't sell draft picks or refuse to match Joe Johnson's contract. But would Mark Cuban spend money if he didn't think his team could contend? And how did they rise to contention? With guys they developed (and did not buy) like Steve Nash and Dirk Nowitzki. The Knicks have always been good at spending money. So good in fact, they are trying to unspend at an amazing rate.

One major owner: Avoid that whole Atlanta mess. Look at Jerry Buss or Peter Holt (San Antonio). Well here is a quick rebuttal, Donald Sterling. Need another? Robert Johnson. I would cry almost daily if I was a Bobcats fan.

Involvement: There is something very cool about a Mark Cuban on the sideline of every game. There is nothing cool about the Devin Harris for Jason Kidd trade. Then again, LeBron James has been to more Davidson College games than Michael Jordan has been to Bobcats games, a team he part owns.

Connection to the community: The cover boy here is Peter Hold in San Antonio. He has poured into that community and there is a die hard support for the team. However, they have had two perfectly timed number one overall picks and besides those years, they always are good so it is not like one needs to twist arms to find fans. And is there anyone more connected to the community than Sterling? He owns more low income housing than anyone else in LA. I kid, I kid.

Owning one team: Quite a few owners have double dipped. Paul Allen owns the Seahawks and the Blazers. Stan Kroenke of the Nuggets has his hand in roughly 200 sports ventures. Neither is considered a bad owner.

In the end, it is of course winning that makes an owner the best. You could have 20 owners or 1. You could have a billion dollars or ten. If you win, you are good. Was Wyc Grousbeck a good owner before the summer of Kevin Garnett? Should we give him credit for that move or Danny Ainge? Good owners win. And of course every team wants to win, they want to fill seats, but what they really want to do is do those two things while they make money, and if they can only make money while not winning well making money is going to win out.

Well, the Atlanta Spirit have increasingly fielded a team that wins, and they have slowly begun to fill Phillips (last year saw the most tickets sold in the arena's history). The only thing they have not done is made money. Which from a fan perspective is the least important of the trifecta.

I am not saying the Atlanta Spirit is peaches and cream, one long joy ride of confusion and fights. This court battle is embarrassing regardless of it relatively low impact it has had on results. They kept Billy Knight for too long, and the reports that Knight wanted to fire Woodson and ownership refused are more than a little disheartening. But these gripes of any fans with owners of teams that are not winning championships. They are not necessarily gripes about bad owners.

Maybe the Atlanta Spirit are not as out there as Mark Cuban or as successful as Jerry Buss and sure I hope the sale of the Thrashers is on the horizon, but the owners are involved and do spend money and desire to win.

Michael Gearon is at almost every single game with his kids on the front row. He is an Atlanta guy. I shake hands and have been thanked by a part owner on numerous occasions for coming to the game. My friend who has season tickets calls his ticket rep all the time, and they actually talk. There are fan forums and draft night parties and any number of perks. The owners have fielded a winner and fielded a team that could remain so for a number of years.

Yea the bickering between millionaires over how many draft picks to give the Suns is a bit ridiculous, but these are business men that want to give away or get as little or much money as possible in a divorce of an ownership group. They cannot help that the legal system exacerbates this attribute found any good business person.

The Atlanta Spirit are never going to be the main cog in fielding a championship team. Rick Sund, the coach, and the players are. I hope if the core Hawks exceed expectations in their development the owners will be willing to push luxury tax limits, but it is bad business and bad long term planning to do so now.

Now, the owners have done exactly what a good owner should do and allowed for the securing of the good talent they drafted for the long term at no more than market value.

The Atlanta Spirit are not perfect, but they are not the laughing stock the legal system has turned them into.

Atlanta is a great NBA town despite what anyone might say. The TV ratings prove as much. It just so happens that many of those million or so NBA fans happen to be fans of other teams because those people come from other cities to our town.

If the Atlanta Spirit started treating the true blue Atlantans and the fully transplanted locals as the small market base which they really are, I am under the belief that our ownership and this team can be fully embraced by the city of Atlanta.

And then, once and for all, we can say we have good owners.

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ummmm.

I dunno. I guess they aren’t the worst.

by Co Co on Aug 18, 2009 11:48 AM EDT reply actions 0 recs

i knew you were not going to like this one....

by hawksdawgs on Aug 18, 2009 11:52 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

How about giving credit to Billy Knight

For all the blunders Billy made( no need to remind anyone of them) , you have to give him credit for building this core despite all the infighting at the top. I can only imagine what it must have been like to be an employee when the owners are fighting each other and hence affecting his ability to buy or sell players…

by dkrib on Aug 18, 2009 12:39 PM EDT reply actions 0 recs

billy knight deserves a lot more credit than he gets

but he also gets very little credit.

by hawksdawgs on Aug 18, 2009 12:42 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

My take

And a small clarification on the picture I linked in the earlier post. That is what comes to mind when I think about the ASG and their litigation, not how they relate to being the Hawks owners. Those two things are not necessarily mutual.

I like how you listed some of the possible characteristics that one could use in determining the difference between a good and bad owner, but the examples are only looking at each item singularly, when I think it really is a large combination of those listed plus a few more. Some of those go hand in hand. I would also add somewhat of a catch all with Intelligence (some might call this Smart Business Sense) and possibly Risk Taking.

Take the first two on your list. Having the ability to spend money leads to actually spending money, because you can’t do B without first having A. You then have to add in the two I listed. One would want their owner to use that Smart Business Sense to spend the money wisely while still having the courage to take a few risks that could potentially pay off huge in the end, but not so many that they sink the ship before it leaves port. By not taking some risks and not spending money, essentially standing pat, it shows that the ownership either doesn’t have the ability to spend money and take those risks, or that they are scrooges and are willing to spend.

The amount of money the Hawks and Thrashers have lost since the ASG took control has been well documented. Does their ownership of both teams, and the losses therein, make them a bad ownership group? Not singularly, no, but considering that it is such a large group of owners, the initial pool of funs individually was probably smaller than average to begin with*. You combine that overall lack of backup funding with the losses from the owning multiple professional sports teams (and everything that comes with that, i.e. two sets of front office payroll, two sets of player payroll, two sets of taxes, etc.) and add in the in-fighting between partners, and it’s very easy to see how that could eventually spill over to the team on the court (and ice in this case).

*Obviously, I have no idea what each individual partner is worth or has for available funds to put into the Hawks. Yes, it is subjective, but considering that it took eight different partners (two of which are father and son, so maybe that’s really seven) to come together to buy the Hawks, the Thrashers, and the rights to Phillips, I’m assuming that they each have significantly less to back up their investment than a singular entity would.

You are very right in that up to this point, it hasn’t affected the team as of yet (or at least the Hawks, as some would argue that the Thrashers have been severely neglected by ownership what with the Hawks actually maintaining some success on the court recently). So, right now, maybe they aren’t a horrible ownership. Maybe they are just mediocre. Or maybe, now that they are not busy worrying about how much money they might lose from a major litigation battle, we will really see how serious they are about winning a championship.

The only thing that I would really disagree with is giving the success of the team to the ownership directly. Sure, they sign the checks at the end of the day, but it’s definitely not all on them. A large part of the Hawks success has to go to Billy Knight for putting this team together to start with, creating the foundation for this team to succeed. Some will attempt to argue his draft mistakes, but the Bibby deal clearly shows that he realized his mistakes and was attempting to correct them. Billy Knight is the one who put our playoff team together, not Sund and not the ASG independently. I’d also say that the ASG preventing Knight to fire Woodson was a mistake, but that’s my opinion of that one incident and it still doesn’t mean that they are the worst ownership of all time.

So, in the end, this is finally one large disctraction that has come to somewhat of an end for now. I don’t think they have always made the best decisions, but I also don’t think they have made a ton of horribe decisions. I’d say that the ASG are slightly better than average.

"This is America, if we can’t self-righteously look down on others and blame them for our faults, the commies win."-----Cormican on Bleeding Green Nation w/r/t fans overreacting to the Eagles signing of Michael Vick

by Jesse28 on Aug 18, 2009 1:04 PM EDT reply actions 1 recs

excellent points, excellent post

it is very hard to leave the realm of fanhood and look objectively at the nba as a business. of course my team should spend the money to get the best free agents, I pay for those players….

but i was not trying to give all or even most of the credit to the owners. just pointing out that calling them laughable, idiotic, etc. which many have done is a bit over done considering the facts.

by hawksdawgs on Aug 18, 2009 7:49 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Still

you can’t say this is a model ownership group since we’ve spent the past 3 years trying to answer the question, “Who actually owns this team?” and a judge just said, “That’s still to be determined.”

There’s a serious crisis of identity of when the entire ownership issue spends that long in limbo. At some point, good ownerships requires a stable identity.

I can’t say that I’m anything but impressed with their willingness to spend money this offseason, but I also don’t feel that negates the two years prior, where uncertain ownership was at least one factor in allowing a quality NBA player (Childress) to be lost without any recompense. And the way Speedy Claxton has been handled (ie, he wasn’t allowed to play so that insurance would cover his deal) also speaks to questionable ownership.

by Bronn on Aug 18, 2009 10:49 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

I’m not sure I understand why several people seem to be upset that they didn’t play Speedy towards the end of last year. I understood why they wouldn’t want to play him. The man was a walking wart. I never expected him to play. And if we saved some money off insurance by not playing a guy that would have to be rounded into playing shape at the end of the year while we were still fighting for the 4th seed, then I wouldn’t really want him to play.

It’s hard to blame them for the Childress thing too. Childress did something that no one had ever done before. Why would anyone expect the ASG to predict how things went down. Technically yes. it was a mistake, but even so, that still doesn’t make Chill worth the money it would have taken to outbid Olympiakos.

I just don’t get the outrage about either of those things. I’m pretty sure if they were done by the Spurs, then no one would be blaming Ownership.

by thirdfALCON on Aug 19, 2009 5:52 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

Hmm

I don’t think we would have had to outbid Olympiakos because by all accounts the money wasn’t the most important issue for Childress. He wanted to be a starter and Woody wanted him to come off the bench. He obviously is not worth the 15mil he is making with Olympiakos and I’m sure both parties understood that.

by Jesse28 on Aug 19, 2009 7:39 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

OK

for the sake of argument I’ll pretend that’s 100% true.

Even so, is it good policy to let a player dictate playing time during contract negotiations?

by thirdfALCON on Aug 19, 2009 2:43 PM EDT up reply actions 0 recs

That's not what my point was

I’m not trying to argue, just stating that Childress made it known that if he wasn’t going to start that he didn’t want to play for the Hawks. At the time he was out-performing Marvin and he believed that he should be starting ahead of Marvin. Obviously, it’s not in the team’s interest to let a player dictate anything during contract negotiations.

I just don’t think we would have had to overpay him or even compete with Olympiakos if Woodson would have been open to starting Childress. Olympiakos is the one who overpaid for him to leave the NBA.

by Jesse28 on Aug 20, 2009 8:29 AM EDT up reply actions 0 recs