Billy Knight and his flightless Hawks...

Since taking over the Hawks in April 2003, Billy Knight has taken his team from a 35 win team to a 30 win team. While that represents an impressive negative five increase in the win column, we would be remise if we didn’t point out that the 30 wins represent a high water mark in King’s spectacular run as Hawks GM. While the Hawks do, seemingly, have talent on their roster, King has made pundits scoff as he acquired athletic wing after athletic wing, while finding nobody qualified to run the show. As Deron Williams tears up the Spurs, Hawks fans (all four of them), can’t help but dream of Williams penetrating and dishing to an open Joe Johnson. Instead they have Marvin Williams taking baby steps towards respectability. Personally, despite the great strides taken by Deron Williams this year, I’d still have selected Chris Paul, but lets be honest, either would have put Atlanta in the playoffs this year.

That was a bad, bad decision, but it probably wasn’t even among Knight's five worst choices since taking over as GM. Lets take a look at five of his most questionable moves.

5) Traded Rasheed Wallace to Detroit in a three team deal that sent Chucky Atkins, Lindsay Hunter, and Detroit’s first round pick to the Celtics, for Bob Sura, Chris Mills, Zeljko Rebraca, Bucks 2004 first round pick.

Along with Wallace, Detroit also received Mike James, essentially trading five irrelevant bench pieces for one very important bench piece, and Wallace. There’s very little question that without Wallace, Detroit doesn’t win Larry Brown’s only NBA title, nor are they in the conference finals for the fifth straight year. For Atlanta’s part, they finished the complicated job of clearing the roster of bloated contracts (a cleaning which began with the trade of Shareef Abdur Rahim and Theo Ratliff for Wallace), and they got a draft choice which they turned into Josh Smith, but all that cap space hasn’t really gotten them anywhere (see below), and while Smith could be awesome, he has yet to make this trade anything more than a downright landslide, first round victory for the Pistons.

4) Traded Jason Terry and Alan Henderson to the Mavericks for Antoine Walker and Tony Delk. Followed seven months later by Knight moving Walker to the Celtics for Gary Payton, Tom Gugliotta, Michael Stewart, 2006 Lakers’ pick which the Celtics owned.

Look, Terry isn’t the greatest player in the world, and he was something of a misfit on the Hawks, but he was their best player and they essentially traded him for more cap space and what eventually turned out to be the 21st pick in last years draft. Cap space does have value, but too much of it, in a weak year can lead to paying good players like great ones, and marginal ones like good ones. Knight has done both. The draft pick didn’t even really help, as Knight used it to help him overpay said player.

3) Signed Speedy Claxton to a four year, 25 million contract.

Speedy’s, well, Speedy’s not so speedy any more. Age and leg injuries have taken something from his legs, and since he was a borderline starting point guard to begin with, he’s much better suited to the bench. Unfortunately, Knight’s paying him to start, for three more years.

2) Drafted Sheldon Williams with the fifth pick in the draft, three spots before Rudy Gay, two before Randy Foye, and one spot before 2007 NBA ROY Brandon Roy. Williams was a massive stretch at five, he played exactly as pundits thought he would, giving the Hawks a solid workmanlike rotation big man. That’s great if the very next player hadn’t been Roy. Again, Knight showed a complete lack of understanding of relative value and it cost his team. They should have just drafted Roy, but at worst they should have moved down to ninth before drafting a player nobody had near the top five.

1) Traded Boris Diaw, that Lakers pick, and their own number one (top three protected this year, unprotected next year) in a sign and trade for Joe Johnson.

This was a harebrained idea to begin with. For starters, Knight wanted Johnson to come be the Hawks point guard, which despite his gifted passing is something he was never going to be successful at, since he isn’t good at penetrating. Second, they surrendered a considerable amount of assets considering, 1) Johnson had already made it clear he didn’t want to return (and be the fourth wheel) to Phoenix, and 2) Phoenix wasn’t going to add a fourth ten plus million salary to their already top heavy roster. So, they overpaid to overpay Johnson. Which isn’t to say that Johnson isn’t a great player, because he is, but just because he rolled with Carmelo, LeBron and Dwayne Wade in Japan last summer doesn’t mean he actually rolls in their basketball class. He’s a very good shooter, who defends well, but isn’t great at creating his own shot or getting to the line. A salary of around 10 million would have been more in line with what he provides, 12 would have made sense given that the Hawks were terrible and terrible teams often have to overpay for talent. Instead Johnson is making an average of 14 million per, which means he’s the big enchilada, and the man on who’s shoulders the team’s poor results should rest. This deal sent the Hawks ownership group into an ugly power struggle that continues to handicap the franchise, making you wonder if Joe Johnson was worth all of that.

Why does any of this matter? Because the East is so pathetic that with a competent offseason, not even a good one, but a competent one, the Hawks could put themselves in position to challenge for a playoff spot in the East. That in turn will lessen the effects of the Johnson trade (it doesn’t make it any better of a trade, it just would make the Hawks lucky it wasn’t worse), by keeping next year’s pick from being a lottery choice. It wont take a lot really, just some astute choices in this year’s draft, but then would you want Billy Knight making those decisions?