Who's leading the Hawks?
Divisions exist between vets, younger players
By SEKOU SMITH
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 12/02/05
It is clear the Hawks have a locker room divided, between players separated by years of service if not by age, and it threatens to torpedo their season.
Locker room chemistry is a problem for the 2-12 Hawks, by far the NBA's youngest team with an average age of 23.5 years. On one side are veterans Joe Johnson, Al Harrington, Tony Delk and Zaza Pachulia. On the other side are the eight players with a year or less of NBA experience.
Johnson, a co-captain and the Hawks' $70 million free agent acquisition, accepts blame for allowing things in the locker room to deteriorate. He also acknowledged that he has felt pressure to lead such an inexperienced group.
"I just think we're not a unit, we're not a unit at all," said Royal Ivey, a second-year point guard. "You can't win like that. We've got to have some leadership, some kind of glue to keep us together. And it's something that has to be amongst us, not coaches or anyone else outside our locker room.
"There's nobody there right now to take over and step up and command people and hold people accountable."
"How can you say anything is together when you're losing like this?" co-captain Harrington said.
"We've got to grow up, man, all of us, not just one group or the other," Johnson said.
In captains Johnson and Harrington, the Hawks have players with a combined 11 years in the NBA.
In the teen-free NBA of yesteryear, captains usually were 11-year veterans. But that league is a faded memory for people like Hawks coach Mike Woodson, whose future likely depends on his players' ability to repair their fractured locker room culture.
"I've got to trust, as a coach, that Joe, Al, the veteran guys that are captains and the veteran guys around those captains, are policing that locker room," Woodson said. "They not only have to make sure those [young] guys do what they're supposed to do, they have to live up to those standards, as well."
Woodson called out his captains and Pachulia after Tuesday night's loss to Houston for the selfish offensive play against the Rockets, making it clear that he won't exonerate his older players.
Harrington said the culprit for most of the discontent, amongst both young and older, is the losing.
"When you're losing there are no positives that come from that," Harrington said. "And I've never seen nothing like this before. This is my second year dealing with it. But you can never find any positives."
Still, Harrington insists that whatever locker room issues exist — and to a man the players understand that there's a connection missing — it's not to the point that they genuinely don't like or care about one another.
"There's no real beef in there," he said. "There's no physical tension between us. Nobody can say I don't pass somebody the ball because I don't like him. It's just a lot of times, during the course of a game people want to, with good intentions, try to do it alone. They want to do it and I think the wrong people try and do that."
Johnson knows it's up to he and Harrington to take the initiative now, before it gets any worse.
"I think it's a situation where me or Al has to jump down somebody's throat," he said. "Or maybe it's me jumping down Al's throat or Al jumping down my throat. Maybe we have to make an example out of ourselves to show everybody else that ultimately it's up to us to make this thing right."
At the same time, Johnson said every man in the locker room, has to recognize the responsibility they have in fixing the problem and get to work.
"Our attitudes have to be together," Johnson said. "We can't be happy go lucky and patting each other on the [butt] when we win a game or two, and then when we lose a few games everybody has got there head between their legs. . . . This is our job, we're professionals. And we have to start acting like it."
Can the problem be fixed in time for the Hawks to salvage their season?
"It can," second-year forward Josh Childress said, "but guys have got to buy into it. And I'm talking about everybody. Right now we have that separation. But they [veterans] need us like we need them. For us to work and for us to win and be competitive, we have to have everybody playing together.
"And I wish it was a simple as us having a meeting or sitting down and talking about, but I don't think it is. All of our actions will speak louder than any one person's words."
