National Media Thoughts

[ATL DirtyBird]

http://blogs.ajc.com/jeff-schultz-blog/ ... hultz_blog

Sad.
I didnt appreciate the Orlando Sentinel article. He questions the fans, but why show up for a team and franchise like this? There are reasons the fans dont show.

[HMFFL]

The attendance was 18,729 in game three and has been high throughout the playoffs. A few weeks ago I created a thread about the attendance during the last ten regular season home games and the crowd showed up for those games.

Good to see Marvin is intelligent enough to realize:

“They deserve to be pissed off. The way we played, the fans deserve to be upset,” said Hawks forward Marvin Williams. “If your team lost by 30 in the playoffs, wouldn’t you be upset? If you get blown out like that, effort is always a factor.”

[evildallas]

“They deserve to be pissed off. The way we played, the fans deserve to be upset,” said Hawks forward Marvin Williams. “If your team lost by 30 in the playoffs, wouldn’t you be upset? If you get blown out like that, effort is always a factor.”

That's more like what Joe should have said.

I agree with you about the Orlando Sentinel article. He was off-target with his fan criticism. The fans showed up ready to chant Defense and Let's Go Hawks and boo the magic, but the team didn't give enough of a glimmer of hope for the fans to rally behind. There weren't many empty seats on Saturday in spite of the 2 big losses in game 1 and 2. If the team had managed to stay in the game at all the fans might have made a difference, but the 1st quarter the margin was 10, at halftime it was 19. When the booing started it seemed to be in response to the effort in my opinion.

[evildallas]

I'm damn tired of people in National Media assuming that the Atlanta fans aren't showing up to games. We've had good turn out on Saturday and it isn't lack of attendance that let the Joe Johnson situation.

[HMFFL]

Game four even had over 18K, but some chose not to attend.

The writers probably never think to actually look up the more recent games to see how many fans are actually showing up to watch the Hawks.

[evildallas]

It was Mike Wilbon who pushed me over the edge this time. He was just being completely lazy with respect to discussing the Joe Johnson comment about the fans. Assuming that lack of fan attendance was the reason for any outburst. It was lazy and irresponsible.