Monday, October 12, 2009

Pistons 100 Hawks 91

Boxscore

Highlights*

Drew compared the pre-season boxscore to a tarot card earlier this morning. It's an apt analogy. These games (there's a home game against Charlotte tonight at 7pm) largely provide Hawks fans the opportunity they missed earlier in the year (due to the organization choosing not to field a summer league team) to overreact to Jeff Teague's performance in games that don't count. News from an unseen pre-season game is sparse. Attempts to divine meaning tend to be fruitless when not simply meaningless. For example, I doubt there's any cause-and-effect relationship between the Hawks picking up Al Horford's 2010-11 option on Friday and Horford missing six of seven field goal attempts on Sunday. To imply such would shift this enterprise into an unnecessarily literary dimension with me ("me" ?) now serving as an unreliable narrator.

Nonetheless, here are the DNP's...
That last item means that Juan Dixon, Aaron Miles, and Courtney Sims got their first pre-season action. Miles's stat line was the most impressive/least unimpressive of the three. Sims played only 3:02 even with Joe Smith, Collins, and Siler sitting out which furthers my confusion about why the D-League MVP is spending his October trying to make this team.

In would-be returnees to the end of the bench watch news another decent performance from Othello Hunter gives him 23 and 12 in 45 minutes over the two pre-season games. Hunter has also refrained from fouling at the rate favored by Randolph Morris (five personal fouls in 8:43) and Mario West (seven in 35:16).

*Check out Rodney Stuckey v. an "electric bundle of energy" at the 1:06 mark. It's a lot easier to defend guys when they're dribbling out the clock than when they're trying to score.

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