As reporters gush over the winner that the “patient” Atlanta Hawks have created for themselves, jubilant GM Rick Sund told chTONGUEeek today that “he’s got to give credit where credit is due – I’d like to take this opportunity to thank God for the decade of incompetence that allowed us to create the modestly successful team that we have today.” As he went on to explain:

If you look at the success of the Atlanta Hawks today – including almost making it out of the first round last season, and the possibility this season of defeating a team of Dwayne Wade, two corpses, and several rookies who might be hung over – there are two distinct moves that clearly put us over the top, er, into the middle. One was acquiring Mike Bibby to man the PG position, and the other was drafting Al Horford to be our stud of front. Any way you slice it, there is no way this dynamic combination could have happened without a full decade of total managerial incompetence. Not only that, but how we got both players, and why we needed them, is highly correlated, which really shows the complexity of what it takes to create a team destined for mediocre success.

Let me explain. There’s simply no way you get a young Buck, er, Hawk like Al Horford (11 ppg, 9 rpg) without a top-3 pick in the 2007 draft. Securing that position required a two- year incompetence plan – drafting Shelden Williams (4 ppg, 3 rpg) ahead of Brandon Roy (22 ppg, 5 rpg, 5 apg) in 2006, and Marvin Williams (14 ppg, 6 rpg) ahead of Chris Paul (23 ppg, 11 apg) and Deron Williams (19 ppg, 11 apg) in 2005. Switch either of those picks, and not only are we not in the position to land Horford, but we have no spot for Mike Bibby to fill – Roy, Paul, or D. Williams would just be in the way. Boy did we ever dodge one, or I suppose three, there.

But don’t get me wrong – it took far more than two drafts worth of incompetence to make the Magic, er, Hawks you see before you today. We had to plant the seeds for needing Al Horford a long time before that. If you’ll recall, back at the start of the century we traded a couple of first round picks, including what turned out to be the #8 pick in 2002 – where we could have taken someone like, say, Amare Stoudamire (21 ppg, 8 rpg) – for Lorenzen Wright (1.4 ppg, 1.5 rpg). That’s right, you heard me correctly, Lorenzen Wright. That’s the type of commitment we’re talking about here. But while he had the appropriate amount of sucktitude for our long-term plans, his youth kind of scared us, so then we packaged him with our #3 pick in 2001 – some Spaniard named Pau Gasol (19 ppg, 10 rpg)- for Shareef Abdur-Rahim (whereabouts unknown), who was last seen playing shuffleboard in Orlando.

So if you piece that all together, you see the kind of 10-year plan a franchise of Atlanta’s caliber needs. If we hadn’t parlyed the ability to acquire Amare Stoudamire and Pau Gasol into a player of Shareef Abdur-Rahim’s lack of caliber, we wouldn’t have had the need for Al Horford. And without the need for Al Horford, we wouldn’t have been able to bypass Chris Paul and Deron Williams in order to make room for Mike Bibby. Ask anyone in “the know”, and I guarantee that they’ll agree we wouldn’t be fighting tooth-and-nail with Miami right now if we’d went the other way.