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There is a picture. One that tells the story.
It's an image of two men. They're inside a courtroom. One man is sitting down, head half-slumped, looking somewhere between very PO'd and very defeated. The other man is standing over him but not above him. His face is that of arrogance and indignation. His expression says, "I just defeated your a**."
His hand is extended.
The other man does a Felipe Alou.
The moments following that moment tell the saga. One that played out over the next five days.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here's the grand that picture is worth.
*****
His name is Joe Johnson. He's the truth. Not Paul Pierce truth, but close.
This time last year, Johnson was not even the talk of Phoenix, let alone the NBA. After a 17.1 ppg free-agent season, during which he dropped 48 percent from 23 feet out, Johnson became the biggest silent story in sports this summer.
The month-long attempt to try to get him to relocate from PHX to ATL has become more comical than the Pamela Anderson roast that Comedy Central recently televised.
It's also become sad.
Trapped in between Joe and his quest to play basketball for the Hawks is the truth behind why Atlanta has fallen professionally (no disrespect to everyone from former And 1 legend Hot Sauce to Lovejoy High School prodigy Noel Johnson) below hell.
The place where that picture was taken.
And although Joe is not in the picture, the picture is all about him.
*****
His name is Allen van Gestel. He's the judge who waited for David Stern to get involved in the situation. In case you haven't heard, the Atlanta Hawks, the worst team in professional basketball, have an ownership that's maybe worse than the team they put on the floor last season.
The owners decided that Joe Johnson was worth $70 million and two first-round draft picks. They decided that Joe Johnson was the answer to all of their basketball problems. They decided that Joe Johnson was going to be their LeBron James.
Well, only two of them did.
Steve Belkin. He was the one owner who felt different. He felt that Joe Johnson wasn't worth all that, because in his mind (as opposed to the mind of Joe Quinn, the lawyer for the other two owners who compared Joe Johnson's arrival in Atlanta to Larry Bird's arrival in Boston), Joe Johnson wasn't all that.
When the asinineness clears, he's the one that might be right.
In the hustle of trying to bring the franchise back to (at least) conversation at run-n-shoot respectability, a disagreement broke out. Now, we all know businesses go through this on the regular. Every day, all day in Fortune 500 companies there are battles between owners.
Majority owners and equal-shared partners disagree on everything from the way their Inc. (or in this case LLC) should be run to the hiring of staff. Professional sports is no different. But rarely do these arguments become public. Smart businesses have a way of keeping all drama of this nature internal. Even the Clippers know how to do this.
But somehow Atlanta LLC couldn't. The incompetence of the parent company of the Hawks, the NHL Thrashers, and Philips Arena, where the teams play, allowed a petty disagreement over a mid-level free agent to get out. To the media and to the public.
