The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Point guard’s play is top factor in playoffs
Jeff Teague showed progress at point guard this season, but with improved play comes increased expectations.
If Jeff Teague exceeds expectations, so may the Hawks.
Everyone is behind Jeff Teague, pushing.
When the Hawks’ young point guard brings the ball up the floor, there are all these unseen hands goosing him with every step. Con- stant gusts of instruction — run harder, play faster, charge headlong into the defense — are at his back. His coach pushes. “We’re trying to get him to where he’s bringing that consistent attack mentality every single night — and that has not been the case,” Lar- ry Drew said. “Some nights he brings it, and some nights he doesn’t.” His teammates prod. “I tell him all the time after there are a few possessions where he’s not pushing it that he has to keep do-
ing it,” Joe Johnson said. “Even if [the opponents] make a basket, we still got to push it. He’s fast enough that we can take the ball out, and he still can beat everybody down the court.
“When he’s in attack mode, he keeps the defense on its heels and we get a lot of easy shots.”
Even from his Indianapolis easy chair, his father still spurs.
“When I’m at home watching and I catch him in a couple plays where he’s maybe not in attack mode, I’m kinda going at him then,” Shawn Teague chuckled.
Relentless are the voices trying to turn Teague into a ballistic missile and the kind of asset at point guard the Hawks have been searching for since they moved to Philips Arena.
Once the team traded Mookie Blaylock in 1999, the search for a trustworthy point guard became progressively more quixotic. That is only as ruinous as a football team unable to settle on a quarterback.
The Hawks famously passed on both Chris Paul and Deron Williams in the 2005 draft.
They wrung some of the last serviceable minutes from Mike Bibby. They tried to make Jason Terry something he wasn’t.
And for you to chew on and enjoy here are a few of the other guards who passed through town in the post-mookie period: Matt Maloney, Bimbo Coles, Speedy Claxton, Acie Law, Jacque Vaughn, Royal Ivey, Dan Dickau, Kenny Anderson, Anthony Johnson.
With Teague show-
“He’s fast enough that we can take the ball out, and he still can beat everybody down the court.”
Joe Johnson
Hawks guard
ing progress — his playing time shot up from 14 minutes a game last season to 33 this season — the Hawks are hoping they can call off the search.
If only they can push him to do more, to be more assertive, to transform his DEFCON 5 personality to a DEFCON 1 playing style.
Slight of build, with a choirboy countenance and as quiet as the front row at church, Teague enters no gym looking like a hardened leader of men.
No matter. It is the gym he must command. With the coming of the playoffs in general and of Boston’s Rajon Rondo specifically, the Hawks require that their 23-year-old point guard take a lead role.
“He makes us go. The way he pushes the basketball and plays the passing lanes defensively, it just turns us up a whole other level,” said the Hawk who otherwise gets most of the attention this time of year, Johnson.
Playoff success
Last season, Teague was the best thing to come out of the Hawks’ journey to the second round. Matched against Chicago and its MVP point guard Derrick Rose, Teague averaged 17 points and 4.4 assists in the series before injuring his wrist early in Game 6.
That was an illuminating performance for the team’s first draft pick of 2009. Having been a bit player as the Hawks went with experience (Bibby, Kirk Hinrich), Teague was thrown into the Bulls series after Hinrich was hurt. Surprise. He could actually play a little.
“It was more [proof ] for the coaching staff. I knew I could play,” Teague said.
As that postseason was a launching point, this one will serve to measure Teague’s progress and the distance he has yet to cover.
This is when the serious players are identified. “You make your name in the playoffs,” he said. Then he invoked the example of a guard he is particularly close to now.
“Like with Rondo a couple years back, ev- eryone fell in love with him in the playoffs [Rondo was instrumental in the Celtics’ 2008 title, and had three triple-doubles in the ’09 postseason],” he said. “The playoffs are just a special time of year.”
Teague has had some second-hand experience with winning large. Watching brother Marquis, the guard on John Calipari’s One-and-done All Stars (aka Kentucky) take the NCAA championship was exhilarating.
Imagine here the scene of the former Wake Forest Demon Deacon jumping around his Atlanta home, celebrating the night of April 2 in a pair of blue Kentucky shorts.
“He was doing an awful lot of bragging the next day. We had to remind him, ‘You didn’t go to Kentucky, Jeff,’ ” Hawks assistant Nick Van Exel said.
“I was just happy,” Teague said. “The whole family was happy.”
Those Wildcats were wire-to-wire favorites.
Postseason pressure
These Hawks are nobody’s pick to win a NBA title.
Johnson and Josh Smith are the Hawks’ marquee players, but a great deal of their postseason will be authored by the point guard.
Having survived two years of purgatory with a team that didn’t know exactly what to do with him, Teague now is leaned upon as a player from whom most good things must flow.
Point guard is sup- posed to be a differencemaking position, manned by the likes of Paul, Rose, Tony Parker and Steve Nash. “Those are the talents [Teague] wants to be mentioned in the same breath with,” Drew said.
The biggest sensation in the league this year? Jeremy Lin. A point guard.
The Hawks’ point guard went for a little more than 12 points and four assists per game this year, solid, but sparking no Lin-sanity type outbreaks.
Van Exel was brought in specifically to help ignite in Teague an aggressiveness that is not exactly inbred. His father and his coaches note that it is part of his personality to defer, to — as Drew said — “not allow his natural basketball instincts to take over, where he might pass up a shot or over-pass the ball.”
“But I see him getting better and better in that area,” Drew said.
Marquis Teague will soon join Jeff in the NBA, expected to be among the flood of Kentucky starters drafted in the first round.
His older brother’s advice comes from experience: “I don’t know where he’s going,” Jeff said, “but every team has a pretty decent point guard, so he’s going to have to work and wait for his opportunity.
“I told him I can almost guarantee you are going to have to go through the same thing I did. Just stay ready.”
Once the kid makes it, then he can join the crowd and start pushing Jeff Teague, too.