Joe Johnson’s Agent (?!) Reveals He’ll Re-Sign With Hawks On HuffPo (?!?!?!)

Glenn Davis | 12:52 pm, July 5th, 2010

This is one of the more unusual ways we’ve seen NBA news break. Joe Johnson, the Atlanta Hawks free agent who was arguably the fourth-best player available this offseason, is going to re-sign with his current team. Though suspected for days, the official confirmation was still a surprise – because it happened in a blog entry on the Huffington Post by Johnson’s agent, Arn Tellem.

Tellem is a regular contributor at HuffPo, and used his latest entry to subtly break the Johnson news in the guise of a column that essentially a love letter to/promo puff piece for Johnson. He inconspicuously buries the re-signing news at the end of the third paragraph, but uses most of the column to take a look at Johnson’s career.

He recalls a day before the 2001 draft (in which Johnson was taken 10th overall), when Michael Jordan predicted Johnson could be the best player in the entire draft. Tellem says that “with the possible exception of Pau Gasol…Joe has fulfilled Jordan’s prophecy.”

There’s nothing wrong with this, but he starts stretching a bit more when he says that “as a dynamic Mr. Inside/Mr. Outside duo, [Johnson] and his young teammate Al Horford rank statistically just behind Kobe Bryant and Pau Gasol.”

Bryant/Gasol combined in 2009-10: 45.3 points per game, 16.7 rebounds per game, 8.4 assists per game
Johnson/Horford combined in 2009-10: 35.5 points per game, 14.5 rebounds per game, 7.2 assists per game

Johnson and Horford are fine players, but Bryant and Gasol they’re not. There’s no shame in not living up to the Lakers tandem, the best such duo in the NBA, but comparisons to them ultimately fall flat. There’s also the part where Tellem talks about how Johnson focused on the Bulls and the Knicks in addition to the Hawks:

Chicago offered him a chance to play with the brilliant point guard Derrick Rose and a tough young center, Joakim Noah. A further incentive: the roster included Joe’s great friend Jannero Pargo, one of his college teammates. New York has Mike D’Antoni, the coach who nurtured Joe in Phoenix. Joe loved playing for D’Antoni and was excited by the possibility of joining him in New York. It seemed like a perfect match: a tenacious player who never naps on court in the city that never sleeps.

Forced New York analogy at the end there aside, Tellem predictably overlooks that there are a couple players named LeBron and Dwyane that the Bulls and Knicks might want just a tad bit more than Johnson. Tellem does mention LeBron in the last line of his column, but only in a fruitless (tongue-in-cheek?) pitch to get him to look at the Hawks.

For what it’s worth, this more unbiased take on Johnson’s impending Hawks from Yahoo! NBA blog Ball Don’t Lie deal takes a decidedly tougher view of the deal – in fact, author Kelly Dwyer opened her post with:

It’s never a good sign when, a full week before a player is set to put pen to paper to ink his most recent contract, that a good portion of the NBA community regards that contract as the worst it has ever seen.

Tellem did not mention this in his post. And while his years of experience at the forefront of the highest level of sports business make him an intriguing commentator on the issues of the day, writing columns that serve as pure PR for his own interests (something he does often, it seems) seems a waste of Tellem’s insights.

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