Manning Ready for Market : After Playoffs, He’ll Hawk Wares as Top Free Agent

Danny Manning has moved out of the Brentwood home he was renting, has taken everything out of storage and has brought the wife and two kids down to Georgia for the final months of the season.

But he cannot really unpack. Sooner or later--the sooner being as early as this week if the Atlanta Hawks are eliminated from the NBA playoffs and the later being mid-June if they rally and advance to the finals--the family will return for the summer to the permanent digs in Kansas.

From there, Manning will conduct a Fourth of July weekend unlike anything this league has seen. Many of the 27 teams will be represented. It will be BYOM--bring your own money. Green fireworks.

No undesirables allowed, though. That means you, Donald Sterling and Andy Roeser of Exposition Park, and you, Larry Brown of Indianapolis. Likewise, teams facing anything resembling a two-year plan to reach .500 will not be welcome.

Those who make the cut will not be there in person, of course. But they will be in phone calls and faxes and offers through agent Ron Grinker in their quest to sign the player who is, perhaps, the most attractive free agent in league history, a rush that will start July 1.

Those who need the prototype power forward will go to Horace Grant. Those who want a two-time All-Star who today turns only 28, who is versatile enough to play power forward and small forward and who can score from every angle around the basket or handle the ball with uncommon skill for someone 6 feet 10 will call on Manning.

It might be of some comfort to the seekers that Manning is already well tested on the subject of crazy days (see: Clipper career, November 1988-February 1994). Consider his past: No. 1 draft choice. Contract holdout. The reconstructive knee surgery, the closely watched rehabilitation and the scrutiny that followed. The $25-million contract extension that almost materialized a year ago and could have made all of this a moot point. Larry Brown. Sterling.

The Hawks, by contrast, have turned out to be almost everything he had hoped, primarily a respite. Given the big advantage of being able to disregard the salary cap to re-sign their own players, they might also become his permanent basketball team. Manning still says he is Atlanta’s to lose. Not because of the money, but because of the last three months.

“It seems like everyone here is on the same page, moving in the same direction,” he said. “Whereas in L.A., it wasn’t like that all the time.

“It kind of takes me back to the days when I was growing up, because it’s a talented team and you just have to do your part. You have to go out and make sure you carry out your responsibilities out there. It’s not, ‘Well, I have to go out and score X amount of points for us to win.’ I just have to go out and play. If I play defense, I can contribute on that end and I’m going to score points in the transition, but I don’t have to score a whole lot.

“That’s fun for me, because every night I go out I try to see what our team needs and then try to give us that lift. In L.A., I felt I had to score for us to be competitive, and if I didn’t score, I felt Ron (Harper) had to score and Mark (Jackson) had to score big points. One of us had to score big points for us to be somewhat successful. But here, I don’t feel that way.”

His numbers have changed as much as his role since he was traded for Dominique Wilkins, the most popular and greatest Hawk, and a No. 1 pick. Manning went from averaging 23.7 points with the Clippers to 15.7 while playing only about 2 1/2 fewer minutes per game, an Atlanta scoring average that wouldn’t have come close to beating out Kevin Willis for tops on the team had he been there all season.

His shooting accuracy dropped from 49.3% to 47.6%. The only statistical area that increased was steals, in which he rose from a 1.26 average to 1.77, no surprise considering Atlanta’s emphasis on defense.

As for being the go-to guy, as with the Clippers? Yes, that was Manning on the bench for most of the crucial final five minutes of his first Hawk playoff game, a 93-88 loss to Miami, when Duane Ferrell played instead. Heat players were nearly unanimous on how Wilkins would have been much more dangerous in that situation.

That might only be the start of such talk. The Hawks will almost certainly be put in a position to defend the trade if they don’t climb out of the 3-1 hole against Indiana, especially after needing a fifth game to eliminate No. 8 Miami.

Summer vacation could begin as soon as tonight, and if it does, the strong Wilkins faction that remains around town will say the trade was why 1993-94, though filled with such lofty moments as tying the franchise record with 57 victories and winning the first Eastern Conference regular-season title in team history, ultimately ended in disappointment.

The Hawks have a counter argument: They were 18-7 with Manning in the lineup during the regular season, 72%, vs. 37-16, or 70%, before the deal.

“ ‘Nique is a nice guy,” Hawk Coach Lenny Wilkens said. “He worked hard. Hey, but what did they win while he was here? Nothing. And they didn’t show up in the stands, right? So what we did was in the best interest of the team, and it proved out. Our winning percentage went up, we got through the first round of the playoffs, here we are competing in this round. I say that there shouldn’t be any question at all.”

Hawk General Manager Pete Babcock said: “They’re both free agents. We don’t have the faintest idea whether we have a chance to sign Danny July 1 or not, not even a clue. We would have been in the same position we are anyway, which is why we made the deal. We thought we were no worse off and at least we have the experience with the 27-year-old for a few months and get a frame of reference for our own sake.”

No matter what happens, it was an aggressive move by the Hawks. They weren’t on Manning’s original short list and before the trade he wouldn’t give management an indication of their chances to keep him as an unrestricted free agent, making the move an even greater gamble. They tampered with team chemistry and fan loyalty by trading Wilkins and could end up with nothing to show for it.

The Hawks counted on Manning being impressed once he arrived, and he has been. He likes the coach. He likes last week’s announcement that they are planning to pick a site within the next 90 days for a new 20,000-seat arena, though he remembers with a laugh being with another team that talked a lot about that for 5 1/2 years and still hasn’t put a shovel into the ground. The key factor now is mood. If the fallout from early elimination turns him into the fall guy, he concedes that could play a role in his decision.

“That’s fair to say,” said Manning, who is doing his part by averaging 19.9 and 6.4 rebounds during the playoffs. “There are a lot of things that are going to weigh in on the decision-making and factor in.”

Starting July 1.