FanHouse Joe Johnson

Every night there are some stupendous, silly, stupid, or downright outlandish individual lines from around the lig. Doing Lines lets you know which one tops the list.

It's not every day that we get to see a player hit for 40 points or more in an NBA game. So on Sunday, when we had three different players meet or surpass the mark, it's definitely something worth discussing.

Especially when two of them did it in the same game.

Joe Johnson wants to believe that his Atlanta Hawks are on the verge of being contenders in the Eastern Conference. They should be getting close.

But going into the start of the NBA's regular season next week, Johnson isn't so sure anymore.

"Sometimes, I can't tell if we really want it,'' Johnson told FanHouse after his Hawks were embarrassed by a 37-point loss Friday night in their final exhibition game by the Orlando Magic. "It's discouraging. Sometimes, you never know what you're going to get from this team. And that won't work.''

Since arriving in Atlanta in 2005, Joe Johnson has been the resident star of the Hawks. Josh Smith draws the oohs and aahs with the highlight reel dunks and eye-popping stat lines, but Johnson has been the only player to really approach greatness, his finest moment coming in the 2007 playoffs, which we mentioned a few days ago.

It's long been expected that Johnson would sign an extension within the last few weeks, to lock him up with the Hawks for the forseeable future, without any question of him going elsewhere in the summer of 2010.

Turns out: not so much.

Tip-Off Timer counts down the days until the first game of the 2009-10 season. On Tuesday, there are 35 days remaining.

Joe Johnson begins his eighth season in the NBA this year. During that time, he's barely scratched the radar of the average NBA fan. His biggest anecdote prior to 2007 was the fact that he was injured during a critical Phoenix playoff run. When he went to Atlanta, it was like he dropped off the face of the planet.

But in the spring of 2008, if only for a moment in the public's eye, Joe Johnson made himself a known man.

Every Tuesday this offseason, two of our NBA experts will go at it with a Debate in the Paint. This week, the topic is LeBron James and what he should do next summer when he becomes an unrestricted free agent.

LeBron James is no fool. Starting this season with uncertainty over his pending free agency would doom the Cleveland Cavaliers, bury them under a sea of unhealthy rumors.

Accentuated by Shaquille O'Neal playing alongside him, basketball would become more circus than serious in Cleveland this season.

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All your oases are mirages. Word spread this afternoon that a ruling in the interminable fight within the ownership group of the NBA's Hawks and NHL's Thrashers had been handed down from the glorious mountaintop (or Maryland's Court of Special Appeals, at least). Sekou Smith of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution translated the opinion, and came up with this:

"The partners are now placed back in the same position they were in before August 2005."

The judge in the case tossed out the ownership group's 2005 agreement on how to proceed with a buy-out of lightning rod Steve Belkin's share as "too vague." Belkin, you may remember, fought with the other seven owners of the teams over such vital issues as team plane access, arena tickets and public speaking engagements. Oh, also, the Joe Johnson trade.

There's some interesting chatter today about Joe Johnson potentially signing an extension this summer with the Hawks, choosing long-term security over rolling the dice as an unrestricted free agent in the summer of 2010.

Any way you look at it, the move makes sense. He'll be 29 years old next summer, much closer to the end of his prime than the more highly prized trio of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, meaning he'd be the fourth-place prize (at best) among teams clearing salary cap room.

ORLANDO -- The Summer of 2010, which was supposed to be the mother load of all NBA free-agent classes, won't be the thriller that many anticipated.

The free spending just won't exist, according to several league executives and agents at the Orlando Pro Summer League Thursday.

News this week that the league is anticipating a dramatic drop in both the salary cap and the punitive luxury tax threshold for the 2010-11 season has sent a chill through every team in the league.

Although almost half the NBA teams had been shuffling future contracts to clear salary cap space in anticipation of a free agent feeding frenzy in 2010, many of those plans are looking rather bleak today.

You know, Billy Knight may have gotten a bad rap. We'll need to reassess his Atlanta legacy at some point. Among other solid draft picks (Josh Smith, Al Horford) and signings (Joe Johnson), the 2008 trade for Mike Bibby -- Knight's final move at the helm of the Hawks -- looks pretty good right now.

Bibby will ink a three-year, $18 million deal with Atlanta, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, leaving the Hawks backcourt in decent shape for the next few seasons.

FanHouse fixes a decade of draft-day blunders in Revisiting the NBA Draft.

After two putrid drafts, the NBA returned to form in 2001 -- but not right away. This draft will forever be known as the day Michael Jordan transformed from the greatest player on Earth to a below average general manager. With the No. 1 overall pick, Jordan held the fate of the Washington Wizards in the same hands that dunked on many of opponent, and he had a rich variety of players for which to don the savior of the franchise.

And he chose Kwame Brown. It really wasn't Kwame's fault. He was the victim of an amazing workout that impressed Jordan so much -- was this thing on video? -- that Air was convinced Brown would emerge as an All-Star. The brutal truth is that this prep player from Georgia faded into one of the biggest busts in draft history, hanging out in the same club as LaRue Martin, Joe Barry Carroll and Michael Olowokandi.