2019-20 Review: Evaluating the Hawks' Future After A Rocky Season
The Hawks’ season, like the rest of the NBA, currently hangs in limbo, waiting for the next steps of a global health crisis to determine its fate. Basketball likely won’t return until June, and every update on the situation makes it seem increasingly unlikely it will continue at all. Atlanta has 15 games left on its schedule, none of which will materially affect the larger picture of the team. The Hawks’ season was inconclusive long before the threat of a global pandemic cut it short. It will be defined by what could have been, inscrutable in its turmoil, leaving observers wondering what to make of the results.
A lack of available bodies kept the Hawks from ever playing at full strength -- and thus, from ever putting together a representative sample of games. We can gather general information about individual players -- like Trae Young’s surge into stardom, Cam Reddish’s gradual improvement, or John Collins’ strong second half -- but very little about the collective outcome, or how it might translate to the 2021 season. What does it matter how the Hawks defended with Damian Jones on the court? Or how well they shot with DeAndre’ Bembry and Vince Carter filling 35 minutes a night on the wing? How much stock can one really put into a season like this one?
What data the Hawks could collect was not positive. They had as many wins (20) as 15-point losses and never won more than two games in a row. Despite Young becoming one of the NBA’s most powerful offensive engines, Atlanta finished the year ranked 26th in points per possession and dead last in 3-point shooting. The Hawks committed the third-highest share of turnovers in the league, grabbed the fifth-lowest percentage of defensive rebounds, and committed the second-most fouls, according to Cleaning the Glass. Most of those problems were even worse before the team restructured its rotation at the trade deadline. Add it all up, and Atlanta finished with a bottom-five offense and defense, and the third-worst point differential in the NBA.
Those marks partly reflect failure by the front office to round out the roster with the right complementary pieces and maximize what Young does best. Rather than surrounding Young and Collins with capable rotation players -- namely a competent backup point guard and a serviceable starting center -- Travis Schlenk left the team understaffed at both positions, which made it perilously thin beyond its top three or four players. The Hawks had little defensive backbone and even less offensive direction when Young went to the bench. Bembry and Evan Turner insufficiently manned backup point guard duties early in the season before the team pivoted to Jeff Teague; Atlanta relied on Jones and Bruno Fernando for alarmingly large portions of games. Schlenk couldn’t have known Young would ascend this quickly and has owned up to some of his failings last offseason. But a slightly more meticulously orchestrated summer would have done more to put Atlanta within striking distance of a playoff spot in the diluted Eastern Conference.
The trade deadline served as something of a correction for those offseason mistakes, though Atlanta will see more returns from those moves in the long term than it did in the immediate. Teague provided 20 minutes of competent play at a position that demands it, and the acquisitions of Dewayne Dedmon and Clint Capela turned a position of severe weakness into one of clear strength entering next season. But Capela didn’t play due to plantar fasciitis, and right elbow soreness limited Dedmon’s effectiveness on offense, leaving the Hawks only wondering how a fully-formed rotation would look.
Even an alternate timeline and a more talented roster wouldn’t have guaranteed postseason contention this year. No matter who filled out the rotation, Atlanta was always going to have one of the youngest rosters in the league and lean on two rookies for significant minutes on the wing. It’s difficult to win that way, no matter how many veteran role players a team has. There was little Schlenk or Lloyd Pierce could have done to prevent Kevin Huerter from suffering two nagging injuries early in the year or Collins from violating the NBA’s anti-drug program -- both of which helped torpedo Atlanta’s season before it really got off the ground.
No matter what the cause of the losses, they piled up quickly and caused frustration within the team. The Hawks strung together two separate 10-game losing streaks during a 4-27 stretch early in the year. A beleaguered Pierce and his players expressed verbal and visible exasperation after losses, and multiple reports in December highlighted minor turmoil within the team. The mental and emotional toll of losing -- even in the franchise’s best long-term interest -- has a way of widening even the smallest fissures in a locker room. That can be missed from the outside, where success is often measured by a team’s lottery odds, but that emotional weight has real effects on the players themselves.
Atlanta had just begun to right the ship (by this season’s standards) behind a second-half surge from Reddish and the best basketball of Collins’ career, and we may never know how the final 15 games might have played out. Even if they wouldn’t have changed the outcome or perception of the season, those games could have offered time for the Hawks to develop their young nucleus and lay the foundation for next season. Atlanta has one of the most potent offensive catalysts in the entire league under team control for at least the next six seasons, and a cast of complementary players theoretically suited to augment his strengths and mitigate his weaknesses.
With Young, Huerter, Reddish, Hunter, and Collins on the floor, the Hawks scored 1.21 points per possession and held opponents to just 1.11. That provided not only a needed on-court boost, but proof of concept for Schlenk’s vision for the team. “We honestly see those numbers as being the floor,” Huerter told SI in February. “We’re gonna get better.” Atlanta’s offense could conceivably reach great enough heights that the defense need only be passable for the Hawks to become a perennial playoff team during Young’s prime. That kind of leap likely won’t happen next season, but the Hawks should see meaningful improvement on both ends of the floor as young players progress and veterans join the rotation in the offseason.
“We know what we have returning, and we’ll look to see what else is added,” Pierce said earlier this month. “But the guys we have returning have been together enough, enjoy being with each other, believe that they’re a playoff team and want it.”
