The Atlanta Hawks are on the short list of hipster Twitter’s favorite teams to watch this coming season. They’re not contenders, very clearly, but they’re going to be fun as hell, and their combination of roster and cap space lets you dream on something truly special developing in the not-too-distant future.
“We’re not getting ahead of ourselves,” Hawks president of basketball ops and general manager Travis Schlenk told CBS Sports. “But obviously we feel good about the direction we’re going.”
This positive direction, of course, hasn’t yet led to any real results. The Hawks won 24 games two seasons ago. They won 29 last year. As with so many young teams, Atlanta’s hat is hanging on perhaps the scariest word in all of sports: Potential. The reality, as we sit less than a week out from the start of the 2019-20 season, is the Hawks are a bad team, but they have the potential to be a really good team, perhaps in relatively short order.
Indeed, if the Hawks are going to go from potentially good to actually good, it has to start with Trae Young, who so far has largely validated the monumental risk Schlenk took in trading for him back on draft night, 2018. Young cost the Hawks Luka Doncic, who looks like a surefire superstar in Dallas — which also sent its 2019 first-round pick to Atlanta in the deal.
That pick, No. 10 overall, became Cam Reddish, who one scout told CBS Sports was “the most talented player in the draft.” Atlanta, armed with multiple draft picks and the flexibility that comes with them, also traded the Nos. 8 and 17 picks to New Orleans to move up to No. 4 for DeAndre Hunter, who they feel fits perfectly with the versatility-rich roster it’s building.
“We really liked both [Hunter and Reddish] throughout the draft process,” Schlenk told CBS Sports. “And it went the other way, too. Both guys made it clear to us that they wanted to be here. That was important to us. As far as moving up, we just weren’t confident that DeAndre would still be there at eight. So we were pretty active in exploring ways to move up. I mean pretty simply, we went and got our guy. We weren’t going to wait around and hope things fell our way. We wanted to ensure that we got at least one of [Hunter and Reddish], and after that, we thought if things rolled right we had a good shot of getting both of them. It obviously worked out.”
This has been Schlenk’s blueprint from Day One: Pile up as many draft picks as possible because you’re not going to hit 100 percent on them. “You obviously have to make good decisions in the draft, but nobody gets them all right,” Schlenk said. “You have to give yourself multiple swings.” That was the impetus behind the Young-for-Doncic deal. The extra pick from the Mavericks was seen as the tiebreaker between two players the Hawks viewed as “pretty equal.”
Again, that logic looks pretty sound so far. Doncic is spectacular, and he had a better rookie year than Young, but not appreciably. Young closed the gap considerably in the second half, making believers out of even those who doubted him initially.
“I have to admit, I thought his defense would be a much bigger problem,” an Eastern Conference scout told CBS Sports. “I mean, he’s still a bad defender, but what I didn’t account for was him being so good offensively that it more than makes up for it. He’s so special with the ball in his hands. He’s a genius passer. He really is.”
Ironically, Schlenk is designing a team that will allow the Hawks to take the ball out of Young’s hands. Schlenk comes from Golden State, where he spent 13 years helping build that machine. He knows the value of having five guys on the court who can all handle, pass and shoot. Predictability is easily punished in the NBA. It’s the shots you don’t expect that kill you. The Warriors took Stephen Curry off the ball and watched defenses run themselves ragged trying to account for all his movement.
“We’ve been talking to Trae about moving without the ball from the first day he got here,” Schlenk said. “I remember him looking at me like I was crazy when I told him the hardest time to score in the NBA is when you have the ball, but it’s true. When you have the ball, you’ve got five sets of defensive eyes on you. When you don’t have the ball, you maybe have one set of eyes on you, the guy who’s guarding you, and there’s a good chance even he’s not paying full attention because he’s doing what? He’s looking at the ball.
“So, yeah, we spend a lot of time talking with Trae about that,” Schlenk continued. “Just trying to get him to realize if he gives it up, and then gets right into moving, he’s going to get great looks. But that’s only possible if you have other guys on the floor who can facilitate. I say it all the time, and it sounds so elementary, but if you have five guys on the court who can shoot, pass and dribble, you’re really hard to guard. But you look around the league, and there aren’t a lot of teams who can put five guys on the court that can do all three. They can maybe do one or two things, but not all three. We want as many guys as possible who can do all three.”
Enter Kevin Heurter, a known sniper who shot 39 percent from 3-point range as a rookie while also showing an ability to do things like this:
And this:
Enter Hunter, who comes out of Virginia as an elite defensive prospect on the wing, but also as a guy the Hawks believe has loads of offensive upside that he didn’t necessarily get to show in his more conservative, pattern-oriented college system.
“I think people really underestimate how good of a shooter he is,” Schlenk said of Hunter, who indeed shot 44 percent from 3 last season at Virginia and has already shown an impressive offensive arsenal this preseason. “We always envisioned [Hunter] as a guy in corner, stretching the floor, and with a guy like Trae making plays, he’s going to get a lot of shots we like him taking. He can put the ball on the floor. We feel there’s a lot there offensively. The thing with DeAndre is he’s going play the role he’s asked to play, and the way Virginia plays, he wasn’t asked to do some of the things we’ll ask him to do.”
The same goes for Reddish, a sweet-stroke shooter whose talent is unquestioned, but whose tendency to fade from the action in college, to just sort of disappear for stretches, was a universal pre-draft concern among scouts. Schlenk, again, believes much of that perceived passivity was circumstantial.
“At Duke, he was asked to basically be a spot-up shooter,” Schlenk said. “That was the first time in his life, coming up through AAU and high school ball, that he had to play without the ball. A lot of guys need the ball just to get into that rhythm, and when they don’t get it, they have a hard time adjusting. It’s easy to get sort of lost in the offense. I think for Cam, that was the cause of some of that passivity you’re talking about. Just that adjustment to not having the ball as much as he was used to.
“Now, with a guy like Trae running our team, obviously he’s not going to be a primary ball handler with us, either,” Schlenk went on. “But our objective is to have him be more of a facilitator and play with the ball as much as we can. Obviously you have to do both these days, but we feel like we can take advantage of his skill set by putting him in positions where he is more involved with the ball.”
Now you factor in John Collins, a potential budding All-Star who Schlenk raves about, and this is the exciting core of a team that is, for all intents and purposes, the youngest in basketball (only the 42-year-old Vince Carter is throwing their average age off). All the while, the Hawks are projected to have some $70 million in cap space next season. Jaylen Brown just reportedly turned down the Celtics‘ four-year, $80 million dollar offer on the belief that he can get more next summer. This is premature, but given Schlenk’s penchant for versatile two-way players, Brown would make a lot of sense.
That said, Schlenk is adamant he won’t use the Hawks’ cap space just because they have it.
“I think the biggest mistake teams make is they say, ‘Hey, we have all this cap space and we have to spend it on somebody,’ and they go out and get the wrong guy who doesn’t fit the culture or the system, or just isn’t worth the money, or whatever,” Schlenk said. “Cap space can be a little bit of fool’s gold in that way. What’s good for us is we have the space. That’s what every team is trying to create. Now, if the right guy presents himself, we can move, but if that doesn’t happen, it makes sense for us to keep being patient and adding assets by taking on come contracts and waiting for the right time.”
You start looking around the league at the teams who might have both the cap space and an intriguing enough roster to at least draw the interest of Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Atlanta has to be at least mentioned. We’ll obviously have to see how these young guys develop. But if indeed they start making the transition from potentially good to actually good, all the pieces are in place for a splash move.
“I haven’t given it much thought, but no, I don’t think it would be out of the question,” a league scout told CBS Sports about the possibility of Giannis, or any other big-time free agent, eventually considering Atlanta. “There’s no doubt they’re building something there. But we’ve said the same thing about a lot of young teams in the past, and where are most of those teams now? In the NBA, the gap between young and promising and even just becoming a playoff team is huge. Atlanta obviously has a long way to go.”
