The Hawks' bizarro season

Nobody has had so many things go so right and so wrong.

The Atlanta Hawks have had one of the most distinctly barbell-shaped seasons I can remember. So many things have gone right. So many things have gone wrong. Naturally, as of this writing, they’re exactly .500 — but the team is so much more interesting than that! In lieu of my more traditional breakdowns, I wanted to highlight some things on each end of the spectrum.

(And in an act of reprehensible SEO self-sabotage, we won’t be discussing any iconic cultural institutions — although I did giggle when I saw that they were playing the Orlando Magic on Magic City Night. Naturally. The Hawks have always had a creative ops team.)

What’s gone right?

Jalen Johnson

Any discussion of Atlanta’s best moments this season starts with Jalen Johnson, the fifth-year point forward who supernova’d even before Trae Young was dealt (in just nine games with Young this season, Johnson had averaged 25 points, nine rebounds, and seven assists on 63% true shooting).

Although Johnson hasn’t quite maintained that scoring efficiency for the season, he stayed healthy and was a no-brainer All-Star thanks to his Hungry Hippo rebounding, slingshot passing, and a relentless downhill style that consistently earns layups and free throws. Few players have as many options on the fast break; even fewer use them better. There’s an ease to his athleticism. He doesn’t jump so much as glide:

Johnson’s three-pointer is still a question mark (he’s down to 34% from deep on slightly below-average volume), but it’s at least functional. And the other parts of his offensive game have blossomed.

Reminder: Johnson is on an absolute bargain of a contract that pays him a flat $30 million for four more years after this one. Health will always be a concern, but that little contract for this much talent is a major competitive advantage.

Nickeil Alexander-Walker

Johnson has been flanked by another of the year’s breakout players, Nickeil Alexander-Walker. NAW was an offseason steal, signing a four-year, $61 million deal that looked decent at the time but has since become one of the league’s best.

Performances that would’ve been outliers in previous seasons have become standard. To wit: Alexander-Walker had five 20+ point games last season for the Timberwolves. He matched that by his 13th bout in an Atlanta jersey, and he’s averaging 19.8 points on the season on above-average positional efficiency.

While the pull-up three-pointer remains a work in progress (just 29% on the year), Alexander-Walker has shown a startling amount of shifty self-creation inside the arc:

Both Johnson and NAW have allowed their defense to slip as their offensive production exploded, but that’s undoubtedly a trade the Hawks will accept for now.

Okongwu’s mask

Onyeka Okongwu has had his finest season as a pro by far. 16 points per game while shooting 39% from deep on 5.4 attempts per game is no joke, and while the box score numbers don’t show it, this is the first season I’ve really felt comfortable with his defense (after all, the defensive talent around him is largely lacking). I was a little skeptical of Okongwu despite a hot streak that started in the second half of last season. I was wrong.

But I’m not really here to talk about Okongwu the player, as nice a story as that is. Instead, I’m here to talk about The Mask.

No, not the Jim Carrey vehicle. I’m talking about this thing:

Okongwu got some chiclets knocked out thanks to a flagrant elbow from Jaylen Brown, and this demonic contraption is what the medical staff decided would be most protective post-dental surgery. It sure looks scary!

That mask will be in my nightmares long after I’ve forgotten the rest of this season, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Trades (Part I)

We’ve already discussed NAW’s impact as a sign-and-trade with the Timberwolves.

A more recent deal for Jonathan Kuminga was generally met with shrugs around the league, but I was a little higher on it than most and remain encouraged. Kuminga has only played three games for Atlanta, and he still looks reluctant to fire from deep. But he’s averaging 21/8/3 while playing confident, carefree ball and racking up monster plus/minuses (against bad teams, to be fair). I’ve seen him smile more in three games than I did in the last three years with Golden State.

Kuminga’s fit with another shaky shooter in Johnson remains to be seen (they’ve only shared the court for a handful of minutes), but they have completely different roles on offense. And with that infamous team option going into next year, the Hawks can spend the rest of the season evaluating Kuminga’s long-term place on the squad without needing to sweat too much.

At worst, the Kuminga bet is a worthy flier given that they were able to offload Kristaps Porzingis (don’t worry, KP is coming up in a different section). It hasn’t taken long for people to remember why Kuminga was such an exciting prospect in the first place:

And the team is yet to reap the dividends of its draft-day heist with the Pelicans that resulted in the team obtaining New Orleans’ unprotected 2026 first-round pick (or Milwaukee’s, depending on which is more advantageous to Atlanta) in exchange for moving down a few spots in the 2025 draft.

N’awlins spent most of the season in the basement. But as the sole terrible team still trying to win, they are, of course, hot right now — 6-4 in their last 10. They currently have the sixth-worst record in the league, but they only have five games left against tanking teams. They might be able to claw out six or seven more wins down the stretch, which would likely place them as the seventh- or eighth-worst team.

The Pelicans coming in eighth from the bottom would give the Hawks a ~26% chance at getting a top-four pick, and almost certainly a top-10 selection at worst (in addition to the more modest chances offered by Milwaukee’s potential pick). That could give Atlanta one more major building block to pair with the rest of its promising young core.

What went wrong?

Trae Young

The Trae Young of it all is hard to pin down. Young had clearly lost all value around the league, and the team wasn’t excited to pay him a large extension in the offseason. Still, losing a longtime franchise pillar in exchange for CJ McCollum and Corey Kispert can’t feel great (even if I just pegged CJ McCollum as my Sixth Man of the Quarter).

Young meant a lot to Atlanta Hawks fans. Now, he’s just a bittersweet memory. That’s a bummer.

Zaccharie Risacher

Of more immediate concern is the play of last year’s number-one pick, Zaccharie Risacher. His stats, both surface-level and advanced, are eerily similar to his rookie season, yet just-so-slightly worse in nearly every way. At his best, Risacher is a connective-tissue jack of all trades who can do virtually anything on a court. Unfortunately, we seldom see his best, and he’s recently been benched for McCollum to put more shooting and spacing on the wood and make things easier for Johnson and Kuminga.

I like Risacher, particularly as a versatile defender with solid help and playmaking instincts around the rim. A stint on the pine could be what he needs to find his footing and confidence, and at 20 years old, there’s still plenty of time for improvement. The expectations of being the number-one pick have never done him any favors.

But fair or not, he was the number-one pick. Even if he was selected to be a high-end 3-and-D guy, not a superstar, he hasn’t made meaningful strides toward that role yet.

Dyson Daniels

While Risacher has stagnated, Dyson Daniels has gotten significantly worse in important ways.

Daniels is still a premier perimeter defender, but much of his value comes from the swipes he generates, and his steal rate is a third lower than last season’s historic mark. I was a little lower on his defense than consensus last season (he “only” made my Second Team), and he hasn’t been as good this year by any measure.

That defensive slippage isn’t nearly as concerning as what’s happened on the other end. Like the Hawks as a whole, Daniels has, in some ways, dramatically improved: More than half of his shots now come at the rim, where he remains a solid finisher, and he’s become an even freakier offensive rebounder.

But all those fun things are overshadowed by his oozing, pulsating flaw: His three-pointer. Or rather, his lack of one.

Daniels has always been trigger-sad, but it’s gone well beyond that this season. He’s attempting just 1.5 threes per game (half of last season’s volume), and many times shoots none at all. The accuracy is even more ghastly: Somehow, he’s made only 11 triples on the season. He made 80 last year! He has more airballs than makes, and calling them airballs somehow doesn’t do them justice. These are anchorballs:

Daniels does his best to make up for that anti-gravity with constant motion: Frenetic cutting, frequent picks and slips and ghosts, and a general ethos that moving has to occupy at least some of the defense’s attention, right? Right?

To be fair, the advanced stats think he’s been a much better offensive player this year. Maybe that’s true, but it is also missing the point. Big men can get away with being non-shooters because most of their value comes from other things: Rebounding, paint-protecting, offensive rebounds, etc. Daniels is trying his best to replicate some of that, but he’s a slender wing. I don’t care what the regular-season stats say. History has shown over and over again that players like Daniels run into major playoff problems every. Single. Time.

That doesn’t really matter for Atlanta this year, given that they’re a play-in team unlikely to append “off” to that label. But given that they re-signed Daniels to a four-year, $100 million contract that doesn’t start until next season, they can’t be happy with what this means for the future. They didn’t pay that kind of money to have a rich man’s Matisse Thybulle. They need more from Daniels if they want to escape the Hawks Curse:

Trades (Part II)

You know what else would’ve helped escape the Curse? If Kristaps Porzingis had provided anything of value on the court this season.

Porzingis managed just 17 games for Atlanta while battling POTS (or perhaps some other illness, according to Steve Kerr? HIPAA sure hits different for athletes). Although the team acquired him for cheap, a price that reflected the risk built into the deal, the Hawks still expected Porzingis to be jet fuel for their rise this season. His inability to stay healthy or play big minutes even when available was arguably ATL’s single biggest disappointment of the season. Remember, people (yes, other people, certainly almost definitely not me) had pegged the Hawks for home-court advantage in the playoffs this year. Now, they might not have that for the play-in.

Still, the future is bright. With a potentially franchise-altering draft pick incoming, a talented young core with or without Kuminga, and a largely clean cap sheet going forward (give or take Daniels’ contract), the Hawks are set up for big success as soon as the coming season.

Then again, we’ve heard that story before in Atlanta, so many times. For once, I’d like to see it come to fruition.