If general manager Travis Schlenk had to grade the Hawks' 2019-20 season, he'd give it an "incomplete," and not just because the coronavirus has so far cut it short by 15 games.
The NBA suspended play March 11, but had it continued on as planned, the Hawks would conclude their season Wednesday with a home game against the Cavaliers. As the country deals with the pandemic, the league has yet to determine if the regular season will ever resume and what will happen with the playoffs.
At the time of the suspension, the Hawks were 20-47, in 14th place out of 15 teams in the Eastern Conference. They had entered the year hoping to build on last season’s 29-53 finish, but instead regressed because of several setbacks — the good news is, they’ve already started re-shaping the roster for the better, and they improved toward the end of the season. But the first three months of the season were brutal, with two 10-game losing streaks, coming in November and December.
"The first half of the season, when you think about the roster we had, just all the injuries on top of the suspension (of John Collins) and the second half of the season, once we kind of got past the injuries, past the suspension and we made the trade for Clint (Capela), we never had the opportunity to see him," Schlenk said. "So I don't feel like we got a really good view of certainly the group we're going to move forward with, how they're all going to mesh together. That would be the disappointing part of it all."
Collins’ 25-game suspension for violating the NBA’s anti-drug program hurt the Hawks, as did Capela’s lingering right heel injury preventing him from making his debut after the trade deadline (Capela figures to alleviate the team’s recurring problems at center, once healthy). But those aren’t the only things that went wrong.
Kevin Huerter, who started 48 of his 56 games played, struggled with a right knee injury to start the season and didn’t look like himself until mid-November, only to injure his left shoulder Nov. 12 and miss 11 games.
The Hawks didn’t get much help from veterans on the team, including the now-departed Evan Turner, Chandler Parsons and Allen Crabbe, having taken on a handful of bad and expiring contracts. Center Damian Jones, in his fourth season at age 24, though playing far more than he did with the Warriors, could finish at the rim but didn’t rebound effectively. Vince Carter acted as a mentor to several young players on the team, but in his NBA-record 22nd season, his contributions on the court were minimal.
Also, the Hawks were simply an exceptionally young group, which presents problems of its own. For much of the season, their starting lineup didn’t include anyone older than 22, with rookie wings De’Andre Hunter (who played 32 minutes per game) and Cam Reddish (26.7 minutes) often asked to guard opponents’ best players.
All that being said, after starting out the season 8-32, they went 12-15 over their last 27 games, improving after getting Collins back, getting Huerter healthy and getting some experience under Hunter and Reddish. Acquiring center Dewayne Dedmon helped, too, although he only played 10 games after the Hawks acquired him at the trade deadline, missing three games with right elbow pain.
A 12-15 stretch might not sound great, but if you take that .444 win percentage and compare it to the eighth-place Orlando Magic’s record of 30-35 (.462), it starts to look a little better.
Had things gone the Hawks’ way this season, had they stayed healthier, avoided Collins’ suspension and gotten a few breaks, Schlenk thought the Hawks were capable of challenging for a playoff spot. Obviously, that didn’t happen.
“If you look at the Eastern Conference standings, if you can carry that over to the next 25 games, now all the sudden you probably are in contention, and you get to the last month of the season and you are fighting for a playoff spot,” Schlenk said.
“So I don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility that this group could have done that this year and add in a guy like Clint at center, and Dewayne at center, we all know that was one of our bigger weak spots throughout the year, I don’t think there’s any reason why we couldn’t. The hard part about projecting into next year is we don’t know what’s going to happen in the draft, we don’t know what’s going to happen in free agency. We don’t even know when those two things are going to take place, so it’s hard to project at this point.”
There were more positives, with Trae Young voted an All-Star starter at age 21 in just his second year in the league, Collins' 20-and-10 pace once returning from suspension in late December and the steady improvement of Reddish, who Schlenk said has "a chance to be one of the best defensive players in the league."
“I think the positive sides of it are, after we got healthy and John got back, our most productive group was our draft picks on the floor, so that’s obviously the positive and exciting part of it all, is we were able to get our young group on the floor together and that was our most productive unit,” Schlenk said.
All the Hawks' "Core Five" of Young, Reddish, Huerter, Hunter and Collins will return next season, and the addition of a healthy Capela should give them a boost on defense. The Hawks will look to add depth in free agency and will target the best player available wherever they end up picking in the lottery, Schlenk has said.
Hawks coach Lloyd Pierce has already said this will be a playoff team next season. As far as exactly how many more games they'd have to win will depend on how the bottom half of the Eastern Conference stacks up, but regardless it would mean taking quite the leap from this underwhelming season.
“There’s going to be a major shift for our team moving forward and the focus starts with our Core Five, and the evaluation is about each guy’s growth individually,” Pierce said. “I put it out there, and I stand behind my comments of we need to make a major jump next year. But I’m encouraged by each guy’s growth and actually, where each guy is.”
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