Atlanta Hawks Rumors | Hoops Rumors

Southeast Notes: Young, Heat, Batum, Fournier

November 17th, 2019 at 5:32pm CST by JD Shaw

Hawks star Trae Young overcame several non-believers in his path to the NBA, proving doubters wrong while using their comments as motivation, Sam Amick of The Athletic writes.

Young, 21, has quickly turned into one of the league’s most electric point guards. He’s averaged 26.6 points and 8.8 assists in 11 games for the Hawks this season, having being drafted fifth overall in 2018. The memories of his doubters still remain firmly in his mind.

“Yeah, it’s little stuff like that,” Young said. “I have pictures and stuff like that. Old tweets. Old different sayings and quotes from people who said things when I was coming into the draft, coming into college too. It’s stuff I just keep it in my mind. Some of it is mental notes, but at the same time some of it is stuff that I keep and I have my eye on. …But I think that type of stuff motivates you.”

Young, according to Amick, has a second phone filled with screenshots of those who doubted him. The phone itself isn’t attached to an actual line, but it’s something he’ll always have for motivation during his career.

“I’ve probably changed my phone twice, but I still have that same phone with all my pictures and all that stuff,” he said. “I’ll always have that phone, until I’m retired. And then, when I’m retired, I’ll go to the ocean somewhere and throw it in the water.”

There’s more from the Southeast Division tonight:

Ira Winderman of the Sun Sentinel examines whether the Heat have reached their development quota. Miami has several intriguing young players on its roster this season, including Justise Winslow, Tyler Herro, Bam Adebayo and Kendrick Nunn.
Hornets forward Nicolas Batum returned on Saturday against the Knicks after missing nearly four weeks with a fractured left middle finger. Batum, 30, finished with three points, nine rebounds and six assists in 29 minutes of work, registering a positive-18 net rating.
Evan Fournier‘s renewed rhythm is leading the Magic to offensive improvement, writes John Denton of NBA.com. Orlando has won two straight games after a poor start to the season, though the team has yet to win a game on the road (0-4). Fournier has averaged 16.2 points per game on 48% shooting from the field and 43% shooting from 3-point range.

Chandler Parsons Cleared To Make Hawks Debut Tonight

November 16th, 2019 at 4:13pm CST by Alex Kirschenbaum

New Hawks forward Chandler Parsons has been activated and is poised to make his season debut in tonight’s bout against the Clippers, tweets Marc Stein of The New York Times.

Parsons inked a four-year, maximum-salary contract with the Grizzlies in the great summer cap boom of 2016. However, knee and back problems limited him to 95 total games during the first three years of his contract. After protracted wrangling with Memphis in 2018/19, Parsons was flipped to Atlanta this summer. He has missed the first 11 games of Atlanta’s 2019/20 season.

Parsons flashed complementary All-Star potential in his time with the Rockets and Mavericks in the first four years of his NBA career. The 6’9″ sharpshooting forward was drafted with the 38th pick out of Florida in 2011, and outperformed modest pre-draft expectations until his body began to betray him at the tail end of the 2014/15 season.

The Grizzlies took a big swing in 2016, hoping their medical staff could mitigate his injury risks. Atlanta has significantly more modest expectations, and could use Parsons as a bench kick-out target for stud point guard Trae Young.

If Parsons is able to showcase flashes of his former self on his new team and stay healthy through early 2020, he may have a shot at postseason glory yet. His is an expensive expiring contract, and could be dangled by Atlanta in a trade to a team looking to clear cap space for this summer. It’s more likely that he will be bought out of his remaining contract by Atlanta and hit the buyout market. A reasonably healthy Parsons could serve as a nice floor-spacing bench addition for NBA teams looking to add cheap shooting for a spring playoff run.

Surging Trae Young Talks Doubters

November 16th, 2019 at 2:34pm CST by Alex Kirschenbaum

The Athletic’s Sam Amick takes an in-depth look at the ascent of Hawks second-year point guard Trae Young in an exclusive interview. The 21-year-old Young is off to a blistering start. Amick discusses the way Young’s on-court achievements will always be connected with the Hawks’ fateful 2018 draft trade with the Mavericks involving Luka Doncic. Young and Amick scroll through a list of Young’s doubters. “I have pictures and stuff like that. Old tweets. Old different sayings and quotes from people who said things when I was coming into the draft, coming into college too,” Young reflected. “It’s stuff I just keep it in my mind. Some of it is mental notes, but at the same time some of it is stuff that I keep and I have my eye on. …But I think that type of stuff motivates you.”

Free Agent Stock Watch 2019: Southeast Division

November 15th, 2019 at 8:46pm CST by Dana Gauruder

Every week, Hoops Rumors takes a closer look at players who will be free agents or could become free agents next offseason. We examine if their stock is rising or falling due to performance and other factors. This week, we take a look at players from the Southeast Division:

Devonte’ Graham, Hornets, 24, PG (Up) – Signed to a three-year, $4MM deal in 2018
The Hornets have until July 7th to decide whether to guarantee Graham’s $1,663,861 for next season. Safe to say, that decision has already been made. In terms of salary vs. production, Graham might be the biggest bargain in the league this season. Making just over $1.4MM, Graham leads the team in scoring at 18.0 PPG and 7.3 APG while coming off the bench in all but one game. The Kansas product appeared in 46 games last season, averaging 4.7 PPG in 14.7 MPG. With Kemba Walker bolting to Boston, Graham has blossomed in an expanded role.

Goran Dragic, Heat, 33, PG (Up) – Signed to a five-year, $85MM deal in 2015
Dragic played in just 36 games last season due to right knee surgery. Dragic, now 33, has been a starter most of his career and had to adjust to a second-unit role this season. Thus far, he’s been healthy and productive. He’s averaging 16.1 PPG and 5.1 APG in 28.4 MPG while making just 1.8 TPG. Dragic’s $19.2MM expiring contract is a tradeable asset if the Heat decide to shed salary. For now, Dragic is a valuable part of an improved team that should make the playoffs out of arguably the weakest division in the NBA.

E van Fournier, Magic, 27, SG (Up) – Signed to a five-year, $85MM deal in 2016
Following a couple of sluggish outings against Oklahoma City and Dallas in which he shot 3-for-12 from the field, Fournier has put together a nice three-game stretch. He’s averaged 18.0 PPG and 5.0 APG during that span while knocking down nine 3-pointers and committing just four turnovers. Orlando won two of those games. The team’s second-leading scorer has a $17.15MM option on his contract for next season. In a very weak free agent market, Fournier has plenty of incentive to decline that option in order to secure another long-term deal.

Evan Turner, Hawks, 31, SF (Down) – Signed to a four-year, $70MM deal in 2016
A rotation piece for a playoff team in recent seasons, Turner was swapped by the Trail Blazers for Kent Bazemore during the offseason. Turner was expected to provide veteran stability to a mostly inexperienced unit in Atlanta. But he only averaged 11.3 MPG during the Hawks’ first three games before being sidelined by Achilles soreness. It’s uncertain how much time Turner will require to recover from the injury. In the meantime, Atlanta has plenty of other options at the wing positions and the return of Allen Crabbe further clouds Turner’s role whenever he’s healthy enough to play.

Isaiah Thomas, Wizards, 30, PG (Up) – Signed to a one-year, $2.32MM deal in 2019
Thomas’ latest attempt to revive his career seems to be working out. Since returning from a training camp injury, Thomas has jumped into the rotation and seen his playing time steadily increase. He’s averaging 13.9 PPG and 6.3 APG while shooting 38.5 percent from long range in 24.1 MPG. Following a lost season in Denver, Thomas has at least reestablished himself as a rotation player. That’s a heartwarming development for a popular player who was an MVP candidate just a few seasons ago in Boston.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.

Hawks’ Kevin Huerter Out At Least Two Weeks

November 14th, 2019 at 3:57pm CST by Luke Adams

After undergoing an MRI on his injured left shoulder, Hawks sharpshooter Kevin Huerter has been diagnosed with a left rotator cuff strain with an associated shoulder capsule strain, the team announced today in a press release. Huerter will begin receiving treatment and going through rehab for that shoulder, and will be re-evaluated in two weeks, according to the Hawks.

Atlanta head coach Lloyd Pierce had suggested earlier today that Huerter’s injury wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but would force him to miss some time, as Sarah Spencer of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution relays (via Twitter). The second-year shooting guard sustained the injury during Tuesday’s win in Denver.

It’s a tough break for a young Atlanta team that was already missing young big man John Collins, who is serving a 25-game suspension for violating the NBA’s drug policy. Huerter was off to a solid start this season, with 9.3 PPG on .427/.386/.800 shooting in 10 games (22.5 MPG).

In Huerter’s absence, and with Evan Turner (Achilles) and Vince Carter (personal) still out for the time being, DeAndre’ Bembry and Cam Reddish are among the candidates to see some extra playing time. Allen Crabbe (knee) is also reportedly healthy now and could make his Hawks debut on Thursday if the club needs to fill more minutes on the wing.

Latest On NBA’s Load Management Dilemma

November 13th, 2019 at 5:10pm CST by Luke Adams

The NBA sent a memo to all 30 organizations this week instructing teams not to use the phrase “load management” to describe an injury, as Jeff Zillgitt of USA Today details in a series of tweets. According to the NBA’s memo, “load management” is a permissible description of a player’s absence only if he’s missing a game due to rest under the league’s resting policy.

The Hawks, who had been listing Chandler Parsons as out due to “load management” during the first few weeks of the season, adjusted their approach on Tuesday, according to Sarah K. Spencer of The Atlanta Journal Constitution (Twitter link). Parsons’ new designation was “injury management (bilateral knees).” We can probably expect the Clippers to make a similar change to Kawhi Leonard‘s injury-report description the next time he sits.

While the NBA’s latest request may seem arbitrary or semantic, it reflects what a delicate subject load management has become for the league. It’s one of the “most debated, least understood” issues in basketball today, according to ESPN’s Kevin Pelton and Kevin Arnovitz, who go into detail on the science and the goals behind load management programs.

“It is rare to find a sports scientist or performance specialist who believes that the NBA season doesn’t require some attention to load management to assure that a player has a chance to be at peak performance in the postseason,” Pelton and Arnovitz write. However, the ESPN duo acknowledges that while teams have more data points available to them than ever, interpreting that data “is still an art” rather than a hard science.

As load management continues to be a popular topic of discussion in the basketball world, here are a few more items related to the phenomenon:

Ethan Strauss of The Athletic surveyed executives, coaches, and players around the NBA in an attempt to determine the best fixes for the load management problem and received a variety of responses. Reducing the amount of games in a season or stretching the season to create fewer back-to-back sets was the most popular answer in Strauss’ survey. One agent also suggested teams should make an effort to rest players during non-national TV games and make their plans clear as soon as they know them.
WarnerMedia chairman Jeff Zucker said this week that he’d like to see the NBA be more proactive in addressing “load management” games that coincide with national TV broadcasts. (Twitter links via Ben Fischer of SportsBusiness Journal). “I think the league has some influence over teams and i would like them to exert that influence,” Zucker said. TNT falls under the WarnerMedia umbrella, so Zucker obviously has a vested interest in stars suiting up for marquee games.
Mavericks owner Mark Cuban came out strongly in favor of load management this week, calling it “the best thing to ever happen to the league,” as Gary Washburn of The Boston Globe tweets. While fans may be frustrated to see star players sitting in regular season games, Cuban argues that it increases the chances of keeping those stars healthy for the most important games in the spring. “You actually get more of your stars [in the playoffs],” Cuban said, per ESPN. “You get shorter rotations of more of the guys playing in the playoffs, which is what you want to see anyway, right?”
Lakers star LeBron James believes that young players could probably benefit from “load management” – or at least more favorable scheduling – at the AAU level, as he tells Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports. “A lot of these [AAU] tournaments don’t have the best interest of these kids, man,” James said. “I see it. It’s like one time, they had to play a quarterfinal game, a semifinal game and a championship game starting at 9 a.m., and the championship game was at 12:30 p.m. Three games. I was like, ‘Oh, hell no.’ And my kids were dead tired. My kids were dead tired. This isn’t right. This is an issue.”

Profiling The Life And Career Of Jabari Parker

November 10th, 2019 at 7:05pm CST by JD Shaw

Despite leaving the Hornets in free agency this past summer, Kemba Walker still holds a positive relationship with owner Michael Jordan and the city of Charlotte.

Walker, who spent the first eight seasons of his career with the Hornets, opted to sign a four-year, maximum-salary deal worth $141MM with the Celtics in early July.

“MJ is always going to be a special guy in my life,” Walker said last week after his return to Charlotte, as relayed by Steve Reed of the Associated Press. The Celtics wound up winning the game 108-87. “He’s one of the reasons I am where I am today.”

Jordan drafted Walker No. 9 overall in the 2011 draft, starting his professional career in a Hornets uniform. Walker has rapidly improved since his rookie season and is currently known as one of the league’s elite point guards, holding per-game averages of 24.5 points and 4.5 assists with Boston on the season.

“He gave me the opportunity to flourish as a basketball player,” Walker said of Jordan. “He gave me the opportunity to grow as a man in this community. So, MJ definitely has a special place in my heart for sure.”

There’s more from the Southeast Division tonight:

Count Jordan and former Hornets head coach Steve Clifford among those who aren’t jumping on the NBA’s “load management” bandwagon, Stefan Bondy of the New York Daily News writes. “Our guys aren’t used to sitting on the second game of a back-to-back.… We’re not sitting guys just to sit,” said Clifford, who currently coaches the Magic. “For me, my background frankly, it all goes back to expectations. Being with Michael in Charlotte, Michael used to tell them every year, you’re paid to play 82 games.”
K.L. Chouinard of NBA.com profiles Hawks forward Jabari Parker, labeling the sixth-year player as “the NBA’s oldest 24-year-old.” Parker has displayed a respectable amount of maturity in recent seasons and has interests typically shared by his elders, including older music and cars, Chouinard explained. Parker has averaged 16.4 points and five rebounds per game for the Hawks this season, starting in three of his eight contests.
The Wizards are working to find a difficult balance between developing young players while still competing in today’s league, Chase Hughes of NBC Sports Washington notes. Washington has young players with high potential such as Rui Hachimura (21) and Thomas Bryant (22), along with established veterans such as Bradley Beal (26), Isaiah Thomas (30) and others.

NBA G League Assignments/Recalls: 11/7/19

November 7th, 2019 at 9:16pm CST by Dana Gauruder

Here are Thursday’s assignments and recalls from around the NBA G League:

The Nuggets have assigned rookie forward Vlatko Cancar to the Erie BayHawks, the team’s PR department tweets. The 2017 second-round selection has appeared in one game, a two-minute cameo on Oct. 31. Denver doesn’t have a G League affiliate.
The Clippers assigned center Mfiondu Kabengele and guard Derrick Walton Jr. to the Agua Caliente Clippers for a practice and then recalled them, Jovan Buha of The Athletic tweets.
The Bulls assigned swingman Denzel Valentine, who missed last season due to an ankle injury, to the Windy City Bulls, the team’s PR department tweets. Valentine practiced with the G League team and is expected to remain with them for their first two games on Friday and Saturday. Rookie power forward Daniel Gafford was also assigned to the Windy City Bulls and will remain for their season opener, according to another team tweet.
The Spurs assigned forward Chimezie Metu to their Austin affiliate, then recalled him prior to their game against Oklahoma City, according to a team press release. He’ll be re-assigned to Austin for its season opener on Friday.
The Hawks assigned swingman Allen Crabbe to the College Park Skyhawks for a practice and then recalled him, according to Sarah Spencer of the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the team’s PR department (Twitter links). Crabbe is working his way back from knee surgery.
The Hornets assigned two rookies, guard Cody Martin and forward Caleb Martin, to the Greensboro Swarm for a practice and then recalled them, according to a team press release. They also recalled rookie forward Jalen McDaniels, according to another team release.

What Collins' Suspension Means For Hawks

November 6th, 2019 at 1:25pm CST by Luke Adams

In the wake of John Collins‘ 25-game suspension, Hawks president of basketball operations Travis Schlenk issued a statement saying the team believes that the big man “is truly remorseful for his actions.” Meanwhile, Chris Kirschner of The Athletic explores what the suspension means for the Hawks, who will start Jabari Parker in Collins’ place.

John Collins Suspended For 25 Games

November 5th, 2019 at 9:41am CST by Luke Adams

Hawks big man John Collins has been suspended for 25 games for violating the terms of the NBA’s anti-drug program, the league announced today in a press release. According to the announcement, Collins tested positive for Growth Hormone Releasing Peptide-2 (GHRP-2).

In a statement to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski (all Twitter links), Collins apologized to his teammates and the Hawks’ organization, as well as the team’s fans.

“I understand the impact this matter has on what we are trying to achieve together this season, and I am incredibly frustrated and disappointed in myself for putting all us in this position,” Collins said. “I have always been incredibly careful about what I put in my body, but I took a supplement, which unbeknownst to me, had been contaminated with an illegal component.

“I plan to appeal my suspension in arbitration so I can get back on the court as soon as possible and continue to contribute to our 2019-20 campaign.”

Collins is working with the NBPA to begin the appeal process, according to Wojnarowski (Twitter link). However, it seems unlikely that he’ll be able to get the penalty reduced.

Assuming Collins does have to serve all 25 games of the suspension, he’ll be eligible to return to the Hawks’ lineup on Monday, December 23 in Cleveland. He’ll also forfeit nearly $611K of his 2019/20 salary, as ESPN’s Bobby Marks tweets.

There has been a noticeable uptick so far this season around the NBA in drug-related suspensions. Collins is the third player so far to be hit with a 25-game ban, joining Wilson Chandler (Nets) and Deandre Ayton (Suns).

Atlanta will be eligible to add a 16th man to its roster after its November 12 game in Denver, since Collins can be moved to the inactive “suspended list” following the fifth game of his suspension.

While having to get by without Collins for the next 25 games is a tough blow for the Hawks, the team did get a bit of good news today. According to Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports (Twitter link), Trae Young will be able to return to action on Tuesday night after dealing with a sprained ankle for the last several days.

Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.