Atlantaholic

Yea, we are marginally better (maybe) than the Dwight Howard, Schröder, Millsap team that prompted Schlenk to rebuild from scratch. Let's pump the breaks on nicknames.

Cleveland is catchable if we really go on a big run, but that's the highest we can aspire too, and probably a first round exit again, if we get lucky we can get to the second round but that would probably rely on us being a lot healthier than whoever we end up playing.

they've been up and down all year and are a mid team overall. They aren't a top 10 team atm or at any moment this year. It was a nice win as it was on the road, but some more sketchy play down the stretch. We just lost games against two very sub-par teams so probably need to string together a few more wins again before anyone gets excited.

Not sure what the purpose of this post is. Fact is our team last year was a lot deeper, not all the roles above are tit for tat. For example Aaron Holiday's role is much more similar to Delon's role. We don't really even have a Lou Will this year, Trent Forrest maybe would be the one you compare him too I guess. We replaced Kevin with Justin Holiday.

Regardless of show starts or not Cap needs to be getting the bulk minutes 90% of the time. OO still not consistent enough to warrant more time.

Yea, it's his fifth season. Not too much to ask of him at this stage considering he is officially making franchise player money.

Our offense is clearly better with Bogi instead of Hunter, problem is Bogi is a calamity defensively.

If Trae can start making shots consistently and we can get our top 8 healthy the rest of the way we might have a shot at seed #5. Still a little disappointing.

Too early to say say what AJ will turn into. He has been extremely efficient while relying mostly on jumpers which is very impressive, on the other hand if you look at his numbers as a starter (53% TS 30 mpg in 10 starts) his efficiency hasn't scaled with more minutes and usage. He's for sure been one of the best rookies though and even in the unlikely event what we are seeing from him is more or less what he'll be throughout his entire tenure as a Hawk it's still a great pick.

He's having a Julius Randle 2021 type season following an embarassing playoff showing. Hopefully like Randle he gets back on track next year, I don't think he's going to just switch it on this year. Last year Trae was already playing at an incredibly high level before shredding it the last two months, he was nowhere near as bad as he has been this year at any point last season. He was voted an All Star starter with a massive amount of votes for a reason.

Funny thing about Cam is his role on teams has always been bigger than his production and impact merits. Dude is lucky to have gotten these many minutes and still complains he can't get more.

Shout out to Anthony Johnson, forgot about that guy. Dude had the pleasure of being on our team twice almost ten years apart.

Or maybe the players and coach were as confused and bewildered by the front office shakeups as anyone else. Now that the dust has settled and at least the leadership has been clearly defined and players are back healthy they can focus on ball instead of God knows what else was going on behind the scenes.

There WILL be times he scores 30 without taking offensive stalling bad 3pt shots and forcing the issue in traffic. When Trae doesn't force everyone else becomes involved. League is too talented in 2023 to think our 6 foot PG is going to outduel Durant, Luka, Jokic, Giannis, Mitchell, Embiid etc. consistently. We need to figure out how to play as a team every night offensively because there IS enough talent (if we can somehow stay healthy) on this team to possibly compete but only if everyone is contributing and engaged.

Not only is he flat out valuable but we have nothing outside of him and OO so if one of them is out we really suffer

That's how he needs to play, the less he forces the more efficient our offense will become. He'll still get his points regardless

I am one of the biggest Dre detractors on the board, but I will say he has played very solid lately on both ends. I would not hate his contract if he kept that level of play up from here on out.

Our starters have been good, we should be trying to add depth. Unless we are making a transformative soft rebuild type of move the only way we improve the team realistically through a trade is if we trade for efficient scoring decent defensive depth.

Of course, but then those players went to other teams that improved. Parity in the NFL is unrivaled compared to any of the other big leagues. it's relatively rare to see a team go 3 years without a playoff berth wheras in the NBA it happens all the time and that's with a much larger playoff field. Not sure how punishing teams for not spending money inteligently is going to incentivize teams to not spend money inteligently.

Which they won't want to pay so he will be coaching as long as he wants through his contract.

They can say all of the right things, interview me and I know enough to say the right things too. At the end of the day they will be judged on results. Hopefully they have enough of Tony/NIck's trust that they are at least allowed to make the moves they want to make and they get a fair shot.

Don't understand why there isn't just a hard cap. I mean I understand (players don't want it) but I don't like it.

I think the big leaps comes after years 1 and 2 as far as getting all of the understandings of the sort of angles you need to take in certain situations and digesting the speed of offenseses to make proper rotations and some familiarity with players (at least conference rival players) and their tendencies. After that it's really up to the player how much effort and energy he is willing to expand to improve in that side of the floor, we see lots of players in the NBA that just stay "bad" on defense. After the four + years of seeing Trae show absolutely no improvement defensively I was starting to have legitimate concerns but we are starting to see Trae take a jump in his defensive impact which is huge for him and us as a team. It very well could be that playing alongside DJM (and overall better defensive lineups) has helped him some.

I mean JC absolutely benefitted tremendously from playing next to Capella and OO vs Alex Len Damien Jones early on in his career. But I think it's a little column A a little column B, obviously experience and practice etc help too. At the end of the day defense is always a team effort and tough to quantify and measure at the individual level.

His Raptor was around -2.5ish for most of the year (been around -3.0 his entire career) and the last 10 or so games it has improved to -1.5 which is a massive leap for him. Never seen it anywhere near that high before. According to Raptor of the regular rotation guys it's Bogi who is really killing us on defense with the -2.9 rating which is a massive drop from his career of around -0.5