The 2017-18 season preview for the Hawks can be summed up in one GIF. Despite the woebegone optics teams get saddled with for being a tire fire, the Hawks set themselves up as a tire fire by design. Instead of being entrenched in the mediocre morass, careening along as a low-ceiling playoff team, they steered hard into the skid.
They realized running it back as a hopeless first-round patsy is a fool’s errand, providing minimal short-term benefit combined with long-term detriment. So in the offseason, the Hawks passed on re-signing their best player, Paul Millsap. They traded away Dwight Howard and his snake collection for a humdrum mélange of Marco Belinelli, Miles Plumlee and the 41st pick, that they used to select Tyler Dorsey, a guard out of Oregon. Their rotation will consist of a lot of journeymen and guys you never heard of.
Atlanta’s lottery-bound plan to land a top-5 pick in a front-loaded draft isn’t groundbreaking in today’s NBA. It’s in their best interest to suck this season and try to find that franchise-altering cornerstone in June. But they do have to get to June and fill the void left in their pet sets.
The Hawks offense was predicated on a bevy of pick-and-roll actions with Dennis Schröder at the controls last season. 50.5 percent of Schröder’s offense came as the ball handler in pick-and-rolls — the 9th highest mark in the NBA — and he ranked in the 61.7 percentile with 0.84 points per possession. Helping him achieve those marks were Millsap and Howard, a versatile roll man and a powerful roll man.
With Millsap they had the luxury of running pick-and-pops:
Millsap can also slip screen-and-rolls for pull-ups and floaters around the basket:
With Howard, it was a lot of pick-and-roll rim runs that would turn into lobs for an alley-oop:
Schröder dished out 499 assists last season, with 119 of them going to baskets made by Millsap and 76 to Howard. With those two in new places, that leaves about 40 percent of the offense to be accounted for.
In their stead, Mike Budenholzer has an assemblage of frontcourt options to go with. In the Millsap role, Ersan Ilyasova figures do the heavy lifting, followed by Luke Babbitt and Mike Muscala. Of these stretch-bigs, Ilyasova will provide the veteran consistency, while Babbitt and Muscala both actually shot over 41 percent from 3 last year. Regardless of who rises to the top, all three lack the playmaking and dynamism in Millsap’s game.
As the roll-man, Dewayne Dedmon can do a decent Howard impersonation at a quarter of the price (and without his teammates openly hating him). The overpaid Plumlee brother is another big whose scoring comes almost exclusively in the paint and restricted area — over 92 percent of his attempts last season was from the paint and in. First-round pick, John Collins projects as an athletic rim runner, but the 19-year-old’s court time will be dictated by his ability to execute the defensive scheme.
The biggest knock on Schröder is his lack of consistent shooting ability. With lesser talent surrounding him, defenses will be smarter about going under screens and closing out on pick-and-pops. In order for Atlanta’s offense to be watchable, hopefully Schröder took the summer to improve that part of his game.
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It’s not going to be a pretty season in the Peach State, 82 games of trials and tribulations. But if the Hawks exit the lottery with a top-3 selection, they’ll have made the long game look like child’s play.
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