Ken Sugiura: Hawks additions don't look like enough to move them forward

Ken Sugiura, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Oct 9, 2024

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ATLANTA — Within the first 90 seconds of his first exhibition game, Zaccharie Risacher showed that, at the very least, he knew what he was doing on the floor.

The player whom the Hawks made the first overall pick of this June’s NBA draft didn’t do anything extraordinary in those first moments of the team’s first exhibition game, Tuesday night against the Indiana Pacers at State Farm Arena.

But he looked like someone who will add value to a team that sorely needs help. Defending against a pass to the corner, he left his man to challenge a 3-point shot, which was errant. (For a team that was awful last season on defense and was particularly egregious defending the 3, this is not a small detail.)

On the ensuing Hawks possession, he kept it alive by tapping out a missed shot to new teammate Dyson Daniels, who made a 3-pointer.

More noticeable highlights followed — 18 points on 7-for-9 shooting, including 3 for 4 from 3-point range. He had two assists against one turnover, most memorably a between-the-legs bounce pass on the break to center Clint Capela, who finished with an and-one lay-in. Risacher finished with a plus-15 rating in 23 minutes.

Risacher has passed the first test, however modest. The 19-year-old from Lyon, France, looks like he can help.

But as the Hawks push through the preseason to their season opener Oct. 23 at State Farm Arena, the larger question is how much better can they be than last season’s 36-46 record?

The addition of Risacher and Daniels, a defense-first guard acquired in the trade of Dejounte Murray, will help. And a fistful of injuries last season — star guard Trae Young missed a third of the season — made an impact on the record.

But it feels as if the Hawks are working on the margins to improve, and for a team that has finished ninth, eighth and 10th in the Eastern Conference in the past three seasons, respectively, that may not lead to meaningful gains in the standings.

The Hawks did do the right thing in breaking up the mismatched partnership of Murray and Young by trading the former. The two high-scoring guards did not work out in two seasons, and general manager Landry Fields got back reasonable value in the trade with New Orleans — Daniels, forwards Larry Nance Jr., E.J. Liddell and Cody Zeller and two first-round picks. Aside from the draft picks, Daniels was the key piece in the deal.

But the problem was that that was essentially where the Hawks’ offseason ended. (The Hawks did trade Liddell to the Suns for forward David Roddy.) Nance should be a capable frontcourt backup behind Capela and Onyeka Okongwu. Daniels will raise the team’s defensive standard, which desperately needs raising. And while this year’s draft was panned widely for its lack of difference makers, Risacher should help at both ends with his shooting and defensive agility.

But the Hawks also lost a highly effective two-way player in Murray, albeit one who didn’t fit well on the floor with Young. It’s hard to look at this roster and believe it will be significantly better than last season.

After three consecutive years in the Play-In Tournament, getting out of it by finishing sixth or better in the Eastern Conference would constitute clear progress. But that has required at least 45 wins to do that in each of the past three seasons. Do the Hawks have a nine-win jump in them?

At the team’s media day last week, Fields spoke of the balance between being opportunistic in building the roster while sticking to the plan.

“We’ve got things that we want to do that we know will help make progress,” he said. “The timing on that on when we start to see results that we want remains to be seen.”

The results that Fields aspires to presumably are beyond finishing in sixth place. But it wasn’t a terribly assuring assessment.

Fields also was asked about expectations for the season. He said the expectation was for the team to make progress.

“The daily habits are very important to us,” he said. “And for us, the belief is, if you do that over a good span of time, all the big goals that we have, we’ll accomplish.”

It sounds nice, and maybe the plan is working. It should be fun to watch Risacher get better and watch Young and Daniels work off each other. Young seems genuinely invested in the Hawks’ success. Jalen Johnson has star potential. Coach Quin Snyder, in his second full season, has a roster more to his liking.

But when the GM, at the start of his third season, is talking about “a good span of time” being necessary to accomplish the team’s big goals and not knowing when the desired results will show up, it’s an invitation to skepticism. And especially so when the first two seasons didn’t produce much, either.

A year ago, Fields said “it’s about stressing the fact that we are unified and we want to play unselfish basketball.” By season’s end, it became clear the Hawks were, in fact, not unified or committed to playing unselfishly.

As Capela put it after the season ended, “That consistency wasn’t there. Sometimes being selfish was overpowering that common goal.”

Is this a team worth believing in?

It remains to be seen.

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