Are the Hawks overtaxing their main players?

Things are really starting to get dicey.

Just as the sun rose on the start of the 2024-25 season, many players that were to fill key roles on this team this year suffered unfortunate injury setbacks.

Merely a single game into the season, ‘hope springs anew’ gave way to ‘ugh, here we go again’ as the all-too-familiar health issues have, well, sprung up once again. The past month has seemed all too reminiscent of the past four seasons that preceded this one.

To recap, at a Saturday practice before the season opener against the Brooklyn Nets, projected backup point guard Kobe Bufkin suffered a right shoulder subluxation (a partial dislocation of a bone from a joint in layman’s terms). As a result, he has yet to appear in a game — and that development has left the Hawks the Hawks to cobble together collective ball-handling units when Trae Young sits on the bench.

Vit Krejci was one of those thrust into a larger role with Bufkin’s injury, and the 6-foot-8 Czech international had been filling in admirably — that is until in the fourth game of the season against the Washington Wizards, when he was forced to exit the game. An adductor muscle strain in his right hip/thigh area later ruled him out for that game plus another two weeks when he’ll be re-evaluated for a possible return.

Veteran wing/guard Bogdan Bogdanovic has displayed an ability to carry a second unit when needed. Sadly, he too is now unavailable with a hamstring injury suffered some time between the first game and the second game against the Charlotte Hornets. He underwent a non-surgical procedure for his right hamstring tendinopathy on October 28, and he’ll instead be re-evaluated four weeks from that date per the Hawks.

De’Andre Hunter has had recurring setbacks with inflammation in his right knee dating back to his sophomore season in the NBA, 2020-21. After playing in 63-of-67 (94%) possible games in his rookie season in 2019-20, Hunter has yet to approach that mark since.

Now, just two games into the current season, Hunter is still sidelined with what the team had called “right knee injury management”, although the newest update as broken by Lauren Williams of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed he is now tending to the premature birth of his child and may be available as soon as later this week.

And so, the Hawks sit at 4-7 largely due to their injury woes (as well as opponent three-point shooting), and with a meeting with the champion Boston Celtics in TD Garden next on the calendar, there seems to be a familiar theme: it’s going to get worse before it gets better.

As a result, Trae Young and Jalen Johnson have had to be two of the most involved players in the entire NBA. As of early Monday, Trae Young led the league with 402.3 minutes on the court. In second place? Jalen Johnson with 401.4 minutes. As of midday Sunday, Young and Johnson were second and third in the league in total touches, although Nikola Jokic has since passed them. Young also leads the league in time of possession (I know, not just a football stat), as he’s had the ball in his hands 98 minutes of game time to this point.

Putting the ball in the hands of your most important players is obviously something you want to do regardless of who is available. But, doing so to this extent has been borne out of necessity with all of the absences.

Have the Hawks gone too far off the deep end on this matter?

Short term, the Hawks seem able to hang around for three quarters before losing steam in the final period. In five of the seven losses, the Hawks have been no more than four points behind the opponent at the end of the third quarter. In a sixth, against the Detroit Pistons on Friday, the Hawks were down double-digits in the fourth quarter, rallied, but couldn’t come away with the victory.

The heavy minutes toll on the main players statistically seems pronounced towards the end of halves, and that’s reflected in the team’s quarter-by-quarter net rating (point differential per 100 possessions).

The net ratings of the first and third quarters are +4.7 and -6.7 respectively.

The second and fourth quarters? Ugly marks of -11.2 and -10.5 respectively.

But what about the long term considerations as well?

With all the talk of load management in recent years in the NBA, the league responded by instituting a 65-game requirement for many of the individual year-end awards. But that hasn’t slowed down the spate of star players missing major time — such as the likes of Kawhi Leonard, Joel Embiid, and Zion Williamson. So, there doesn’t appear to be an all-encompassing solution for the toll a grinding 82-game schedule plus occasional offseason international play takes on athletes in the NBA.

To add insult to injury (pun intended), Atlanta’s own star guard Trae Young popped up on a recent injury report with “right Achilles tendonitis”, and so he will miss the contest tonight. Be sure to keep your fingers crossed that this is just a precautionary measure.

What can the Hawks do in the near future to stabilize the ship? I see three reasonable solutions:

Wait it out

It’s a long NBA season. Atlanta is just about 13% or roughly one-seventh through with their schedule, and nobody besides the Boston Celtics and Cleveland Cavaliers has truly separated themselves in the Eastern Conference.

None of the sidelined Hawks are thought to be dealing with possibly season-ending injuries, so maybe the Hawks need to just take their lumps and aim to climb back into a more competitive position in January or thereabouts.

Waive Cody Zeller

This has been the figurative elephant in the room thus far. A (seemingly) healthy player Cody Zeller has not been with the team at all this season. Not in the practice facility. Not in State Farm Arena. The Indiana native may not even be in metro Atlanta at all.

Zeller came over from New Orleans in the Dejounte Murray-Dyson Daniels trade, and in order to comply with salary-matching stipulations, he agreed to a three-year contract with two non-guaranteed years beyond 2024-25. Waiving Zeller would cost the Hawks exactly $3.5 million against the cap for this season (and the Hawks are perilously close to the luxury tax threshold as it stands), but it would open up that roster spot for a player signing to ‘eat minutes’ for the team.

Look around the NBA for a suitable trade

It’s common to do most of your in-season trade business at or around the trade deadline. But with the crisis the Hawks are in, they may not be able to wait any longer. Zeller is ineligible to be traded until mid-December, but the Hawks could look to trade of of their other centers (Clint Capela, Onyeka Okongwu, and Larry Nance Jr.) for more immediate backcourt help, for example.

This would be a rather drastic move at this stage, but maybe the Hawks don’t want to continue to see their season slip away and their franchise centerpieces continue to be overburdened.