NBA Season 2025-26

[Quetzalcoatl]

Porzingis has looked good the few Hawks games I've watched, but man that team really needs to consider dealing Trae. 

One thought I have with them is that people are always like "you need to have a winning culture or you will eventually regret it when your team isn't serious/experienced during an important run".  My counter argument is the 2008 Celtics team and this Hawks team.  We went from the lottery to a championship and our young players were major contributors in 2008.  Rondo, Perkins, Powe and Tony Allen were all huge for us that year and the pick from tanking made us win a championship.  We were like OVERTLY tanking too.  And now this year the Hawks have given all these bad habits to Trae and I wonder if he can actually shed them and they did it in the name of mediocrity.  They did semi-tank but JJ is a 20th pick you know?  I feel like they'd have been better off having Trae play team ball and not jack up a million shots at the expense of their record now.  He's good enough he can beat bad teams by himself in the regular season as a ballhog but it just won't play vs the elite teams in the playoffs.

[Kernewek]

Porzingis has looked good the few Hawks games I've watched, but man that team really needs to consider dealing Trae. 

One thought I have with them is that people are always like "you need to have a winning culture or you will eventually regret it when your team isn't serious/experienced during an important run".  My counter argument is the 2008 Celtics team and this Hawks team.  We went from the lottery to a championship and our young players were major contributors in 2008.  Rondo, Perkins, Powe and Tony Allen were all huge for us that year and the pick from tanking made us win a championship.  We were like OVERTLY tanking too.  And now this year the Hawks have given all these bad habits to Trae and I wonder if he can actually shed them and they did it in the name of mediocrity.  They did semi-tank but JJ is a 20th pick you know?  I feel like they'd have been better off having Trae play team ball and not jack up a million shots at the expense of their record now.  He's good enough he can beat bad teams by himself in the regular season as a ballhog but it just won't play vs the elite teams in the playoffs.

I think there's something here, but I also think there is a world of difference between bringing KG and Ray - a textbook insane competitor and a textbook consummate professional, respectively, who happen to be All-Star calibre players very hungry for postseason success - onto a team and doing what Atlanta has done.

Kristaps is the only guy who's even hit 30 on the Atlanta team, you know? And he's already got a ring. And - no offence to him - he's clearly not Kevin Garnett.