Is Taurean Prince the Best Player on the Hawks?
By Chris Guest
With all that playing time, Prince has been honing his craft and improving his skills on the fly as one of the most important players on the Hawks’ roster. Throughout portions of the early season, Prince would have strong, double-digit scoring performances intermingled with tough nights in which he only scored 2-7 points despite big minutes loads.
Consistency is perhaps the most important indicator of a player’s talent level, and though Prince showed flashes before the All-Star Break, he was never able to truly “put it all together” and display his entire bag of tricks in the same game.
He did have a few strong games in which one segment of his skill set was highlighted: He obliterated an extremely weak Kings team with a career-high 8 assists and 4 steals despite only scoring 14 points in a November game, he notched career-highs of 30 against the Raptors in December and then one-upped himself with 31 against the Celtics in February.
Despite those strong showings, his 30-point outburst against the Raptors was sandwiched in between 11- and 12-point outings in which he shot a combined a combined 8 of 22. His 31-point showcase came after one of the worst games of Taurean’s young career against the Hornets in which he did not score from the field in 25 minutes and only hoisted 2 total field goal attempts.
That inconsistency was troubling for Hawks fans, especially after a strong playoff push at the end of the 2016-17 season for Prince, whose play was widely lauded as the best among all rookies getting minutes in those playoffs.
Even with so much variance in his performances, Prince was named as a replacement in the Rising Stars Game when the Bucks’ Malcolm Brogdon went down with a serious injury. Though he did not look great in that game (overshadowed by an incredible dunk from teammate John Collins), perhaps that exposure to All-Star weekend helped to re-focus The Prince That Was Promised and get him back on the right track for the rest of the season.
That has definitely looked to be case as Prince has come out like a man possessed since returning from the All-Star break, and one could certainly make the case that he has been the best player on the Hawks in that time frame.