2019 NBA Draft: Atlanta Hawks Ranked as Best Landing Spot for Matisse Thybulle
By Chris Guest
A quick primer on potentially one of the best fits for the Atlanta Hawks in the 2019 NBA Draft.
Matisse Thybulle out of Washington produced one of the single-best defensive seasons in NCAA history last year. Due to that simple fact, the Atlanta Hawks were recently ranked as the best landing spot for the defensive maestro in the 2019 NBA Draft.
According to a piece by Ben Pfeifer of The Rookie Wire, “For Thybulle, Atlanta is the perfect destination to maximize his strengths and minimize his weaknesses. Few teams in the league have the luxury of shooting gravity and vertical spacing like Atlanta, due to the range on Trae Young’s pull-up [three-point jumper].”
Certainly, drafting Thybulle in the 2019 NBA Draft would help paper over some of the glaring concerns that the Atlanta Hawks produced last season on the defensive end, where they ranked 27th per Cleaning the Glass – ahead of only the New York Knicks, Phoenix Suns and Cleveland Cavaliers, who were the three worst teams in the league in 2018-19.
Thybulle is one of this writer’s absolute favorite prospects in the 2019 NBA Draft, so this article sounds like music to mine ears. Previously, we have expressed a few reasons why drafting Thybulle makes sense, we have mock drafted him to the Hawks in our most recent mock, and he featured prominently at #17 overall in our exploration of all 6 picks the Hawks have in next week’s (!!!) NBA draft.
Just so we have it, Thybulle is the only player in Sports Reference’s database to produce over 120 steals, over 80 blocks, a higher than 8 percent block rate and a higher than 6 percent steal rate. He is also the only NCAA men’s collegiate player to play more than 150 total minutes while producing the latter two block and steal rates. To underscore: Those numbers are ridiculously absurd and showcase just how impactful Thybulle can be on defense at the next level.
Next. 3 Backup Point Guards for Hawks in 2019 Draft. dark
Who knows the players that Atlanta Hawks GM Travis Schlenk will focus on in the 2019 NBA Draft, but Thybulle would certainly fill a need on the defensive end due to his striking defensive prowess in college.