The Atlanta Hawks captured lightning in a bottle with their run to the Eastern Conference Finals in 2020-21. As they navigate this season with a similar roster setup, one former Hawks player is also hoping to recapture that magic.
Just five players remain from that team.
Kevin Huerter is not one of them, traded to the Sacramento Kings in 2022 following the Hawks’ deal to acquire Dejounte Murray. Now, he hopes his Kings can do what the Hawks did.
Like those Hawks, these Kings have turned to a former player in hopes of sparking their season, which has gotten off to a 14-19 start. For the Hawks, it was going from Lloyd Pierce to Nate McMillan.
The Kings are turning to Doug Christie after firing Mike Brown.
“Ours, I remember back in the day, was – that it happened right before All-Star break, and I think we won seven in a row. So this is kind of similar. A little bit earlier in the season,” Huerter told reporters on December 31. “Sometimes there's a change of energy is all you need. It's not like we, the rest of that season in Atlanta, we changed everything we were doing X's and O's. It was just an energy shift, and we’ll see if a similar thing can happen here.”
The Hawks were 14-20 when they fired Pierce in February 2021. They went 27-11 the rest of the way, including a seven-game winning streak in January, en route to the ECF.
Of course, it was downhill from there for McMillan’s Hawks.
Kings could find short-term fix for long-term issue
They won two more games the following regular season. But they were bounced in the first round of the playoffs by the Miami Heat in a series that saw the latter hound Hawks star Trae Young.
That experience sparked the trade for Murray, leading to Huerter’s trade. McMillan would last 59 games into the 2022-23 season before he was fired and eventually replaced by Quin Snyder.
Huerter has previously spoken about how that extended playoff run doomed the Hawks.
“That was almost like the start of our downfall, was the run that we went on,” Huerter told J.J. Redick and Tommy Alter on ‘The Old Man & the Three’ in May 2023. “We won before we were expected to win, or before we should have won let’s call it…That just put a fast forward on our timeline, and I don’t think our team as a whole was fully at that point.”
Huerter is optimistic about the change to Christie. And the Hawks could certainly benefit from the Kings at least capturing that lightning in a bottle even if it is only a short-term solution. But there is a reason teams do not go down that path intentionally.