Tim Bontemps is leaving ESPN to join the Atlanta Hawks’ front office.
According to the network’s Tim MacMahon and Brian Windhorst, Bontemps has been hired for a front office role with the Atlanta Hawks, serving as a strategic adviser reporting to team president of basketball operations Onsi Saleh. Front Office Sports previously reported that Bontemps was in “advanced talks” with the Hawks for a front-office role. And as Awful Announcing noted at the time, he was notably absent from his usual spot on Windhorst’s Hoop Collective podcast in reacting to the Giannis Antetokounmpo trade to Miami, which was as good a sign as any that something was in motion.
The 41-year-old has been on the NBA beat for 14 years, the last eight at ESPN. His résumé before that included stints covering the Nets for the New York Post and a run as the Washington Post‘s national NBA writer. At ESPN, his role expanded well past writing, with regular hits on Get Up, sit-down interviews with star players, and a recurring seat on Windhorst’s podcast alongside his coverage of the Eastern Conference.
FOS had initially reported that the new role sits on the “basketball side” of Atlanta’s front office, and Bontemps had already spent his final ESPN years drifting away from gamer recaps and toward roster construction, trade mechanics, and where the league was heading next, the exact terrain a front office adviser gets paid to think about.
As Brendon Kleen has tracked at AA, Bontemps is part of a much bigger pattern this year. The WNBA has pulled from the media twice over, with ESPN’s Kevin Pelton landing in the Houston Comets’ front office and The Athletic’s Ben Pickman joining Portland’s expansion franchise in a similar capacity. The NBA side has seen its own churn, with Royce Young moving to the Thunder and Mike Singer to the Nuggets in recent years, and Cristina Daglas landing in the Washington Wizards’ front office shortly after being fired by ESPN. None of it matches the speed of Mike Schmitz’s climb, who went from writing draft coverage to running the Mavericks in well under 10 years.
Teams pulling front-office hires from the press box isn’t new, but the pace lately says something about how much value front offices now place on the analytical muscle sports media has built over the last two decades.