ATLANTA — If you’re looking for clues as to how and why Zaccharie Risacher, the top pick in the 2024 NBA Draft, ended up on the bench Sunday, you need not look far.
Before Friday’s game against the Miami Heat — the Atlanta Hawks’ first home game after the All-Star break — coach Quin Snyder’s response to my question about Risacher was telling.
I asked him why Risacher played more than 23 minutes for only the second time since Christmas — 27 — in a win over the Philadelphia 76ers the previous night. Snyder, not one to call out players publicly, immediately launched into what he felt he needed from Risacher.
“He guarded, and he crashed the offensive boards,” Snyder said. “And I just thought he played with a competitive fire that stood out relative to some of the games he’s played previously. Him raising that bar, we need that, and he needs that.”
Needless to say, Risacher didn’t provide that same energy Friday evening in a moribund 128-97 loss to the Heat. Some garbage-time minutes padded his totals a bit, but in the three quarters when the game was competitive, Risacher had zero points, zero assists and two rebounds in 11 minutes.
And in the first game that followed, Sunday’s win against the Brooklyn Nets, the Hawks decided the top pick in the 2024 draft shouldn’t be given starter’s minutes any longer.
Into the starting five was veteran guard CJ McCollum, and off the bench came Risacher, who had started all but two of his first 119 games in the NBA. (Coincidentally, McCollum had started every game for 11 years before he was traded to Atlanta in January and started coming off the bench.)
In a season when the Hawks have acknowledged several realities — most notably, they weren’t going anywhere important with a team built around Trae Young — this move felt like the latest admission the prize for winning the 2024 lottery isn’t ready to be any kind of focal point for a winning team.
Let’s stop here and exhale for a second. The first pick in a notably weak draft, Risacher is only 20 years old and is certainly something at the NBA level. You wouldn’t call him a bust, at least not yet. He has a clear pathway to being a plus-starter at some point.
To a man, the Hawks also still love him as far as the intangible stuff goes — he’s a hard worker, pleasant to be around and doesn’t care about his own stats. You don’t meet many players who come off the court from their first summer league game lamenting they could have played better help defense.
But the reality slapping Atlanta in the face is that Risacher is not, at this point, an NBA starter, and that lack of energetic juice Snyder mentioned is a big reason. The Hawks have been dramatically better with McCollum in the lineup in his place and have closed every game (not to mention most first halves) that way since trading Young. On Sunday, that group outscored Brooklyn 21-2 over the final seven minutes to secure a comeback win.
“Obviously, (Risacher) was the one that didn’t start,” Snyder said of the lineup change after Sunday’s win. “But I think the biggest thing, it doesn’t reflect in any way on our and my personal belief in Zacch. I thought it actually was a positive for him. Be in the game at a different stage, get some different actions with different guys.”
“He was relaxed, and he competed. Zacch’s about all the right stuff. So, his development is something that’s going to continue to happen whether he’s starting or coming off the bench. But in this case, it’s just at a point where it made sense with CJ out there.”
Entering Sunday, Risacher had a 10.9 PER with a 53.7 percent true shooting mark and mostly negative advanced numbers (a minus-3.7 BPM, for instance, and minus-2.5 rating per 100 possessions in EPM). All those figures are slightly down from his rookie season, when he started slow but provided encouragement with a strong spring.
Alas, that momentum never carried over. To Snyder’s point, Risacher’s lukewarm motor has been a big reason his second season hasn’t been more successful. The Hawks have been crushed on the boards this season, ranking 29th in overall rebound rate, but the 6-8 Risacher somehow has a pathetic 7.9 percent rebound rate, slotting him just behind the Phoenix Suns’ 6-1 Collin Gillespie on the league leaderboard.
There’s also, for the moment, a major fit issue with a starting group that was already light on shooting and ballhandling. Risacher has made a modest 35.4 percent from 3 on the season, and nobody is scared of him firing away from the perimeter.
You could live with that percentage if he had another half-court talent to hang his hat on, but he doesn’t. Risacher isn’t a natural shooting pull-ups in the paint, has no low-post game to speak of and has neither the handle nor first-step quickness to reach the rim with frequency. His best skill, scoring in transition, is something this roster doesn’t especially need.
Also notable is his lack of physicality. Though Risacher has put on muscle since coming to the Hawks as a stringbean teen, he still draws shockingly few fouls (a piddling 0.15 free-throw attempts per field goal attempt) in addition to the underwhelming rebounding. A notable play from Sunday, for instance, was a right-handed drive against Brooklyn’s not-exactly imposing rookie Egor Demin, during which Risacher reached the restricted area but couldn’t muscle home the finish through some incidental contact.
Unfortunately for Risacher, he also doesn’t play with a lot of shooting around him in that starting five, which has become particularly notable with Dyson Daniels’ shooting regression this season. (After making a respectable 34.0 percent from 3 a year ago, Daniels is shooting 12.7 percent in 2025-26. TWELVE POINT SEVEN PERCENT, people!)
Thus, McCollum has to be out there. There just isn’t enough half-court spacing or on-ball shot creation otherwise.
So, here we are. Risacher came off the bench again in Brooklyn and scored 7 points in 20 minutes, with a solid first-half stint followed by some rough possessions in the third quarter and zero minutes in the fourth. One wonders whether his playing time from here will only diminish; newly acquired Jonathan Kuminga, another combo forward, has yet to play a minute as a Hawk but should be playing soon and seemingly has overlapping skills. Plus, newly acquired Corey Kispert offers more shooting from the small-forward spot, albeit at the cost of highly flammable defense.
“A lot of those things are matchup related,” Snyder said after Sunday’s game, also noting Mo Gueye’s defense could make him part of that forward mix, too. “These quandaries, they’re always there. This is just the latest one. So we’ll work our way through it.
“I think I’ve run him 24 minutes over the course of the last year and a half, which is about the same as other guys in that draft are playing. So he needs to keep playing, whatever that looks like. But there are going to be bumps in the road. … So I think there’s a balance there, of your belief in guys and giving them confidence and then also, you know, we’re about winning.”
So, what does this look like?
The Hawks won the 2024 draft lottery and chose Risacher over reigning Rookie of the Year Stephon Castle and No. 2 pick Alex Sarr, among others. (Sarr, it should be said, seemed amazingly unenthused about coming to Atlanta.) At the time, it seemed like he might join Young as the future of the franchise.
Barely a year and a half later, Young is already gone, and Risacher’s impact on the future is very much in question. Now, Atlanta has multiple forwards it can use interchangeably behind and next to the All-Star Jalen Johnson. Risacher is just one of them.
It’s a tough, grown-up choice by the Hawks that was likely made easier by the fact a different general manager is in place from the one who picked Risacher. Nonetheless, it’s also an acknowledgement of a reality that just couldn’t be ignored: The Hawks have been massively better with McCollum in Risacher’s spot.
Thus, 18 months after he was picked first, Risacher’s draft position is no longer enough justification to put him on the floor. If he brings the energy he did to the Philadelphia game, he’ll stay on the court.
And if not? Snyder has other options.