Atlanta has a $24 million team option on Kuminga, and picking up that option is just one of the alternatives the Hawks would be looking at with him \u2014 and arguably the least likely.<\/p>\n
For starters, Atlanta in theory can be a cap room team this summer if it doesn\u2019t re-sign McCollum, declines the option on Kuminga and stretches Buddy Hield (his $3 million guarantee can be atomized into five years at $600,000 a pop). That\u2019s true even if they win the draft lottery with the pick gift-wrapped from the New Orleans Pelicans last June.<\/p>\n
There are even scenarios where the Hawks re-sign McCollum and still have more than the midlevel exception in cap room, although that would likely involve trading one or both of Corey Kispert (may I interest you in two years and $27 million for our 10th-best player?) or Zaccharie Risacher.<\/p>\n
More likely, however, the Hawks\u2019 play since the deadline threw that idea out the window. Atlanta is good enough that re-signing the 35-year-old McCollum on a short-term deal for, say, a bit above the projected $15 million midlevel exception makes sense. That means the Hawks are likely operating as an over-the-cap team: Using their non-taxpayer midlevel exception on a quality big, their biannual exception on another guard \u2026 and figuring out what to do with Kuminga.<\/p>\n
Is he worth $24 million? Probably not. My BORD$ free-agency evaluation is still in beta for 2026-27, but suffice it to say, its early estimates of Kuminga\u2019s value are well south of that number. Like, Roald Amundsen expedition-type south.<\/p>\n
However, that doesn\u2019t mean the Hawks should just decline the option and let him walk. There are scenarios where picking it up still makes the most sense, just to have the tradeable salary on hand; there are even more scenarios where declining the option but agreeing to a longer deal with Kuminga at lower money makes all kinds of sense.<\/p>\n
Of course, Kuminga\u2019s perceived value may swing dramatically based on what transpires the rest of this series (and beyond, should the Hawks advance). In the big picture, Atlanta\u2019s books are clean enough to go in several directions with the $24 million. If his play attracts other teams, the option may also permit the Hawks to immediately flip him for a different player who is less duplicative of Johnson \u2026 or decline the option and sign-and-trade Kuminga on a longer deal \u2026 or, yes, bring him back and see where this goes a year from now.<\/p>\n
About that last shot\u2026<\/p>\n
Mikal Bridges is going to have a tough time beating the charges after his shot at the end of Game 2. The rap on him, from his critics, is that he values his consecutive games streak so much that he is unwilling to absorb any contact around the basket and will actively duck situations where he might draw a foul or create contact to flee for the safety of a perimeter jumper.<\/p>\n
Welp \u2026 on the final play of Game 2, the Hawks screwed up their coverage just enough to let Bridges catch the ball on the go with a full head of steam, three seconds on the clock, a half-step advantage on Jalen Johnson and no Hawks at the rim.<\/p>\n
Yes, Bridges also had to worry about Dyson Daniels flying back on defense, and Johnson is athletic enough to contest a shot attempt at the cup. At the moment he catches the ball, however, Bridges is already bailing toward the corner with his first step rather than pressing his advantage to draw a foul on Johnson \u2026 to the point that he nearly steps on the referee\u2019s foot!<\/p>\n
![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/Screenshot-2026-04-21-at-6.01.22\u202fPM.png\")
<\/p>\n
In a related story, Bridges only drew 98 free-throw attempts this season in his 82 games, and his foul-drawing rate of 6.5 percent on 2-pointers is one of the league\u2019s lowest (18th-worst among players with at least 500 minutes, according to pbpstats.com; nearly all the players below him are small guards).<\/p>\n
That doesn\u2019t mean Bridges isn\u2019t a valuable player; his defense has been a huge plus, and his shooting normally is too (those back-to-back Bridges misses on wide-open 3s in the middle of the fourth quarter of Game 2 were a lucky break for Atlanta). And, of course, he does keep himself in the lineup for 82 games every year, which is no easy feat for a lean player.<\/p>\n
But in a high-leverage situation, his seeming unwillingness to absorb contact to get an advantage stood out.<\/p>\n
The Tony Bradley experience<\/p>\n
Atlanta backup center Jock Landale is likely out for the entire series because of an ankle injury, and that has left the Hawks\u2019 backup center rotation in tatters. At times, rail-thin Mo Gueye has tried to match up against Knicks behemoth Mitchell Robinson; in Game 2, Hawks coach Quin Snyder switched around his first-half rotation to match Okongwu\u2019s minutes with Robinson as much as possible.<\/p>\n
However, another solution may be coming into focus: Tony Bradley looks like he\u2019s in shape to help a little.<\/p>\n
The Hawks tried Bradley for a disastrous three-minute stint in their April regular-season game against the Knicks, mere hours after signing him off his couch, but he clearly wasn\u2019t ready for the assignment. Atlanta had been terrified to send him back on the court; however, the fact that the Knicks weren\u2019t guarding Gueye finally persuaded Snyder to give Bradley another look in Game 2.<\/p>\n
All things considered, it went OK. Bradley played 12 minutes and finished with a tidy plus-7 plus\/minus, helped along by a rough night from the Knicks\u2019 subs. He had enough juice to grab a steal and a block and offers a legit roll target who got free for a dunk in a half-court pick-and-roll.<\/p>\n
Bradley was dealing with Robinson as a Pacer in last year\u2019s Eastern Conference finals. As this series winds on, I\u2019d expect the backup center job to be his until further notice.<\/p>\n
One side note while we\u2019re talking about the bigs: With all the focus on Robinson and New York\u2019s offensive rebounding, the Knicks\u2019 24.4 percent offensive rebound rate is very survivable for the Hawks.<\/p>\n
The flip side, however, is that the Hawks are also allowed to grab offensive boards and haven\u2019t really been doing so. The Hawks have grabbed only\u00a0 16.3 percent of their misses across the two games, which would be a league-worst rate (emphatically so) over the regular season. When your probability of an offensive rebound is lower than Dyson Daniels\u2019 3-point percentage, that\u2019s a bad sign. It\u2019s one reason the Hawks have fewer points than the Knicks over the two games despite outshooting them in effective field goal percentage, 53.3 to 53.0.<\/p>\n
The leading offensive rebounder for Atlanta in this series? That would be Risacher, who grabbed two in his two-minute cameo in Game 1. Five other Hawks also have two, but nobody has any more.<\/p>\n
The Pelican Brief<\/p>\n
The last time McCollum, Jose Alvarado and Daniels were in the playoffs was in 2024, as members of the Pelicans team that was rudely swept out of the first round by Oklahoma City. (An injury to Zion Williamson didn\u2019t help.)<\/p>\n
So, it was a bit humorous to see McCollum and Alvarado, teammates for four seasons in New Orleans, getting into it and each receiving double technical fouls after their, um, interaction late in the third quarter of Game 2.<\/p>\n
The Pelicans\u2019 fingerprints are all over this series, actually. Alexander-Walker was originally drafted by the Pels and overlapped both Alvarado and McCollum (though not Daniels). Daniels was drafted (and given up on) by New Orleans before landing in Atlanta in the Dejounte Murray trade.<\/p>\n
Hart overlapped with both McCollum and Alvarado on the last Pelicans team to actually win a playoff game, in 2022 against the Phoenix Suns. And of course, the Hawks own an unprotected lottery pick courtesy of the Pelicans that has a 9.8 percent chance of netting Atlanta the top pick this June; the same deal also brought in little-used Hawks rookie Asa Newell.<\/p>\n
Enjoy this series, Pels fans; this might be as close as you get to the playoffs for a while.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Life comes at you fast, and nowhere does it come faster than in an NBA playoff series. Best-of-sevens…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":715779,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3796],"tags":[208,7,6,478,470,191,4073,4072,675],"class_list":{"0":"post-715778","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-orleans-pelicans","8":"tag-atlanta-hawks","9":"tag-basketball","10":"tag-nba","11":"tag-new-orleans","12":"tag-new-orleans-pelicans","13":"tag-new-york-knicks","14":"tag-neworleans","15":"tag-neworleanspelicans","16":"tag-pelicans"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116447938897171501","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=715778"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715778\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/715779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=715778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=715778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=715778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}