De’Andre Hunter nears his return, and the Hawks’ bad-luck season might be turning around

For months the Atlanta Hawks couldn’t catch a break, but things are finally looking up. They’ve won five straight games, thanks in part to some overdue good fortune. The streak started with a 14-point win against a Miami Heat team missing Jimmy Butler, then continued with a massive comeback in Orlando that required seven 3s in six minutes to beat the Magic, a buzzer-beating 3 from Tony Snell to take down the Toronto Raptors and a pair of professional wins over the relatively hapless Sacramento Kings and fully hapless Cleveland Cavaliers.

The Houston Rockets, who have lost 16 straight games, host the Hawks on Tuesday. If their respective streaks continue and Atlanta can beat the feisty but rebuilding Oklahoma City Thunder at home on Thursday, the Nate McMillan era will have gotten off to a 7-0 start. 

The best part, though, is that the Hawks are getting healthy. While they made as much noise as anybody in free agency, a series of injuries prevented them from finding harmony and ultimately cost Lloyd Pierce his job. In an interview with John Fricke and Hugh Douglas on 92.9 The Game on Tuesday morning, team president Travis Schlenk said that De’Andre Hunter could be back in the lineup against Oklahoma City. 

“Fingers crossed,” Schlenk said. “It’s possible that we might see him as early as Thursday. But we’re getting close. We’re taking it day by day.”

That Atlanta was able to salvage anything at all out of the first half of the season is a credit to Hunter. It was 10-9 and tied for the ninth-best net rating in the league after the game in which he injured his knee on Jan. 29, and it went 4-11 with the ninth-worst net rating in the month that followed. Before having surgery, Hunter averaged 19.3 points, 6.0 rebounds 2.5 assists, 1.1 steals and 0.6 blocks per 36 minutes on 64 percent true shooting and 19.1 percent usage. Each of those numbers is an improvement from his rookie season, and combined they constitute a massive step forward. Hunter went from an iffy decision-maker with mostly theoretical upside to a legitimate 3-and-D guy with some playmaking chops. 

Defensively, the Hawks have been 9.3 points per 100 possessions better with Hunter on the court than on the bench, per Cleaning The Glass, which filters out heaves and garbage time. He has only played 317 minutes with Clint Capela, the Hawks’ defensive anchor, but in that time they’ve allowed 101.2 points per 100 possessions, which is significantly stingier than the Los Angeles Lakers’ league-leading defensive rating. Their terrible offensive rating in those minutes might be a concern, although their full-strength starting lineup — Trae Young, Cam Reddish, Hunter, John Collins and Capela — has scored just fine. That unit, along with the one with Kevin Huerter in Reddish’s place, have dominated, albeit in small samples.

If Hunter picks up where he left off, the team that sits eighth in the East will soon have more firepower than many of the teams occupying similar space in the standings. Bogdan Bogdanovic returned from his knee injury at the start of the streak and logged 25 encouraging minutes against the Cavs on Sunday. Danilo Gallinari’s last four games represent by far his most productive and efficient stretch of the season. Reddish will remain out for four-to-six weeks after a nonsurgical procedure on his Achilles, according to The Athletic’s Shams Charania, but reinforcements are on the way. Kris Dunn, who has yet to play a single game for Atlanta, is “ramping up his on-court stuff” and will go on its upcoming, potentially season-defining road trip, per Schlenk. 

“He’s probably a little bit behind De’Andre,” Schlenk said on the radio, “but we hope that somewhere on that trip, that eight-game trip, that’ll be the first time we’ll be able to see him this year.” 

The Hawks expected to be much better than 19-20 at this point in the season, but, considering they were hit with a barrage of injuries, they’ve fared well. Should Hunter return on Thursday, though, he will not have much time to ease himself into things. The trip opens with a Saturday matinee against the Lakers, in which Hunter will likely have to guard LeBron James. He’ll probably check Kawhi Leonard in the same building two days later. It would be unreasonable to expect Hunter to be at the peak of his powers by then, but the NBA schedule is unforgiving, this season particularly so. If nothing else, though, the Hawks will field a team that resembles the one they envisioned coming in, which has rarely if ever been the case.