With every passing season, it’s more and more clear that the Atlanta Hawks tricked the world in 2021. Although their Eastern Conference Finals run two seasons ago was thrilling, the Hawks greatly benefitted from matching up with a bootless Knicks team and a Sixers team freighted with neuroses and weirdness. As such, the Hawks have failed to match those same lofty heights ever since, even as they returned the core of the roster in Trae Young, Clint Capela and John Collins and their coach Nate McMillan. Last year, they got trounced by the Heat in the first round as the eighth seed. This year, after swinging a blockbuster deal for Dejounte Murray over the summer, they only did marginally better, losing to the Celtics in six games as the seventh seed.

This is a supremely talented roster that, for whatever reason, can’t channel all that talent into winning basketball games. Here are the three Hawks most responsible for their underwhelming season

Trae Young

Usually, Trae Young is cold in a good. This year, he was mostly cold in a bad way, shooting a paltry 33.5 percent on three-pointers. While Young still had tremendous gravity and wasn’t shy to let it fly, that was part of the problem— of the 26 players to shoot more than 450 threes this year, Young was the fourth worst. In theory, Murray represented the ideal running mate for Young, covering for Young’s leaky defense and providing another ball-handler so that Young wouldn’t have to be responsible for piloting every single Hawks possession. Instead, it exacerbated Young’s anti-social tendencies. Young refused to shoot catch and shoot threes; he moves without the ball with the enthusiasm of a kid going to the dentist.

Fairly or not, Young has earned a reputation as an empty stats guy; this year, they felt even emptier than usual, as he stuck to his hedonistic stat gorging even as other options presented themselves.

Accordingly, Young is now the subject of frequent trade rumors, even if his strong playoff performance has quieted them somewhat. The Hawks now have enough talent and a strong enough coach in Quinn Snyder that they can divorce the entirety of their future from Trae Young. If Young is the pilot of yet another underwhelming Hawks team in 2024, it’ll be the last Hawks team that he’s a part of.

John Collins

The idea of John Collins is thrilling. At a time where teams are upsizing their frontcourts to try to keep as much rim protection on the court as possible, Collins should be the ideal power forward, pairing world-class size and athleticism with a polished offensive game. In reality, though, Collins has never been especially comfortable since the Hawks acquired Clint Capela in 2020. His stats have uniformly declined. This year, he had his worst season yet: his scoring plummeted (13.1 points per game this year, down from 21.6 in 2020); his rebounding evaporated (6.5 per game this year, down from 10.1 in 2020); he no longer makes threes (a ghastly 29.2 percent this year, down from 40.1 percent in 2020). Despite putatively just entering his prime, the 25 year-old Collins still hasn’t found a workable role for himself.

There’s a fundamental misalignment in his game. The context he needs to thrive as a scorer is incompatible with the context he needs to survive on defense. Offensively, he should be a pick-and-roll monster, but can’t carve out enough space alongside Capela or another big man; defensively, he’s way too spacey and permissive of a rim protector to anchor the team, necessitating the presence of another big man to cover for him. There’s a reason that the Hawks have shopped him for years. Collins is clearly a good player who could still blossom into the player he once seemed destined to become, but it’s unlikely that that happens in Atlanta.

Nate McMillan

Coaching is a fickle thing. Hailed as the Hawks’ savior after turning the team around in 2021, McMillan was canned in February after allegedly warring with Trae Young and losing the trust of the team. Fortunately, the Hawks have already found the long-term solution, hiring one of the NBA’s best and most creative coaches in Quin Snyder. Despite the fact that Snyder ran up an uninspiring 13-15 record with the Hawks, he’s easy to believe in; his slow start in Atlanta can be chalked up to the fact that we brought in mid-season and didn’t have time to implement his scheme or assemble his coaching staff in a meaningful way. As such, next year should serve as an important litmus test for what really ails the Hawks. Are they an uncoachable team or was Nate McMillan simply the wrong coach for the team?