Most of the NBA teams expected to do well in the upcoming 2025-26 season have been doing well already: the Oklahoma City Thunder, Denver Nuggets, Houston Rockets, New York Knicks, and Minnesota Timberwolves all come in with momentum, depth, and experience relevant enough that projecting them as 50-game winners feels like a layup. It’ll take more than that, of course, for any of them to say they had a successful season, relative to expectations. Every claim in this paragraph is obvious.
Then there are the teams who, despite not doing so recently, are expected to enter into similar realms as these more solid groups. These are the teams who are poised, they say, to buck the obvious. It does happen every year: some franchise exits purgatory in an upward way, establishing a higher competitive floor than they used to have. But predicting this form of success is some of the hardest league-wide speculation you can do. Experts feel confident, nonetheless, that this year will see the Atlanta Hawks make that step.
Atlanta made it all the way to the Eastern Conference Finals in 2021, but that might have been the weirdest NBA season we’ve ever seen, and they’ve only finished (barely) over .500 once in the four years since. The roster has changed over plenty of times during that stretch, but remains centered around ever-mercurial point guard Trae Young. Young’s career shows us a fascinating tension between myth and reality: known culturally as a hot shooter, he’s benefitted a lot from the world’s desire for more Steph Currys, on that front. Young has never actually shot 40 percent from three over a full season; in more than half of his campaigns, he hasn’t even hit 35 percent, which is considered the threshold for should-versus-shouldn’t from three-point land.
Despite this, Young is indeed an exceptional offensive talent, one of maybe a dozen NBA players who no front office should hesitate to give the keys of an offense to. When you put a capable, healthy team around him, you’re going to have a top-ten scoring unit. He may not have equivalent size and scoring skills as LeBron James, Nikola Jokic, or Luka Doncic, but he does read and react to defenses about as well as those guys. And the big brains of basketball believe that the Hawks have given him the right teammates to do that with, this season.
Key to this are two young athletic punishers who caught eyes last season, during the Hawks’ surprisingly competitive first two months of the season. Dyson Daniels, winner of the 2025 Most Improved Player award, made history with his 229 steals; the most any player has had in the 21st century. You see bigger numbers, in this category, through the 80’s and 90’s, when predators like John Stockton, Michael Jordan, Gary Payton, and Alvin Robertson could exploit the generally weaker dribblers of that NBA era. Daniels has entered their company at a time when primary ball handlers are more fortressed with their handles than ever before.
Jalen Johnson was the other of these two stand-outs. A long, athletic utility wing who can stuff every column of a box score, his feel for uptempo basketball brought out the best in Young, and even gave him more opportunities to rest; Johnson can run a fast break nearly as well as he can finish one. Johnson hasn’t been an All-Star yet, but he’s produced like one. The only problem with him is a big one: at 23 years old, his four NBA seasons have a health record more similar to the recent seasons of a 33-year-old. His 2024-25 campaign ended in January with a shoulder injury, but ankle and other lower-body maladies have kept him out of action too. He’s played in just a bit over half of all games he’s been eligible for in his young career.
Vegas has the Hawks winning 46 or 47 games, which would likely be good enough to secure them a non-play-in spot in the East playoff bracket; many top media analysts are more optimistic than that, suggesting that 50 wins are on the table in a weakened conference. In either case, Johnson’s health is a major variable, even given all the new additions to the roster: Kristaps Porzingis (a major health concern himself), Luke Kennard (a guard who can shoot as well as casual fans believe Young does), and Nickeil Alexander-Walker—the cousin of the 2025 MVP, who pairs with Porzingis to bring his new team more knowledge about what happens at the highest levels of the league today. All of them should help, but Atlanta’s top level is inaccessible without Johnson, the only player here who figures as a true co-star for Young.
Second-year wing Zaccharie Risacher is perhaps the exception. He looks to build on a season in which he finished second in Rookie of The Year voting, and who knows how high his game might go? He certainly combines with the rest of his supporting cast, in any event, to make up the kind of overall size, speed, and force that Trae Truthers have long contended he could make real feasts out of. The vision is certainly there, even if it depends on some mystery boxes yielding gold.
Atlanta has made some calculated bets, which could very well pan out just as their enthusiasts expect them to. But for now, the Hawks are simply a thing of great hype, eyed excitedly not just by their own fanbase, but by the broader audience of the sport. Those onlookers have their fingers crossed, with hopes in their hearts for a fresh contender in an Eastern Conference that badly needs an injection of new competitive life.
