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Two of the best young guards in the league will match up against each other for the first time when the San Antonio Spurs play the Atlanta Hawks

It didn’t take long for Dejounte Murray to reintroduce himself to the NBA. He’s been doing it all for the Spurs so far, leading the team in rebounding, assists, and steals. All of this is being done on a minutes restriction that is keeping him from playing more than about 23 minutes per game. Per 36 minutes Murray’s averaging 21.5 points, 13.2 rebounds, and 7.2 assists per contest.

Before an ankle injury took him out mid-way through his fourth game of the season Trae Young was on fire. He wasted no time picking up where left off in his thrilling rookie season. He had expanded his range (if that was even possible) and had the Atlanta Hawks looking like a legitimate playoff threat.

Young is one of the most exciting young players the league has had in some time. He’s a rare talent both as a shooter and playmaker, the kind of player who can dice you up with well-placed assists or get Stephen Curry level hot from deep on any given night. Before his minor ankle injury, he was connecting on an unsustainable 50 percent of his three-point attempts.

Tuesday nights matchup between the Hawks and Spurs will be the very first time that we have seen Murray and Young take the court against one another in the NBA. It’s sure to be an exciting duel between two rising stars with vastly different skillsets.

Young will flambe your favorite team on offense whenever he wants, but he’s also going to get torched on the defensive end. He’s a better offensive player than Murray is right now but doesn’t hold a candle to him on the defensive end of the floor.

With a 6’10 wingspan, Murray can envelop most opposing point guards and wreak havoc in passing lanes. That’s what this game between the Hawks and Spurs will ultimately come down to, can Murray neutralize Young? He should be able to. Young is coming off of that minor ankle sprain and might be a step slower than he usually would be. That, combined with Murray’s length, should give Dejoutne the edge he needs to stay in front of him and regularly contest shots throughout the night.

Spurs Fansided

Game Preview: San Antonio Spurs at Atlanta Hawks

Can the Silver and Black limit Trae Young in his return?



The San Antonio Spurs are back on the road Tuesday night to take on a fledgling Atlanta Hawks team at State Farm Arena. San Antonio has struggled against young athletic teams in recent years, and their older legs looked slower than usual in Sunday’s loss to the Lakers.

Atlanta is far from title contention, but with Trae Young returning to their lineup, the Hawks are a threat to outpace any team in the NBA. Young garnered a tremendous amount of media attention this summer, and he’s proven to be deserving of every ounce of praise. The second-year floor general has looked nothing short of a generational point guard, and the Hawks young core goes as he goes.

His range is unlimited, his vision arguably second to none, and his handles are right up there with the Kyrie Irvings and Stephen Currys of the world. Though his defense admittedly leaves much to be desired, you’d be hard pressed to find a guard his age with skills this advanced.

San Antonio only had Derrick White to throw at Young last year, and with the addition of Dejounte Murray, life will only be more difficult for Atlanta’s rising star. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to say Murray has been San Antonio’s best player on either side of the ball. His defense has been relentless, and his breakneck speed has added another element to the Spurs’ offense that they’ll desperately need to keep up with Atlanta.

Trends to watch:

• The Silver and Black rank seventh in transition points per game, are second in rebounding, and lead the league in and-one frequency.
• Nearly half of their games were decided by single digits in 2018-2019, and five of their first six games this season have come down to the wire.
• The Hawks have been one of the worst three-point shooting teams this season, and the Spurs have defended beyond the arc just about as well as anyone in the league.
• A minutes restriction is the only thing that’s slowed Murray’s meteoric rise. White and Murray have played a grand total of five seconds together in 2019-2020

Spoiler:

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San Antonio -- SB Nation

Just wait til 6:30 I guess.

The positive with Hunter and Reddish is both are 6'9 with shoes and a 7'1+ wingspan

Spurs East, Baby!

Remember, as an Atlanta Hawks fan, when that used to mean something? Way, way back, around five years ago?

We didn’t have a Tim Duncan. But, for what it was worth, we did have an Al Horford to throw out there! Not a Tony Parker on the roster, really. But Jeff Teague was no small potatoes au gratin, either! No Gregg Popovich, no. But we got The Man Sitting Next To The Man in the head coach chair, summoned here by his boss-pal, a guy that played for the both of them back in the day. So, there’s that.

You could lump a Thabo, a Baze, and a Dennis together, and make a Manu Lite. We’ll take your Marco Belinelli and raise you one Kyle Korver, thank you very much. Tiago, Moose, Pero, Bonner… it’s a wash.

We didn’t have a Kawhi Leonard. But for a lockdown defender that dogs out opposing wing stars while rounding out the rest of his game, you could have done a LOT worse than DeMarre Carroll.

No matter what players and staff you bring in to replicate, duplicate, and approximate the successes the San Antonio Spurs have enjoyed for decades under Popovich’s watchful eyes, there is one thing NBA competitors like the Hawks have yet to reproduce and sustain. Something that, from ownership down to the G-Leaguers, reasonably resembles The Spurs Way.

The Spurs (4-2) enter State Farm Arena with a Spurs East alumnus, Carroll, now suiting up for them in his return to playing in the rough-and-tumble NBA West. Coming off a winning homestand and just a pair of losses to LA clubs, they’ll face an Atlanta Hawks team (7:30 PM Eastern, Fox Sports Southeast and 92.9 FM in ATL) that suddenly has a lot more to worry about than whether Popovich will unshackle Carroll from his light workload this far this season.

The eleven-year NBA veteran arrived as part of a deal the Spurs would come to regret, not due at all to Carroll. The Spurs had to part with Davis Bertans, this past summer, to make room for free agent Marcus Morris, and swung a three-team deal with the Junkyard Dawg’s last team, the Nets, and the Wizards to make that happen. Only then do they find out that they’ve been Spur-ned by Morris, who reneged on his agreement to sign a better deal with New York.

This is the sort of “misfortune” San Antonio occasionally suffers through. Poor things.

No worries, really, because Carroll was eager to enter the season as the team’s new glue guy. But some funny things happened along the way. Trey Lyles, dead in the water after stops in Utah and Denver, wowed the Spurs staff in camp and in preseason, and now he gets a starting spot. With LaMarcus Aldridge happy to play the 5-spot, and DeMar DeRozan plugged in at small forward, Carroll has found himself the victim of a squeeze play.

Even bench minutes at forward have been sopped up by Spurs incumbents, perennial Pop fave Belinelli, and free agent returnee Rudy Gay. The fifth highest-salaried Spur, Carroll was DNP’d, without injury, by Popovich for the team’s first four games, and was granted just 22 minutes of action in the past two games.

With other franchises, you’d have a player like Carroll openly moping about playing time, leaving subtle jabs on his social media pages until he gets his way. Not so here, where everyone buys into The Spurs Way, which is essentially Coach Pop’s Way, not everybody pulling in different directions doing their own thing. Popovich is a master collaborator, making everyone associated with him feel involved and heard. So when he makes decisions, on who to play and who to DNP-OLD, there is no questioning him. Unless you’re, like, Kawhi or somebody.

“He’s healthy,” Pop explained of DMC before the Spurs fell to the Lakers, 103-96, on Sunday. He added that resting guard Dejounte Murray was the reason Carroll even saw minutes in the first place, and that Carroll was “aggressive, did a good job,” in short stints against the remnants of the Warriors, but needs more time to learn San Antonio system. The tried-and-true Spurs Way.

“That’s what I try to show these young guys,” DeMarre told the Express-News recently about what can’t even be called a demotion at this point. “A lot of things you can’t control, and (playing time) is one. All I can control is getting into the gym, working on my game. And when my number is called, perform at the level I know I can perform at.”

There are some whine-and-cheese Spurs fans out there, perhaps those who miss those days when Finals appearances and 60-win seasons were a given, who implore Pop and the Spurs to start blowing this thing up already. After two consecutive first-round exits, they point to Aldridge as not being, I guess, Duncan enough, he and DeRozan leading an elder pack of Spurs Lite into another hope for a postseason foray.

LMA, who now has Duncan on the bench as an assistant, is doing just fine (16.5 PPG, 7.0 RPG, 2.0 BPG). So is DeRozan (20.3 PPG, 4.2 APG), as doing “just fine” is all anyone in Spurs Country should be clamoring for.

Popovich isn’t pressing his defensive hound of a point guard, Murray, into excessive minutes as he returns from his season-sidelining ACL injury from 2018-19. He’s “just fine” leaning on Bryn Forbes and Derrick White, young guards who benefited greatly by glowing up in Murray’s absence last year.

As one would come to expect, the Spurs are a top-five rebounding team (77.4 D-Reb%, 3rd in NBA) in the early going. It’s the crashing of the offensive boards by San Antonio (27.9 O-Reb%, t-8th in NBA) that presents immediate challenges for Coach Lloyd Pierce’s Hawks (69.5 D-Reb%). Amid the smolders of Spurs East, coach Pierce was brought in to help GM/PBO Travis Schlenk shift gears, and create a Dubs East of sorts.

Atlanta (2-3) has done things “the right way,” mostly, even despite a three-game swoon and the momentary loss of Trae Young (returning tonight, under a 30-minute cap) to an ankle injury along the way. Pierce’s Hawks have been outscoring their opposition on points off turnovers (+1.4 per-48), on the fastbreak (+2.0; the Spurs’ 19.8 PPG leads the NBA), and in the paint (+9.2).

The biggest defensive bugaboo has involved Atlanta ceding second- and extra-chance scoring opportunities (-2.6 points per-48). Rebounding on the defensive end has been woeful, particularly by the Hawks centers, as Trae Young has been, to date, the team’s second-leading defensive rebounder (4.5 D-Rebs per game) despite being the only member below six-foot-five on the roster. Going down that list behind Trae, you will find Cam Reddish and the De’Andre’s, and Jabari Parker, before you can get to starting five-man Alex Len (2.8 per game).

And now, the uphill battle for the Hawks, against the Spurs and just about everybody else, gets impossibly steep. All because we’ve got John The Pharmacist out here writing his own prescriptions.

I can’t begin to pronounce what it is that John Collins is accused of digesting, or rubbing into his bloodstream, or whatever. All I know is it sure looked like it was working. Despite a dip in some stats while trying to cover for his centers’ and his own men, Collins averaged two blocks and a steal per game while logging a juiced up 17.0 PPG (47.4 3FG%) and 8.8 RPG (6.8 defensive).

It used to be the fellas likely to get popped for PED violations were the elders of the league, trying to find whatever angle they can to keep up with the young bucks. Now it’s the young bucks on small-bucks rookie-scale deals, pressed to be superstars from the outset (Cam.) lest they be judged busts, that have guys like Deandre Ayton and Collins doing the GHRP DERP and getting busted anyway.

Collins and the Hawks will make only the finest chicken salad they can, out of the 25 games he’s slated to miss due to suspension. But it is stuff like this that makes every fan alligator-armed when it comes to embracing the Hawks as a team that has its act together, as one that, to a man, does things “the right way”.

I mean, we have Emory Healthcare – the folks who smacked down Ebola – in our corner. We’ve got Dr. Oz and his little Sharecare thingy, and the P2 fellas helping us out. We’ve got a freaking mystic named Chelsea Lane sitting right there behind the bench. You could have your head lopped off, and Chelsea will be right there to sew you back together, quick, fast in a jiffy. There is literally no need to lose your mind. But you gonna try something your cousin Cletus found out works for him doing deadlifts at Palm Beach Planet Fitness? Okay.

The Hawks will need Len and Bruno Fernando being more active and effective on the defensive boards, and they are likely to wear out Young and Parker until they do. They’re also going to need the Age 26-and-up Club (of Len, Evan Turner, Allen Crabbe, Chandler Parsons, yeah I said Chandler Parsons, and Uncle Vince) to get healthy and play way more meaningful roles than they have to date, until Collins becomes eligible to return right before Christmastime.

It’s really the Spurs, and the NFL Patriots to an extent, that have everybody hooked on The Culture Thing: “The first thing we want to do is establish a culture, blah-blah-blah!” As for Atlanta’s attempt at building a Culture Club, it comes and goes, it comes, and it goes. We maxed out our run at creating Spurs East, although repeatedly fumbling our chances away had a lot to do with it.

Now that we’ve got a glimpse of what perils await pursuing Dubs East at full throttle, it’s time to create a unique Culture around here, one that makes somebody else want to grow up to become Hawks North, or Hawks West.



Let’s Go Hawks!

~lw3

Cam with a 'break out' game so far.

I love the defense and energy that Bembry brings, but I can't stand to see him dribble or try to be a playmaker. I know I'm alone, but it's painful to me. When he gets it in his mind to dribble head down, it's over.

That being said, when this team grows up...look out! Love it. Cam is going to be difficult to deal with when he "gets' it.

He picked up right where he left off.

Deester11 wrote:I love the defense and energy that Bembry brings, but I can't stand to see him dribble or try to be a playmaker. I know I'm alone, but it's painful to me. When he gets it in his mind to dribble head down, it's over.

That being said, when this team grows up...look out! Love it. Cam is going to be difficult to deal with when he "gets' it.

Nu uhh, you ain't alone with bembry

Trae was the maestro tonight.

DirtybirdGA wrote:

Deester11 wrote:I love the defense and energy that Bembry brings, but I can't stand to see him dribble or try to be a playmaker. I know I'm alone, but it's painful to me. When he gets it in his mind to dribble head down, it's over.

That being said, when this team grows up...look out! Love it. Cam is going to be difficult to deal with when he "gets' it.

Nu uhh, you ain't alone with bembry

I needed that. Ha. For as much energy as he brings defensively, my Hennessey gets an extra swig when he's trying to be creative offensively.

Deester11 wrote:

DirtybirdGA wrote:

Deester11 wrote:I love the defense and energy that Bembry brings, but I can't stand to see him dribble or try to be a playmaker. I know I'm alone, but it's painful to me. When he gets it in his mind to dribble head down, it's over.

That being said, when this team grows up...look out! Love it. Cam is going to be difficult to deal with when he "gets' it.

Nu uhh, you ain't alone with bembry

I needed that. Ha. For as much energy as he brings defensively, my Hennessey gets an extra swig when he's trying to be creative offensively.

I'll live with it. Our defense has been amazing this season and he's a big part of it. We don't win without our defense especially when we can't score.
It doesn't help that we don't have a true backup PG.

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jayu70 wrote:

Deester11 wrote:

DirtybirdGA wrote:

Nu uhh, you ain't alone with bembry

I needed that. Ha. For as much energy as he brings defensively, my Hennessey gets an extra swig when he's trying to be creative offensively.

I'll live with it. Our defense has been amazing this season and he's a big part of it. We don't win without our defense especially when we can't score.
It doesn't help that we don't have a true backup PG.

I agree with the BU PG view. He was only +0 on the floor and i just think he's best offensively when he's already slashing or out on the break. Defense has been phenomenal for this team so I can live with it.. but I will still cringe.

We'll need Trae to be Hercules on a nightly basis if we want to compete for a playoff spot. He's really coming along.

Bembry on the defense, the Trae pass and Reddish.
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