The Atlanta Hawks season ended this week with a loss to the Chicago Bulls in the NBA Play-In Tournament and for the first time since the NBA had to finish its season in the bubble in 2020, the Hawks are sitting at home instead of participating in the postseason.
Atlanta is going to be one of the most interesting teams to watch this offseason. There is already heavy speculation about them splitting up the backcourt duo of Trae Young and Dejounte Murray, but there could be more retooling around the rest of the roster as well.
Yesterday, the Hawks held their end of the season exit interviews and general manager Landry Fields wrapped the day up. He fielded questions about how the season went and what the Hawks need to do to get the roster to a championship level, here is what Fields had to say:
“Yeah, I mean its been happening and it will continue to happen. Just making those changes, we never want that to just be an arbitrary thing or whimsical, we want it to be well thought out and for us and it is like I mentioned, it is taking time to reflect on what we have with this group and reflect on the areas in which we can continue to improve.
And it is not question of when, it is a question of we can always be doing that, it is the nature of our business and that is part of my job to do that.”
Fields was also asked if the Hawks need to have a big shift or make a big addition to the team in order to make that happen:
“I think we are going to learn that in time, I think those are things that we are going to discover here in the coming weeks or months.
The immediacy of the draft is coming up as well so we need to be able to navigate that while also continuously building out the roster and how we are going to construct that but we are always going to look for areas to improve. Is it big or is it small? At this point, it is hard to tell but I trust our group when we sit down and go through.”
Trae Young was also asked questions about the future, including if he wanted to be in Atlanta:
“Every year teams are different, obviously, I want to be here, but I want to win. I want to be here and I want to win championships here and do that, but I want to win, I mean, that is pretty much all it is for me, that is my motto and that has been me from the beginning.”
When asked if he thought he could win with the Hawks or if it was with someone else, this was Young’s response:
“I believe it can be here, we just have to make it happen.”
