Atlanta Hawks: Lloyd Pierce Rumors Beginning To Bubble
By W. M. Lawson
The Atlanta Hawks are in the middle of a search for a new Head Coach. That hire will have three 1st round NBA Draft picks, and a serious rebuild ahead. One name is beginning to surface.
Frankly, it’s still a little tough to write about our beloved Atlanta Hawks. It wasn’t that long ago that our fair team was the Number 1 seed in the Eastern Conference Playoffs. Yet, it feels like forever ago. With the Atlanta Braves seemingly ahead of schedule in their rebuild, new GM Travis Schlenk looks to kick start the Hawks’ revamp and restart with three 1st Round picks in the coming Draft. None of that will matter, if the impending coaching hire is bad. One name in that search is starting to bubble to the rumor surface.
Multiple articles have reported or reaffirmed in the last 24-48 hours that Atlanta has seemingly reduced and distilled the Head Coach search to 3 or 4 dudes. All have some sort of background in renovation projects. Some even have a history of working with Schlenk at previous spots.
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Lloyd Pierce falls in that latter group. The rumor mill started churning loudly yesterday afternoon about what the Atlanta Hawks’ Front Office was up to. Those rumors pointed to Coach Pierce.
The point of this piece is not to assert that Pierce will get the job. Nor is it some sort of treatise about whether he should or shouldn’t. There is no way to know either of those things right now.
But it is becoming clear what this coaching search means in terms of direction of the franchise. Travis Schlenk was brought in to fix something. Apparently, his idea is that it needs to be torn up from the roots.
That probably could’ve been inferred by the dismissal, or non-retention, of former Coach Bud. The contracts he signed with Bazemore and Schröder will haunt the Front Office for a couple of years. He probably abrogated any chance to help lead this team through a rebuild with those two contracts, frankly.
With the attention around Lloyd Pierce, and Larranga and Tibbets, it seems to be the first real indication that Schlenk sees the pitiful state of the roster, and conjoining contracts, as some of us do. All three of those dudes have been integral to fixing situations in their current roles. None more so than Pierce. The job they’ve done in Philly, AKA “The Process”, looks pretty good from the outside.
It is impossible to know whether any of those dudes will eventually get the job, or whether they would succeed. But what this search already tells us is that a rehab isn’t what’s about to happen. It is an old fashioned re-plowing of the soil and rebuilding.
That is both exciting and disappointing at the same time.