2010 Summer League Rosters: Atlanta Hawks
July 13th, 2010
Alade Aminu
Aminu was covered in the Bobcats summer league round-up thing of last week. In 4 games for Charlotte, Aminu averaged 5.5 points and 4.0 rebounds. Additionally, Aminu has signed a contract to play for Chalon in France next season. So whatever chances he had of making the Hawks roster now look shot.
James Augustine
Augustine was previously covered on the Jazz summer league roster recap. Playing for Utah in the Orlando summer pro league, Augustine averaged 6.2 points, 4.2 rebounds, 3 fouls and 2 turnovers per game. Not great, although he did hit two 3 pointers.
Jordan Crawford
After his trade from New Jersey, Jordan Crawford now gets to (or has to) battle Jamal Crawford for backup guard minutes. The two are really quite similar; 6’4, athletic and with tons of flair, extremely capable of creating their own shot with the dribble and able to hit extremely tough ones, occasionally forgetful of where thae cutoff point between a good and a bad shot is. The difference is that Jordan hasn’t had to spend a few years pretending to be a point guard. And that Jamal is better.
Jermareo Davidson
Like Augustine, Davidson was previously covered on the Jazz summer league roster recap. Davidson averaged 7.6 points and 2.8 rebounds per game for the Jazz, all coming in less than 11 minutes per game. Pretty good.
Trey Gilder
Gilder, too, has been previously covered. He was playing with the Magic at the Orlando summer pro league, and was thus covered here. He played in only two games for them, however, totalling 2 points and 3 assists.
Sergiy Gladyr
Gladyr was the Hawks second-round pick in 2009, a Ukrainian shooting specialist. After being drafted, Gladyr went to Spain, where he became one of the youngest rotation players in the ACB (a league known for not playing youngsters much). Gladyr was pretty inconsistent throughout the year, as you might expect, and didn’t have great overall numbers. Playing for Suzuki Manresa, he was third on the team in scoring with a 10.0ppg average and 2.1 rebounds per game, but also recording 3.6 fouls per game and no other significant statistics. For a shooter, he did not shoot too well, hitting only 34% from three point range. And given that he attempted 170 three pointers compared to only 59 two pointers, that’s not ideal. It was not an ideal first season in Spain for Gladyr; that said, given the context of it being from a 20 year old in the ACB, it was pretty good.
Also of note was the fact that Gladyr missed six weeks between mid-February and late March due to injury. Gladyr broke his hand punching an advertising hoarding while being subbed out of the game. Whoops.
Richard Hendrix
Hendrix was covered in the Pacers summer league round-up of last week. Despite my endless touting of him, he averaged only 2 points and 3 rebounds for the team.
In addition to that performance, and his already signing for Maccabi Tel-Aviv, Hendrix has made news in another way this month. He is soon to receive a Bosnian passport, which will further his career in two ways; he’ll get to bypass import rules for many European leagues, and he’ll also get to play for the Bosnian national team. It’s all exposure.
Luke Jackson
Jackson is still battling to get back in the NBA, yet it looks like an ever more impossible task. He had a good year in Italy last season, averaging 15.1ppg, 5.3rpg, 2.3apg and 2.1spg, shooting 38% from three point range. Yet in the eyes of the NBA, the book is out on him now. About to turn 29, it’s unlikely to change.
This very day, Luke Jackson agreed to sign with Italian team Lottomatica Roma. It’s a good gig for him, but it should seal his NBA fate.
Randolph Morris
Morris just completed a guaranteed two year contract with the Hawks, and now has four years of NBA experience to his name. Also to his names are totals of 438 minutes, 140 points, 104 rebounds and 100 fouls. Nonetheless, he showed a little something last year. Morris only ever received garbage time minutes, but in them, he at least showed the ability to score the ball. 62 points in a season is not something to be ecstatic about from a fourth year player, yet Morris demonstrated the offensive talent that got him this far, and it might just help him land somewhere else for next year. Now, he needs to stop fouling.
(If you need proof that Morris made significant strides last year, look no further than his year-on-year PER; 1.5, 4.3, 1.8, 14.6. Quite the crescendo. Even better, Morris only played 4.4 minutes per game, so per 36 minutes that equates to a PER of 118.7. And that’s quite high.)
Pape Sy
Everything that I could say about Pape Sy, I said in my draft night recap thing. For those who – understandably – can’t be bothered to read all that, here it is again.
Atlanta drafts Pape Sy, a player that literally nobody has heard of. And when I say “literally nobody”, I do mean literally nobody. There was not a draft board in the land that this guy was on. This is much more of an obscure pick than Christian Eyenga. Sy is just your average, every day, run-of-the-mill French league backup. And now this.
Strange times. Really strange times. But therein lies the fun. So let’s learn.
22 year old Sy has spent his entire career with French team Le Havre, who this year finished 13th out of 16 teams in the French ProA with a 10-20 record. Sy played in all 30 games backing up former Texas A&M guard Bernard King – not THE Bernard King – and averaged 14.2 minutes, 5.2 points, 1.7 rebounds, 1.3 assists, 1.9 fouls and 0.6 steals per game. Sy shot 55% from two point range, 42% from three point range and 715 from the foul line. and he shot 69 free throws to 93 total field goals. He clearly has no problem getting to the line, and the three point percentage also came on a healthy 29 attempts. He didn’t play much, and he played only in a league with particularly bad defence, but he scored efficiently nonetheless, with 155 points on 93 shots as a 6’6 shooting guard.
However, there’s no pedigree here. The French league is not a great league, and yet Sy was a mere backup in it. He played briefly with the French Under-20 national team, yet averaged only 2 ppg in the 2007 U-20 championship for a disappointing French team. (For comparison’s sake, Nando De Colo averaged 17.9 ppg in the same tournament). Sy has played significant minutes in only one professional season, and that was this past one. He is 22 years old, has not cracked 6ppg in the French league, and has not exactly got a storied history of tearing up draft camps for many years like so many other draft picks with limited professional experience have done in the past. Pape Sy’s draft selection has literally come from nowhere. And it could only have come from Rick Sund, a man who just loves to take flyers on international players.
The only person who seemed to know that Sy would be drafted was Pape himself, because he’s here, along with the four people he brought with him. Pape spends so long hugging them that it takes almost the full two minutes to even get to Silver. It would be good comedy, were it not truly awkward.
Is this the world’s biggest steal, or the world’s biggest reach? It’ll take some kind of turnaround to be the former.
So he’s got that going for him.
Jeff Teague
Jeff Teague’s rookie year was not particularly good. There was the occasional spark on the fire, but he never threw a log on it. Teague showed he did not have an outside jump shot, was often overly tentative offensively, passing up good shots and taking bad ones. On the plus side, Teague was OK defensively and didn’t turn it over a lot, and if you want to be really positive, then the firing of Mike Woodson might prove very important to Teague’s development. With a playbook that expands beyond watching someone else isolate and waiting for a kickout, Teague might start to show more.
