Despite being pulled from the chopping block shortly after Kyle Korver was traded to the Cleveland Cavaliers, Paul Millsap is no lock to finish the season with the Atlanta Hawks.
As The Vertical’s Adrian Wojnarowski said on The Ringer’s NBA Show (via HoopsHype):
There’s no question that [Atlanta] may revisit it again here before the trade deadline and see how they want to go forward with this group.
This jibes with the prevailing line of thinking from when Millsap was first yanked from the bargaining table.
Indeed, the Hawks are competing for a top-three playoff seed in the Eastern Conference. But there’s a distinct gap between them and the Cavaliers, whose title hopes they just bolstered. They may be content sustaining the status quo and getting bounced in the first or second round of the postseason, but what happens after that?
Millsap is expected to decline his player option for next season, at which point he will field max-contract offers. Perhaps he’ll give the Hawks a hometown discount, but even shaving a few million dollars off the top of each year’s salary leaves Atlanta with a long-term commitment to a power forward on the wrong side of 32.
Unless the Hawks are close to certain some of their kiddies—Dennis Schroder, DeAndre’ Bembry, Taurean Prince, etc.—have imminent leaps in them, they cannot bank on in-house transformation. And that suggests they will at the very lease reconsider dealing Millsap ahead of the Feb. 23 trade deadline.
