The San Antonio Spurs have agreed to trade Dejounte Murray to the Atlanta Hawks in exchange for Danilo Gallinari, three future first-round picks and future first-round pick swap, CBS Sports HQ’s Bill Reiter confirmed Wednesday. The Spurs will get a 2023 first-round pick via the Charlotte Hornets, and unprotected 2025 and 2027 first-round picks via the Hawks. The pick swap between the Spurs and Hawks will be in 2026.
Murray, a late first-round pick back in 2016, is coming off the best season of his career, in which he led the league in steals and made the All-Star Game for the first time. He averaged 21.1 points, 8.3 rebounds, 9.2 assists and two steals, while shooting 46.2 percent from the field. All of those marks were career-highs. The Hawks will now pair him with Trae Young to form one of the best young backcourts in the league.
As for the Spurs, they are pivoting towards a rebuild — one they hope will set them up with the first pick in the 2023 NBA Draft, and a chance to take Victor Wembanyama. The 7-foot-2, 18-year-old French big man is widely seen as a generational prospect, and has already impressed as a professional in his native country.
Let’s grade the trade.
Hawks
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After their surprise run to the Eastern Conference finals in 2021, the Hawks appeared to be a team on the rise. Instead, they took a step back last season and had to pull off a big comeback against the Cleveland Cavaliers in the play-in tournament just to sneak into the playoffs as the No. 8 seed.
In January, when the team was still floundering under .500, GM Travis Schlenk gave an interesting interview in which he admitted to reading too much into their 2021 playoff run. “Maybe I need to lower my expectations for this team,” Schlenk said. “I have to accept that responsibility that maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to bring everybody back. That’s on me.”
At that point it was clear that whatever ended up happening over the final few months of last season, the Hawks were in for a transformational summer. To his credit, Schlenk didn’t wait long to put his words into action, and has acquired one of the most versatile young guards in the league.
To what extent the Hawks will be able to challenge the entrenched contenders at the top of the East remains to be seen — and will depend on what other moves they make this summer — but they are much better now than they were before the trade. Here’s a…
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