Atlanta Hawks: The Helping Hand Of Mike Muscala

The Atlanta Hawks are off to a fast start this season. While it’s been a true collective effort, one of their more underrated contributions lies on the shoulders of Mike Muscala.

Coming into the season, the Atlanta Hawks were a team surrounded by question marks.

They were at the center of one of the biggest shakeups this offseason not once, but twice, with Al Horford leaving to sign with the Boston Celtics, along with the trading of Jeff Teague to the Indiana Pacers.

Now with Dwight Howard and Dennis Schroder filling those spots, many people were asking whether they’d have trouble integrating new pieces (or existing players now in bigger roles, in Schroder’s case), which would lead to a different Hawks team than the one we’d grown used to over the last few seasons.

To the credit of the players, as well as the coaching staff, the Hawks haven’t looked like a team that’s in the process of adding new guys to their defined system to open the season.

Standing currently at 3-1, the Hawks have largely picked up where they left off from last year coming out of the gates. It may be just four games in, but they already stand in the top 10 of the league for both offensive efficiency (seventh) and defensive efficiency (second), per NBA.com.

Per usual under head coach Mike Budenholzer, not one player stands above the team or their roster from a contribution standpoint. They Hawks have prided themselves on being a deep team throughout the regular season and that’s continued into the start of this year, at least on a points per game basis, as they have six players already scoring in double figures.

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Of those players that have gotten off to a fast start coming off the bench, one player in particular has relished in his newfound opportunity for the Hawks to start the year.

In his first three seasons with the Hawks, Mike Muscala was mostly the third, or even fourth option when it came to the team’s big men.

Never averaging more than 12.6 minutes per game in a season, Muscala was at times the odd man out of the team’s rotation, earning a string of DNPs here and there. Despite that, Muscala made the most of the small doses of playing time he’d receive throughout the year.

Now in his fourth season, the story has changed for Muscala.

With Tiago Splitter sidelined with a hamstring strain, Muscala has been the first big man up for the Hawks by necessity to start the year. No matter the cause of his expanded role, Muscala has been performing at the same level like he has in his prior three seasons.

Muscala currently rounds out the six Hawks who are averaging double figures in scoring to start the year, averaging 10 points per game so far. With that, he’s been incredibly effective in his 20.8 minutes per game, on both an individual level and a team level.

Although it’s an incredibly small sample size, Muscala’s shooting efficiency is through the roof to start the year, hitting 40 percent of his three-point attempts as well as having a whopping 78.7 percent true shooting percentage.