Is Atlanta Hawks coach Lloyd Pierce overvaluing Evan Turner’s versatility?
The Atlanta Hawks head coach sees potential in Evan Turner’s jack-of-all-trades skill set. But how helpful will he be to the team this year?
When the Atlanta Hawks executed a rare player-for-player trade by sending Kent Bazemore to the Portland Trail Blazers for Evan Turner, you’d be forgiven for dismissing the move as nothing more than a salary dump.
After all, Turner is in the last year of a four-year, $70 million deal that he signed with Portland during the cap spike-influenced 2016 offseason, an agreement that was met with befuddlement before the ink dried on the contract, and likely isn’t part of the Hawks’ future plans given his age and the wealth of young wings on the roster.
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But when Hawks head coach Lloyd Pierce looks at Turner, he sees more than a one-year tenant. Judging by this quote from Oct. 2, he expects the veteran swingman to become a positive fixture in the Hawks’ rotation, as he praised the 30-year-old’s apparently diversified deftness:
"“The versatility that Evan Turner has, we’ve talked about it a few times. He is going to be our backup point guard and he is going to be our small-ball 4.”"
Of course, anyone who’s watched at least one Turner highlight video over the years shouldn’t be shocked to hear this. Since he entered the league in 2010, Turner has thrived as a secondary playmaker who creates some problems for opponents with his length and court vision, so the roles that Pierce has earmarked for him make sense.
But is it reasonable to expect Turner to flourish in these conditions?
Given the nine seasons of empirical and statistical evidence, the answer is probably no. In that time, Turner has never finished with more than .085 win shares per 48 minutes (WS/48), had a box plus/minus (BPM) that didn’t start with a minus sign, nor has he compiled a Player Efficiency Rating (PER) above 13.6 (15 is average).
He didn’t change that narrative in 2018-19: He averaged a career-worst 6.8 points per game with a 50.4 true shooting percentage and .060 WS/48 in 73 games with the Blazers last season. The tracking data was even less kind to him. His 0.67 points per possession (PPP) as a pick-and-roll ball-handler was one of the lowest marks among qualified players.
How about spot-up shooting? Well, the mid-range enthusiast was unsurprisingly terrible here too, ranking in the seventh percentile in spot-up PPP while draining a putrid 22.2 percent of his catch-and-shoot 3’s.
Now, this doesn’t mean that Turner is some wet lump of clay that has nothing to offer.
He is a solid playmaker — among players who appeared in at least 50 games last year, Turner ranked in the top 50 in assist rate and averaged a respectable 7.2 potential assists — and heaven knows that this Atlanta team that ranked 27th in defensive rating could use a player like Turner on that end (opponents shot 43.2 percent against him overall and just 32.9 percent from 3-point range last year).
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In short, all of this tells us what we already knew when this deal was announced: Turner is a very flawed offensive player who never lived up to expectations as the second overall pick, but he has enough skills to contribute to a rebuilding team. He’s not quite the scrub that FiveThirtyEight’s RAPTOR algorithm projects him to be, but he isn’t some basketball version of Ben Zobrist either.
And that’s fine. No one expects Turner to bloom into a star player for this team. He’s in Atlanta to pilot the offense whenever Trae Young needs a breather, though his lack of shooting won’t create the same amount of open looks that Young will.
He may get used in lineups with Young as well, giving Pierce the option to have Turner run the show while Young hunts for clean looks on off-ball screens. And even though he can’t space the floor at all, Turner will probably get some minutes as a “stretch” big who could feast on mismatches.
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So in a way, Pierce is right. Turner will fill a lot of spots for the Hawks this year. He may even excel at some of them. But expecting Turner to turn into some sort of hidden gem sixth man is probably asking too much.