Atlanta Hawks: 2010s All-Decade team

Point guard of the decade: Jeff Teague

While Jeff Teague didn’t start during his first two seasons of the league, he stands above the rest of the point guards the Hawks have had in the last decade. And before you get upset that Trae Young is not included here, he hasn’t even completed a second season yet and that second season will finish in the start of a new decade; thus Jeff Teague is the Hawks’ point guard of the decade.

If we look at all guards that played for the Hawks during the 2010s, Joe Johnson is the only guard that had a better Player Efficiency Rating than Teague, giving the Hawks a pretty solid backcourt duo for the decade.

Teague’s overall numbers for his seven years with Atlanta are a little skewed as he didn’t gain a lot of playing time behind Mike Bibby his first two seasons. If we take out the first two seasons of his career, his counting stats take a significant jump up in some categories.

Over the course of his full seven seasons, he averaged 12.1 points, 2.2 rebounds, 5.2 assists and 1.2 steals per game. While his rebounds and steals per game only increase slightly when we look at Teague as a starter, he made a significant jump in points (15.1) and assists (6.4) per game.

Teague wasn’t the prototypical point guard of the 2010s that could score in the 30s on a nightly basis, but he was still a very serviceable point guard for the Hawks; his win shares per 48 minutes and VORP were definitely better than your average point guard.

Teague’s best seasons came between 2012-13 and 2014-15 as he averaged 15.7 points and 6.9 assists per game over those three seasons. Teague eventually got selected to the All-Star game as a reserve, but that didn’t happen until the 2014-15 season.

Trae Young is the point guard of the future for the Atlanta Hawks, but Jeff Teague was easily the top point guard for the organization for the decade of the 2010s.

Other considered: Mike Bibby, Tim Hardaway Jr., Dennis Schroder