The Hawks Are Gambling That Devin Carter Can Paper Over a Hole That Just Got Bigger

Atlanta acquired Devin Carter from Sacramento three days after Mouhamed Gueye went under the knife for a fractured left foot, and the timing is not coincidental — it is a confession. The front office knows what the depth chart looks like right now, and it is not pretty. Gueye, who logged 85 games last season at 14.7 minutes per night, was never a star — 4.2 points and 3.4 rebounds per game will not make anyone's highlight reel — but he was a warm body in a rotation that desperately needed warm bodies. With the team saying his status won't be updated for three to four months, Atlanta is staring at an opening to the 2026–27 season without him, and Carter is the answer they have chosen to write in the margin.

Here is the narrow path to this working. Carter slides into the perimeter minutes that Gueye's absence vacates, provides the kind of defensive activity that exposed Atlanta so badly in the Knicks series, and grows into a reliable third or fourth option off the bench behind Jalen Johnson, Nickeil Alexander-Walker, and CJ McCollum. That is a real scenario. Johnson's 22.1 points, 9.9 rebounds, and 7.5 assists per game on 48.7% shooting last season established him as a genuine two-way engine, and Alexander-Walker's 20.2 points per game gives Atlanta a backcourt that can carry offensive load. If Carter can simply defend, move the ball, and not ask to be carried, the math works.

What breaks that path is everything else on the depth chart. The center situation is not a depth problem — it is a structural emergency. Tony Bradley is the only center with observed playing time, and his production last season registered at roughly 37% of the league median for the position. There is no viable second center behind him. None. A typical playoff rotation carries two functional big men; Atlanta is carrying a fraction of one. Gueye's absence does not directly worsen the center hole — he is a forward — but it removes a player who could at least stretch the floor and give Quin Snyder or whoever is coaching this team a body to throw at a problem. Carter, as a guard, does not solve that.

The close-game number is the one that haunts me most as I look at this roster construction. Atlanta went 9-10 in games decided by five points or fewer last season — a 47% win rate against a 56% baseline — and that gap between who they were and who they needed to be in tight moments showed up in unmistakable neon in Game 6 against New York, when they lost by 51 points. The McCollum extension, at $21 million for one year, is explicitly a bet on veteran clutch execution closing that gap. McCollum's 18.7 points per game in 47 games last season showed what he can do when healthy. The question is whether Carter adds a second layer of that same quality, or whether he is simply a developmental piece dressed up as a solution.

My read is this: Carter is the right kind of addition in the wrong kind of offseason. If Atlanta were coming in healthy and deep, a young guard acquired from Sacramento would represent upside layered onto a functional foundation. Instead, he is being asked to be a load-bearing wall in a building that already has a cracked foundation at center and a missing beam at backup forward. The Hawks' best-case scenario for 2026–27 requires Johnson to stay healthy across a full season, McCollum to replicate his efficiency in more than 47 games, and the center position to somehow not become a playoff liability. Carter can contribute to the first two conditions. He cannot fix the third. Until Atlanta addresses what is happening — or not happening — at the five, every other move this summer is decoration on a structure that the Knicks already proved they can knock down.