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Hawks guard Lou Williams participated in some contact drills Tuesday, the first time he has done so during his rehabilitation from a torn ACL in his right knee. The team will evaluate Williams after the Tuesday practice. The next step will be to clear Williams for full five-on-five contact drills. The veteran has been playing three-one-three and four-on-four recently. Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“He’s getting closer,” Hawks coach Mike Budenholzer said. It could take a month once Williams returns to full contact practices to be ready to play in a game. His return will bolster the Hawks’ thin backcourt. Williams was injured on Jan. 18 at the Brooklyn Nets. Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Good news! Looking forward to seeing Lou back on the court.

The sad thing is I completely forgot about Marvin Williams until I saw this post.

Poor Marvin...

Still a home game for the Knicks of course.

Sad but true!

The game against the Knicks on Wednesday is in Atlanta.

Well, dang. Hawks are already .5 games out of 1st place already.

Joking aside, the Eastern standings are pretty crazy. You have Indiana that is way ahead, then a lot of 4-3, 3-3, 3-4 teams. The bad teams are playing about as well as teams like Miami and Brooklyn.

It's early and we all know this will change as the season progresses but it is a little odd to see.

Rondos Rookie Season : 23.5 Minutes Per Game 6.4 PPG 3.8 Ast per gameSchröder So Far : 18.3 Minutes Per Game 6.3 PPG 4.3 AST Per Game So hes actually having a better Rookie Season then Rondo Already and is playing 5 minutes less per game.....so dont give me that nonsense..

You have to remember that Rondo was pretty much on the court to pass the ball to 3 future hall of famers. He didn't have the free reign that Schröder has on a semi-rebuilding team. It's also way too early to say who is better at this point in their careers..The thing is we have two point guards that are getting better. It's dumb to trade either now because their value will continue to increase.

It's a good problem to have though..

Let Schröder develop over the next year or two and hope that Teague continues to improve. Eventually the problem will work itself out.

I think the Hawks would have brought Zaza back if he wasn't always hurt towards the end of the season. He wasn't even able to play for us during our last two playoffs.

I wonder who will start to lose minutes once Williams comes back and when Jenkins/Ayón proove to be healthy and productive.

I think I may enjoy #JoshWatch more than watching the Hawks play this season... . I kid of course..

Living up in MI makes this so intriguing for me. Obviously we both care about the Hawks more but I'm in the middle of the 'Motown Smoove saga'. It's so funny seeing how excited everyone is to have him as a Piston. I can't wait to see how this unfolds.

I'm really impressed with Dennis so far, he is going to be a really good player. You can see it in his play and reading things like this really make you appreciate what kind of player he is at such a young age.Minus Horford, our best draft picks have been outside of the lottery. Smoove, Teague, Schröder and Jenkins/Scott appear to be decent players. Obviously we haven't been in the lottery for awhile but that may be a good thing!

He played but he looked like he hasn't played in awhile. Glad he is back though, hopefully we can find him enough minutes to get his confidence back.

Poor defense and missed free throws equals frustrating basketball.

What is the starting time?

Game is at 930. It'll be nice to get a win in LA no matter who is on the court wearing a Laker jersey. Gasol has played pretty well his first couple games so we have to watch out for him.This game is ours if our guards dominate. Thanks for the write up LW3, you're still putting in work even on Sunday evenings!

Instead of a 30 win team, I think they were a 38 win team if all the injuries didn't happen. But if we made the playoffs that year, we would've lost our 1st round pick to Phoenix. So we end up with the 4th worst record in the league .. but get in the top 3 in the lottery. And we select the guy who is our current franchise player with that pick.

I was thinking about that when I was posted. We were really lucky that year that we wound up getting to keep our top 3 protected pick (and even luckier we got Horford out of it). Can you imagine if we wound up picking number one and selected Oden?

The thought of having drafted Oden at 1, Marvin at 2, Shelden at 5 and Childress at 6 makes you cringe.

Philly is a surprise at 3-0 but it's to early to really tell if it means anything.

I remember in 2006 when we started 4-1 a lot of people I knew were jumping on the Hawks bandwaggon in the first week of the season, thinking we turned a corner and were finally good or something. We wound up finishing with the 4th worst record in the league.

This is going to go back and forth all year. Josh had a great debut but as soon as he plays poorly people will be jumping all over that too. We all saw Josh play 9 seasons here in Atlanta, we know how great and how bad he can be.

I hope he has a great season for the Pistons. Even though he pissed us off sometimes he always cared about the Hawks and our city. All that said though, it was time for him to leave and I'm happy I won't be watching him play for my team the next five years.

Al Horford was really why we lost this game. He wasn't present offensively, he wasn't rebounding the way we are used to seeing, but he did play solid defense with 5 steals and 4 blocks. You can see this team is going to be heavily dependent on Horford, if we want to win alot of games. Overall, the team played well. Carroll and Martin are looking to be the best steals in free-agency. Milsap displayed his plethora of offensive tools. And we saw an agressive Jeff Teague! Let's regroup and focus for the game Friday against the Raptors.

I'm a huge Horford fan and I'll gladly admit he was pretty horrible this game. He was probably one of the biggest reasons we lost outside of our horrible perimeter defense.That said, I know he will get his offense figured out. I also think it was a good thing to see or guys playing solid offensively. I'd like to think the D gets better once we know what we are doing when the ball is in our hand. I was happy with the game..this is going to be a fun year. Win or lose I'll be happy.

I'm so glad that the season is finally starting. Seems like game 6 in Atlanta was years ago with all the stuff going on this offseason. Great work as always LW3. No better way to get the season started by reading your game preview!

If Charter is anything like Comcast, then League Pass is a huge ripoff as only 1-2 games are in HD every night. Plus it's more expensive than the broadband package. I'd rather just get broadband and VPN.

I had to get it through Comcast last year. You're right, it was the biggest ripoff ever. The worst thing is they didn't even pick the good games to put in HD, they'd pick whatever game started first. You'd have Raptors vs Bobcats in HD while Miami vs Chicago would be in SD.

Luckily I was able to switch to DirecTV and will be able to watch the Hawks play in HD all year long.

Horford has always been pretty honest in his assessment of the team and its direction. I don't see anything wrong here, we all know that he won't stick around if we don't win and bring in more talent. Who would?

Unless the Hawks are able to make a deal to bring in another player at the 2 or 3 and even then the Hawks are not a contender. My gut feeling is that we are not as good as last year. Josh Smith was terrible on offense but a good defensive player. Brand is the only decent low post defender we have. The Hawks have a long way to go. I was never for rebuilding and Danny Ferry has to prove to me he can get the job done.

Honestly I think we will be about the same (record wise) as last year. Last year would have been a better team if everyone was healthy, but we missed guys like Zaza and Lou for a good portion of the season. We could wind up trading some of these guys we signed in the offseason and wind up being worse, but I still think we are a 43-46 win team in the East as of now.I'm not thrilled with still being a 6 seed in the East, but keep in mind we still players on reasonable contracts that can be traded if we decide to tank. We can still sign top FA players in years to come too because we still have good financial flexibility (no bad long term contracts).Our team might not be better yet but I don't feel like this is where we are going to be for years to come. Ferry still has work to do, but he has done a good job drafting players and keeping us in a position to sign or trade guys if we decide to do so.

But the Pistons have Josh!

That is a bizarre take on this article. This was not an article about who will make the playoffs. Totally disagree with premise of this thread.

I'm thinking the same thing.