Nickeil Alexander-Walker and Lamelo Ball have become the kind of late-season names that can tilt a playoff race, even if one of them is still best known to many fans as a side piece in a bigger story. put both guards at the center of its post-All-Star breakout team, but Alexander-Walker’s run has been the one forcing a second look. Atlanta has won 18 of its last 22 games and went 15-2 in March, a surge built in part on his scoring burst.
Alexander-Walker averaged 20.1 points per game in the first half of the season, then turned hotter after March 4. In 18 games since then, he has averaged 24.4 points on a 72.3 true shooting percentage, hitting 49.0 percent of his 3-pointers and 60.6 percent of his 2-pointers in that stretch. He scored a career-high 41 points in a win over the Orlando Magic and followed it with 36 points against the New York Knicks on Monday, the kind of back-to-back production that changes how a team is defended.
That production matters because Atlanta signed Alexander-Walker for the midlevel exception to be a third guard, not a front-line scorer. Instead, he has become one of the clearest reasons the Hawks have stayed in the thick of the East postseason picture. He is shooting 90.2 percent from the free-throw line for Atlanta this year, and the article notes that he is on the books for $29.6 million over the next two years before his 2028 player option.
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The arc is familiar to anyone who watched Alexander-Walker blossom with the Minnesota Timberwolves, where he made peace with a secondary role before this bigger scoring stretch arrived. He summed up that lesson by saying there is accepting your role, and then there is accepting that it will always be your role. The Hawks did not sign him expecting this level of offense, and now they have to live with the question of whether his breakout is a spring surge or the start of a much larger adjustment to what he can be.
