Everybody Kept Their Old Job

The Hawks announced three College Park Skyhawks appointments Wednesday afternoon, and the interesting part is not who got the jobs. It is that nobody had to give up the ones they already had.

Ryan Silverstein, the Hawks' vice president of cap strategy and player personnel, is the Skyhawks' fifth general manager. Sanjay Lumpkin, an assistant on Quin Snyder's bench, is the fifth head coach. Reggis Onwukamuche, also a Hawks assistant, is the first associate head coach in franchise history. All three keep their Atlanta titles. Nobody moved. Three College Park jobs were layered on top of three Atlanta ones.

The men they replaced did not go anywhere either. Aaron Evans, the outgoing general manager, was elevated to pro scout in the Hawks front office. Steve Klei, who spent two seasons splitting himself between the Skyhawks bench and Snyder's, comes back to Atlanta full time - a divided job becoming a whole one. Nobody was fired. Five people rotated inside the same organization, and the AJC headlined it a shuffle.

Then the detail that makes this more than a transaction note.

All three of the new hires were there in 2019-20, College Park's first season. Silverstein was the basketball operations coordinator and coaching assistant. Lumpkin and Onwukamuche played - actual minutes, 33 games for Lumpkin - in a season almost nobody outside it remembers. Lumpkin is the first former Skyhawks player to be the team's head coach, and in the statement the team released he called himself "a former NBA G League player and Skyhawk."

Seven years later, the same three people run the place.

Snyder, in that same release, called the Skyhawks "a central component to our team identity." The dual titles are that sentence turned into an org chart. Whether it reads as continuity or as a closed loop is not something September gets to decide - the Hawks have not played a game yet, and College Park does not tip off until November 6.

What is already legible is the arrangement. Atlanta has stopped staffing its G League club as a separate operation, and handed it instead to three people who were there the year it started.