SACRAMENTO, Calif. — When Kevin Huerter awoke on Christmas morning, there were no presents to unwrap. There were no family members to celebrate with. Instead, there was loneliness, sadness and frustration. Huerter stepped out of a van at the Atlanta airport at 8 a.m., got into his car and drove home to spend Christmas alone after testing positive for COVID-19.
Advertisement
Instead of playing in Madison Square Garden in his home state of New York in front of numerous family members, Huerter was home alone, watching his Hawks play the Knicks in a game he had dreamed of playing in when he was a child. To take his mind off spending the holiday by his lonesome, he spent most of the day on FaceTime with his family. It gave him a chance to reflect on how challenging NBA life can be, even in normal circumstances.
“It was one of the tougher and lonelier moments I’ve had in my career so far,” Huerter told The Athletic. “For how much travel you do, for how much you have to sacrifice as a person, player and family member, it was one of those moments where you sit there and are like, ‘Damn. I do a lot for this job.’ There are so many perks and moments that come with this, though, that I wouldn’t change for the world. But in that instance, I was somewhere I didn’t want to be with no one around me — none of my family, none of my friends. I had nobody there. That was one of the toughest moments in my NBA career.”
The days leading up to Christmas Day were a whirlwind for Huerter. The night before the Hawks hosted the Magic on Dec. 22, Huerter’s daily testing sample came back with an inconclusive result. The same sample was rapid tested the following morning and tested negative twice, so he thought he was in the clear to play that night against Orlando. However, the PCR test results — the official sample the NBA uses to determine the status of league personnel — didn’t return in time for the game, so he was ruled out. Coach
To be as cautious as they could be, the Hawks kept Huerter away from the team and did not allow him to travel with them to Philadelphia after the game. The Hawks found Huerter a commercial flight to Philadelphia while the team was playing Orlando. Huerter was forced to watch the game on his phone as he navigated Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. The following morning, while in Philadelphia, Huerter took a rapid test, and the result came back positive. He subsequently took two additional tests that turned up negative. It was the same cycle for Huerter as the day before, so the Hawks still had to follow the most cautious plan and didn’t allow him to get on the team bus to the arena. Instead, Huerter called an Uber and stayed in the parking lot of the Wells Fargo Center as he and the team waited for his PCR results.
Advertisement
A Hawks ball boy came outside and tossed Huerter his warmup gear just in case he got clearance before the game. In the frigid Philadelphia weather, there Huerter was, getting dressed and stretching while waiting for his possible clearance so he could run inside and get as much of his pregame routine in as possible. This time, though, the PCR result came back before the game and was positive.
Now that he had officially tested positive, Huerter and Hawks rookie Sharife Cooper, who had also tested positive, took a van to New York City, hoping to get two negative tests on Christmas Eve. The two of them huddled in the van and watched on Huerter’s iPad as the short-handed Hawks stunned the Sixers.
Huerter didn’t get encouraging news Christmas Eve morning. His PCR sample tested positive again, which meant he was ruled out for the Knicks game. He thought he’d somehow be able to salvage Christmas because he’s from New York, so initially he thought he’d find a way to get to Albany, where he’s from, and safely see his family. The problem, though, was he had to continue testing every day. The league tests its samples through BioReference Laboratories, and there’s no BioReference outlet in Albany, so the two options were to stay in New York City by himself in a hotel or travel back to Atlanta. The NBA wouldn’t allow Huerter to fly commercially after testing positive, and the Hawks couldn’t find any last-minute private flights on Christmas Eve. So at 5 p.m., he, Cooper and a few unnamed Hawks players boarded a van headed to Atlanta.
“I can’t complain with how the travel was. Fourteen hours is fourteen hours, though,” Huerter said. “We’re just sitting there. We’re hanging out, eating, having snacks. It almost felt like an AAU trip where you’d stop every few hours with your teammates, you get out of the car and walk into the gas station to get snacks you’re probably not supposed to have, and you do it all over again in the next four hours. It took me back to the AAU days where we’d travel with teammates. It was funny seeing the snack choices of different guys. We played different games, we were watching other games. You get to a point where it’s like 12, 1 o’clock in the morning and everyone is trying to sleep. I woke up, and we were in Atlanta.”
After missing six games in the health and safety protocols, Huerter was cleared before the team’s matchup against Portland on Monday. Huerter’s first couple of shots fell well short, and he didn’t play particularly well defensively (nor did the entire team). But after a full game and getting his conditioning levels right, Huerter thrived against Sacramento on Wednesday night, coming off the bench and scoring 25 points, grabbing 11 rebounds and dishing out five assists. He’s the first Hawks bench player this season to have at least a 20-10-5 stat line.
Kev going to work. pic.twitter.com/jKG4bW4bnR
— Atlanta Hawks (@ATLHawks) January 6, 2022
It was surprising to see Huerter come off the bench against the Kings, especially after Trae Young was ruled out before the game with a lower back bruise. Huerter was arguably the best offensive option the Hawks had with Young, John Collins and Bogdan Bogdanovic out. Acting head coach Joe Prunty told Huerter on Wednesday morning that he was going to come off the bench, mainly because the Hawks wanted Huerter to control the second unit’s offense. It worked out, as the short-handed Hawks got a much-needed 108-102 win over Sacramento.
TUFFFF 😤 pic.twitter.com/oxZuX3OFYg
— Atlanta Hawks (@ATLHawks) January 6, 2022
The team’s defense, which has been an abomination, was much better against the Kings. The urgency was there, even with a depleted roster, and the Hawks made multiple effort plays, something that has repeatedly plagued them.
Before the Portland game, Huerter was asked what he thinks has been the biggest issue defensively for the Hawks.
Advertisement
“I think a lot of it is mindset,” he said. “It’s us simply trying to outscore teams. We’re so dominant on one end of the court that we sometimes take for granted the other end of the court. We don’t have the same level of urgency as we did last year sometimes. It’s still the same group of guys, so we can figure it out. I just think we have to have more urgency and more pride on that end. Us winning games 120-115 instead of 120-95 is something we have to take pride in so we don’t make it so hard on ourselves.
“We have a lot of really good offensive players on this team and a lot of guys who want to be good offensive players. Sometimes, your first conversation isn’t about how can you be good defensively, it’s how can we continue to be dominant offensively. Nate, from the day he came in here, said he was only going to play guys who play two sides of the ball. It’s something he’s always preached. As players, we have to take better pride on that end of the court for him.”
It’s been a frustrating start for the Hawks (17-20) after they advanced to the Eastern Conference finals last season. They find themselves in 12th place in the conference and outside the picture for the play-in tournament.
Clint Capela said Wednesday morning that he felt like the team needed to play with more heart, a message he shared with teammates inside the locker room after the loss to the Blazers. There’s still plenty of time to move in the right direction, and panic hasn’t set in yet. The motto of last season’s team was “Believe.” Huerter thinks that word still applies, but he knows they need to show it on the floor instead of just talking about it.
“I think the expectations going into this year and wanting to live up to them and feeling like we could and trying to find a way to get there, we, in a lot of ways, have now found ourselves in a similar situation to last year,” Huerter said. “That’s definitely frustrating. Some of it is out of our control, and some of it is us doing it to ourselves.
“I think we’re a team that is still very capable. We’re trying to mix in guys who were out last year. We have a lot of our core guys and main group who helped us win a lot of big games last year. I think we’re a team that can be even better than we were last year. I think we need to get to that point. We’re very capable, and I think this team has a lot of belief because of how dominant we were last year, even against teams that were considered the best teams in the league. We have a team that is built of mostly the same guys from last season. Nobody thinks we’ve played well up to this point. It would be different if we were playing well and we just weren’t winning games. John (Collins) said a couple of weeks ago, it’s how we’re losing. We’re not getting beat. We’re giving away games. It’s stuff that is changeable. Everybody here knows we can change this. I still think there’s a lot of belief.”
(Photo: Rocky Widner / NBAE via Getty Images)
