There’s a date that explains the Devin Carter waiver, and it isn’t September 13th. It’s sometime in mid-July, the week Atlanta finished a three-team trade that quietly filled the backcourt spot Carter was supposed to compete for.
Carter was the 13th pick in the 2024 draft, taken by Sacramento, not Atlanta. The Hawks acquired him from the Kings in late June, and picked up a 2033 second-round pick in the same deal for barely anything in return. He reported to camp, worked through the preseason, and never played a single regular-season minute in a Hawks uniform before the team waived him this week. The roster crunch that ended his Atlanta tenure was set in motion before he ever got a locker, not because of anything he did with it.
Why Did the Hawks Waive Devin Carter?
Atlanta waived Devin Carter, the 13th pick in the 2024 draft, to get its roster under the 15-man regular-season limit after a July trade for Luguentz Dort and Ryan Nembhard had already filled the backcourt need he was supposed to address. He was a numbers casualty, not a talent evaluation.
Waiving Carter still leaves the Hawks at 16 players, one over that limit, so this almost certainly won’t be the last cut of the preseason. It barely moved the financial needle, either. Per SI.com, Carter’s $5.158 million salary stays guaranteed whether he’s on the roster or off it, and Atlanta sits roughly $3.8 million below the luxury tax line either way. This wasn’t about saving money. It was about saving a spot.
Jake Fischer, who broke the news, framed it plainly:
https://twitter.com/JakeLFischer/status/2098520024122028492
That report nails the timeline down. The front office had already treated the roster spot as spoken for before Carter played a single preseason minute that mattered.
The Trade That Decided This in July
Atlanta already had Trae Young running the offense when it made the trade that brought in Dort and Nembhard, a three-team deal that also sent Risacher to Dallas. Dort is a starting-caliber wing defender. Nembhard is a young table-setter teams like as insurance behind a ball-dominant lead guard. Between the two of them, they cover almost every backcourt role the Hawks could have auditioned Carter for.
That’s the part of the timeline that actually explains Carter’s release. He wasn’t competing with Young for the ball, but the Hawks’ guard depth got two bodies deeper in one July trade, and Carter was still a two-way project with unproven shooting, not a finished product. Once Atlanta had Dort and Nembhard in the building, keeping Carter around through a full training camp evaluation stopped making sense.
None of this makes Atlanta look bad on the balance sheet. The Hawks landed a former top-15 selection and gained a 2033 second-round pick in the same trade, never gave up a rotation player to get him, and now clear his salary discussion without having guaranteed him anything beyond this season. Every asset column favors Atlanta. What it cost them is information: real minutes that would have shown whether a former lottery pick could contribute in an NBA rotation, a chance he was never given.
What Carter’s Numbers Actually Say
This is where the roster-math argument needs a gut check, because Carter’s own numbers only partly support it. This season, his most recent with Sacramento, he averaged 8.9 points, 3.3 rebounds and 2.7 assists in 18.4 minutes across 38 games. Translated: those are bench-rotation numbers, not building-block numbers. He was getting real run and doing modest, useful things with it, not forcing his way into a bigger role.
Zoom out to his two-season career line and the picture gets thinner: 74 total games, 6.4 points, 2.7 rebounds and 1.9 assists in 14.8 minutes a night. Some of that is context. Per NBC Sports, shoulder surgery delayed his NBA debut all the way to January 2025, so he’s effectively a season and a half into a career that started with him already behind schedule.
The efficiency numbers are the real problem, and they’re a career-long trend, not a single bad season: 40% from the field and 27% from three, per SI.com’s grading of the move. A 27% three-point shooter isn’t just below average, it’s in the range that keeps a guard priced as a depth piece no matter how high he went in the draft. That’s evidence for cutting him loose, and it’s evidence Atlanta collected watching him play for someone else, not for them. It’s the same math I run every August cutting my own fantasy rosters: a decent-but-not-great sample doesn’t buy patience once the depth chart fills up, no matter the pedigree.
What This Says About Atlanta’s Timeline
Atlanta still has to get from 16 players to 15 before the regular season, and Carter wasn’t the only name in that conversation. Corey Kispert, Buddy Hield, Mouhamed Gueye and Ryan Nembhard have all been floated in various reports as roster-crunch candidates, though nothing there is settled the way the Carter move was. What’s settled is the signal: Atlanta will spend a trade exception or a late pick on a lottery-caliber guard, then cut him without playing him, once the depth chart in front of him fills up. That’s the timeline talking, in the only language front offices actually use: transactions.
The Boston angle is the ironic coda. Multiple reports, including Fischer’s, have the Celtics showing interest in claiming Carter off waivers, citing their G League development track record. The team known for actually developing young talent through the G League might be the one that finally finds out what Atlanta didn’t bother to.
Nothing about that changes what already happened here. Atlanta landed a former top-15 pick and a 2033 second-rounder in the same trade, kept him around for exactly as long as it took the roster to fill up elsewhere, and let him go without ever finding out what he could do in their uniform. Call that asset management if you want. It’s also the clearest evidence yet of exactly how far down the priority list player development sits on Atlanta’s actual timeline, as opposed to its stated one.
