Atlanta Hawks salary reset Trae Young To Washington Wizards on Wednesday evening. This will be labeled as a trade, but Atlanta doesn't care too much about which players it got back in the deal: C.J. McCollum And Corey Kispert. In any case, there were no drafts. For the Hawks, it was about getting Young off their books and roster so they could officially start moving in the direction of a new franchise player.
Maybe they already have this guy? Jalen Johnson.
Maybe they'll go for Anthony Davis.
Either way, they are done with the ball-dominant, defensively deficient point guard that has become the most maligned player archetype in today's games. NBA. Teams used to fight over these guys, which was an elite insult in itself. James Harden in Houston. Damian Lillard and Portland. Luka Doncic in Dallas and Young in Atlanta.
Now no one needs them. Mavericks exchanged Luka over a cup of coffee. Harden played 80 games for Brooklyn and 79 for Brooklyn. 76ersand until the last few weeks Clippers were a joke. Bucks paying Lillard $113 million to play for someone else. Now Young was sent to NBA Siberia for the expiring salary of a 34-year-old who averages 9.2 points per game.
Trae Young Trade Grades: Hawks Get B+ for Sending Former Face of Their Franchise to Wizards
Sam Quinn
When Portland traded Lillard to the Bucks, I wrote that Lillard didn't just play for a championship in Milwaukee. He played at a very real level for the survival of his special kind of point guard. If the Bucks are with Giannis Antetokounmpocould not overcome the defensive slump from Jrue Holiday Lillard, despite the latter being one of the best offensive point guards of a generation, who could have expected more?
Defense matters too much these days and one guy with the ball is out of the game unless you're Doncic and even he, already one of the greatest offensive players in history, is still questionable because Lakers 23rd in defense. Knicks ranked 17th in defense, trying to plug the same defensive hole they had at point guard. Jalen Brunson.
These are some of the best strikers on the planet and you still can't win at the highest level while they're leading your team. It's telling, or at least interesting, that we can connect many of these player dots.
The Mavs let Brunson go to New York because they didn't think they needed him with Luka. They then traded Luka for Anthony Davis. Now the Hawks have signed divorce papers with Young, so they could potentially go after…Anthony Davis.
Of course, it all started with Doncic and Young being traded for each other in the 2018 draft. Travis Schlenk was running things in Atlanta at the time and told me that they thought Young and Doncic were pretty evenly matched, so the Hawks' extra draft pick sweetened it enough to justify the deal. This additional choice turned out to be Cam reddish. Bust.
However, at first, Young was not a failure at all. As a rookie, he averaged 19 and 8 points. Young has given the Hawks two wins in the finals in 2021. He's still one of the world's most gifted strikers, but that doesn't matter anymore.
Over the past four years, the Hawks have essentially been a .500 team in the Eastern Conference, no less. They went 2-8 with him this season, with a defense that climbed into the top 10, and he didn't return to the red carpet as soon as he returned.
Part of the problem is that, in addition to his defensive resistance, Young, for all his talent on the ball, is not a very good shooter. It's been like this for some time. He had a league average of 3 at best and worse for many years. He's 30% deep this season in a small sample size. He shot 34% in 76 games last season.
Young has a floater and at some point he became a pretty lethal mid-range guy and he will always be a tremendous passer. But shooting is one of the most important qualities of a modern point guard. If you can't consistently confuse you better be able to defend or at least have some size e.g. Tyrese Haliburton (who also doesn't dominate the ball, which is an important part of this conversation, and could knock the lights out) or even LaMelo BallHe's 6'7, stupidly skilled and probably still in the way of winning.
Trae has become a three-point forward: he's a ball-handling point guard who doesn't shoot 3s or play defense, and he's small. The point is, if you're going to play the small point guard role in today's game, given the price, teams would rather have Colleen Gillespie or Davion Mitchell than Young, as crazy as that may sound.
Brunson is interesting because he doesn't play defense and is short, but he is an elite shooter and scorer. The same goes for Harden and Lillard in their prime. The same is obviously true of Luke. Early on, people wanted to make comparisons between Young and Steph Curry. Even Schlenk spoke about this, since he worked for 13 years in Warriorsand watched first-hand as Curry transformed this organization into a smaller, more prolific point guard.
But it was always a bad computer. To begin with, no one Steph Curry. He defies all the rules of basketball. But more than that, Curry plays off the ball and competes on defense. He worked to become stronger. We started finishing at the elite level. Trae never changed as a player (Schlenk told me more than once how hard he tried to put the ball in Young's ear, but it never did him any good).
The simple truth is that small point guards who can't play defense quickly die out as franchise players. There will always be intrigue for talented guys like Young (see. Ja Morantbefore his star began to fade too; Keyontae George on his honeymoon where we're all amazed by the big numbers, not expecting them to translate into wins), but at the end of the day, Luka and Prime Harden are probably the only eager guys we can confidently say are good enough to anchor a championship contender despite being completely destructive defenders.
It's a short list, and Young isn't on it. The Hawks have known this for some time, and given that no one would offer them half a good trade package, so does everyone else. This sounds like a big blow to Young, but honestly, it's not.
Of course, he is an imperfect player. Probably more of an artist than an inveterate competitor. A little LaMelo. There were messages last time Ryan Russillothat his teammates don't really like playing with him.
But the biggest takeaway from this deal is that Young's specialty players have proven to be something of a quirk. They exploded on stage with Harden and went down the path of cuts. Some guys still manage to pull it off, but not many. And Young is not one of them.
