Trae Young is out of excusesIf Trae Young can't win with this team, he might be the problem
No player is in total control of everything, or even, to some degree, anything around them. All that said, I'll say this about Trae Young: If he can't deliver consistent wins with the support staff with which the Hawks have outfitted him for this upcoming season, he might be the problem.
Building around a star like Young is, at once, challenging and straightforward. Give him shooting, a big man to throw lobs to and an insulating defense, and he can pretty much do the rest. Same goes for Luka Doncic, and every other defensively deficient, ball-dominant, center-of-the-universe point guard. It's a player archetype that has come into great question in recent years, and for good reason.
Gone are all the good feels that came with Atlanta's surprise run to the 2021 conference finals, when Young was seemingly on track to take center stage as one of the league's premier playoff performers. Since that run, the Hawks have gone 160-168. They fired a coach and barely improved with a new one. They made a huge trade for Dejounte Murray that went totally bust. They've missed the playoffs entirely in two of the last four seasons, and went out with a first-round whimper (3-8 in two series vs. Boston and Miami) in the other two.
Young's prints are on all of this. He's played in at least 73 games in three of the last four years, and it's not as though Atlanta hasn't had talent around him. Young has played with prime Murray and a borderline All-Star in John Collins. Clint Capela, Bogdan Bogdanovic, DeAndre Hunter, Kevin Heurter, Onyeka Okongwu, emerging star Jalen Johnson, Defensive Player of the Year runner-up Dyson Daniels, and plenty of other good NBA players, including 2024 No. 1 overall pick Zaccharie Risacher, who was quietly really good down the stretch last year, have been Young's teammates as well.
Still, the Hawks have managed just a plus-3.5 combined net rating over the last four years (almost 21,000 non-garbage possessions) with Young on the floor, per Cleaning the Glass, with an upper-class offense and a lower-class defense. That is not winning basketball. That is staying afloat in basketball.It's gotten worse in the playoffs, where the Hawks have been positively pounced with Young,
even counting the memorable 2021 run, shooting barely 40% including 29% from 3 over 37 career playoff games. Shooting isn't everything, of course. Young's threat level remains high, and he has averaged huge numbers in two of his three postseasons (roughly 29 points and 10 assists). But this only further begs the question if he's ultimately a good-stats-bad-team guy, as most of the evidence to this point has suggested.
This year, he has an honest chance to flip that script. Nobody is saying the Hawks are a contender (although in this Eastern Conference, you can't rule anything out), but this is a good team. More importantly, it's a team that has been built specifically to serve Young.
Let's start with the most important piece: Jalen Johnson will be back after suffering a torn labrum 36 games into last season. Johnson is a budding All-Star with whom Young has a clear chemistry; last season Atlanta outscored opponents by more than six points per 100 possessions with those two on the floor together, per CTG, with a 74th percentile defense. That's encouraging.
You know what would be nice? If Young actually shot above league average from 3, which he hasn't done for his career and hasn't come close to doing in two of the last three seasons. Would it kill him to move a little when he doesn't have the ball? Steph Curry didn't come into the league with a body for defense, but he has transformed himself physically and become a passable, if not good, defender. Is Young not willing to put in the same work?
The point is, Young has a part in all this losing. And now he's out of excuses. The Hawks are expected to offer him a max extension, and the simple truth is that if you keep handing out max money to good-stats-bad-team guys, you're going to be a losing team. There's a reason, after all, that there wasn't much of a trade market for Young when it was pretty clear the Hawks would've been open to moving him last summer. Because nobody knows if he's a winning player. In about four months, he's going to have the best opportunity of his career to answer that question.
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