The Atlanta Hawks salary dumped Trae Young to the Washington Wizards on Wednesday night. It will be headlined as a trade, but Atlanta doesn’t care too much about which players it got back in the deal: CJ McCollum and Corey Kispert. No draft picks were involved either way. For the Hawks, this was about getting Young off their books and their roster so they can officially begin moving in the direction of a new franchise player.
Maybe they already have that guy in Jalen Johnson.
Maybe they’ll go get Anthony Davis.
Either way, they’re done with the ball-dominant, defensively deficient point guard that has become the most maligned player archetype in today’s NBA. Teams used to fight over these guys who were an elite offense unto themselves. James Harden in Houston. Damian Lillard in Portland. Luka Dončić in Dallas and Young in Atlanta.
Now nobody wants them. The Mavericks traded Luka over a cup of coffee. Harden lasted 80 games with Brooklyn and 79 with the 76ers, and until the last few weeks, the Clippers were a joke. The Bucks are paying Lillard $113 million to play for someone else. Now Young has been sent to NBA Siberia for the expiring salary of a 34-year-old and a guy averaging 9.2 PPG.
Trae Young trade grades: Hawks get ‘B+’ for sending former face of their franchise to Wizards
Sam Quinn
Back when Portland dealt Lillard to the Bucks, I wrote that Lillard wasn’t just playing for a championship in Milwaukee. He was playing, on a very real level, for the survival of his particular point guard species. If the Bucks, with Giannis Antetokounmpo, couldn’t overcome the defensive decline from Jrue Holiday to Lillard despite the latter being one of the best offensive point guards of a generation, who could expect to do any better?
Defense matters too much nowadays, and one guy hogging the ball is out unless you’re Dončić, and even he, already one of the greatest offensive players in history, is still under some question as the Lakers rank 23rd in defense. The Knicks are 17th in defense as they try to patch the same defensive point guard hole that is Jalen Brunson.
These are some of the best offensive players on the planet, and you still might not be able to win at the highest level with them leading your team. It’s sort of telling, or at least interesting, that we can connect many of these exact player dots.
The Mavs let Brunson walk to New York because they didn’t think they needed him with Luka. Then they traded Luka for Anthony Davis. Now the Hawks have signed divorce papers with Young so that they can potentially pursue … Anthony Davis.
Of course, this all started with Dončić and Young being traded for one another on draft night in 2018. At that time, Travis Schlenk was running things in Atlanta and he told me they viewed Young and Dončić as pretty equal players, making the extra draft pick the Hawks got enough of a sweetener to justify the deal. That extra pick turned out to be Cam Reddish. Bust.
Young, however, was anything but a bust in the early going. He averaged 19 and 8 as a rookie. In 2021, Young had the Hawks two wins from the Finals. He’s still one of the most gifted offensive players around, but increasingly that just hasn’t mattered.
The Hawks have basically been a .500 team, in the Eastern Conference no less, over the last four years. They went 2-8 with him in the lineup this season, with a defense that had risen inside the top 10 without him turning back into a red carpet the instant he returned.
Part of the problem is that in addition to his defensive drag, Young, for all his ball talents, isn’t a very good shooter. It’s been the case for some time. He’s been league average at best from 3, and many years worse that that. This season he’s at 30% from deep in a small sample. Last season, in 76 games, he shot 34%.
Young has the floater and at one point was becoming a pretty lethal mid-range guy, and he’s always going to be a terrific passer. But shooting is one of those bottom-line abilities for a modern point guard. If you’re not able to knock down shots consistently, you better be able to defend, or at least have some size like a Tyrese Haliburton (who also isn’t ball dominant, which is a big part of this conversation) or even a LaMelo Ball.
Trae, on the other hand, has wound up a triple-whammy offender: He’s a ball-dominant point guard who has never shot 3s efficiently or played a lick of defense, and he’s small. The fact of the matter is, if you’re going to be a small point guard in today’s game, considering the price points involved, teams would rather have Collin Gillespie or Davion Mitchell than Young, as crazy as that sounds.
Brunson is interesting because he doesn’t play defense and he’s small, but he can shoot and is an elite scorer. Same for Harden and Lillard in their prime. Same, obviously, for Luka. In the early going, people wanted to make the Young/Steph Curry comparison. Even Schlenk talked about it as he had worked 13 years in the Warriors’ organization and watched firsthand how Curry transformed that organization as a smaller, scoring point guard.
But that was always a bad comp. For starters, no one is Steph Curry. He defies all basketball rules. But more than that, Curry plays off the ball and competes on defense. He worked to get stronger. Started to finish at an elite level. Trae has never changed as a player (Schlenk told me on numerous occasions how much he tried to put moving off the ball into Young’s ear, but it has never meaningfully took).
The simple truth is that small point guards who can’t play defense are fast going extinct as franchise players. The intrigue will always be there for guys as talented as Young (see Ja Morant, before his star began fading as well), but in the end, Luka and prime Harden are probably the only ball-hoggish guys we can definitely say were/are great enough to anchor a championship contender despite being a downright destructive defender.
It’s a short list, and Young isn’t on it. The Hawks have known that for a while, and considering nobody would offer them an even halfway lucrative trade package, so does everyone else. It sounds like a big knock on Young, but honestly, it’s not.
He’s a flawed player, to be sure. Probably more entertainer than down-in-the-dirt competitor. A little LaMelo. There have been reports, most recently by Ryen Russillo, that teammates don’t exactly love playing with him.
But the overarching takeaway from this trade is that players of Young’s particular profile have sort of turned out to be a fad. They exploded on the scene with Harden and went the way of bowl cuts. A few guys can still pull them off, but not many. And Young isn’t one of them.
