What makes a winning basketball player? It’s a hard question to quantify with any sort of consistent answer. So much of it depends on circumstance. Timing. Situation. 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.
If you can’t win a title with James Harden and bank on that level, and type of offensive brilliance to outweigh the debilitating defensive tradeoff, which players can you do it with? Portland never figured it out with Damian Lillard. Neither did the Bucks. Dallas didn’t even think it could do it with Luka despite reaching the NBA Finals.
Jalen Brunson is currently fighting this fight with the Knicks. He’s a borderline unstoppable scorer who cannot defend, and that was good enough for a conference finals run this past season. Young has won at this level as well. But the honeymoon period in which Brunson is currently operating has ended.
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.
Now add to that a stout perimeter defensive trio of Daniels, who had almost 100 more steals than any other player in the league last season, Nickeil Alexander-Walker (one of this summer’s prized acquisitions), and the aforementioned Rissacher, and Young is surrounded by crack-covering defenders who can switch just about anything outside the paint and thus, hopefully, mitigate the overlying threat of offenses hunting Young.
That’s not all. Atlanta also has backline protection in the form of Okongwu and Kristaps Porziņģis, whom they traded for this summer. Imagine a closing lineup in which Young is surrounded by Johnson, Alexander-Walker, Daniels and either Okongwu or Porziņģis, the latter of whom held opponents to a 42% conversion rate as the primary defender last season, a better mark than both Victor Wembanyama and Anthony Davis.
If this unit can’t defend well enough to win, say, 50 games, in this Eastern Conference, and go into the playoffs as something more than a play-in afterthought destined for another quick death, there will only be one place to point the finger.
And at that point, what will we be able to say about Young other than he’s just not a winning player? Because he has a real chance here. On top of all the defensive support, Young has an incredible two-man opportunity with a big man like Porziņģis, who can stretch the floor to 30-plus feet on pick-and-pops, and a certified sniper in Luke Kennard, who has shot a Steph Curry-like 43% from 3 over eight NBA seasons.
Imagine that kind of spacing with Jalen Johnson cutting down the wide-open lane for a lob with Young, one of the best passers the league has ever seen, playing quarterback. It’s impossible not to get excited about it, not just as a basketball experiment, but as a Young fan. The playoffs, beyond a dine-and-dash first-round beating, are a better place with Young in them.
That 2021 run was magical when he took over Madison Square Garden and blew up the last shred of the Ben Simmons 76ers. If Young hadn’t gotten hurt, Atlanta could have had the chance to beat the Bucks and go to the Finals, where they would’ve played the Suns. You don’t have to squint that hard to see a Young-led team winning, or at least competing for, a title.
Maybe the Hawks should’ve recognized the flukiness of that run and not rested on their laurels, signing Collins for huge money and re-upping Nate McMillan and basically coming back with the same roster. Maybe Murray represented a panic move and never really fit as an off-ball player next to Young. Maybe the front office mess, beginning with the firing of Travis Schlenk, stunted growth. It would’ve been great if the Hawks landed the top draft pick in a class with an actual superstar on the board.
You know what would also 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.
