I’m unsure if I’ve already said this (not like I have an archive of descriptions I can refer to anything), but I did not expect Trae Young to be this good this early. I fully thought it would take him a month or so before doing anything of note. He just didn’t seem like the kind of players who would be fully NBA-ready. He’s small, for one thing. Small and not that old. Sure, he looked great in college, but since when does that mean anything? Sometimes it feels like scouts prefer players who were bad in college.
His three-point shot still isn’t quite there yet, probably because he jacks them up there like he’s a Curry bro. On a real team getting real, quality looks, he’d be looking better from there. But then he wouldn’t get to be the primary ball-handler, running the offense and setting the table for that team’s equivalent for Alex Len over and over again. Yeah, I like him on the Hawks. Hyped rookies definitely deserve bad teams just so they can show their stuff on a nightly basis.
Just because the Hawks beat the Heat tonight doesn’t mean they don’t suck. They absolutely do. It also means that the Heat suck, and that their ragtag collection of overpaid role-players is a flawed concept. But that’s a discussion for another video. Young is showing that he can get stats against bad teams. What about good ones? He wasn’t so bad against Philly, but other than that, my data points are limited.
I will say that him dropping 40 on the Warriors while getting into a shootout with Stephen Curry would be pretty fun. And if it doesn’t happen exactly that way, I can probably edit together the clips to make it look like he did, anyway. That is the power I wield as an NBA highlights-maker.