The good news with Trae Young’s lackluster rookie season is that his counting stats still look pretty good. If he’s looking at the bigger picture, playing the long game, he’ll know that if you want to score 20,000 points in a career you can’t really take any time off. You have to score lots of points every year for a whole lot of years. And 15 points per game playing (hopefully) every game is a lot of points! That’s something you can build off of.
Plus, when people look back on his career, they’ll be like “wow, 15 and 7, that’s a far cry from the 25 and 10 he was averaging his third year in the league, but it’s still pretty good”, and they won’t even look at his advanced stats which say he’s one of the most detrimental players in the league to his team.
Another plus, his good counting stats mean he has a lot of really nice highlight videos (like this one, just saying). Not little scrawny ones. Beefy ones, with lots of Ice Trae action. And you can bet that the end-of-season three-ilation that I’m gonna make for him is going to look really sick. Who cares if he ended up shooting 25 percent from three on the season? The threes he did make were sweet.