Trae Young is an incredible basketball player.
Imagine being as good at anything as Trae Young is at this sport. Let’s get that out of the way up top. I don’t want to say anything negative about him in that sense. He is a wonderfully entertaining talent — among the 30 or 40 best to do it in the entire world. And sometimes he can be even better than that.
But can you win an NBA championship with Young as your point guard?
That is the question every team asked themselves this week, if they had not already, since Young’s agents reportedly were working “over the past week” with the Atlanta Hawks to find a new landing spot for him.
If the answer to that question was a flat no, and it was for many, there was no reason to trade for the four-time All-Star. The point of the game is to win the Larry O’Brien Trophy, and if you think you cannot win it with him, then why even entertain it? This is a conclusion most of the league must have reached.
Otherwise, he would not have been traded to the Washington Wizards in exchange for 34-year-old CJ McCollum’s expiring contract and Corey Kispert. With all due respect to Kispert, whose shooting could help the Hawks, he is hardly on Young’s level. A four-time All-Star was dealt for relatively little in return.
And the league did not bat an eye. Nobody wanted to give up much for Young. That should tell us a lot.
It also tells us a lot that the Wizards were reportedly Young’s preferred destination. Why would anyone want to join a team that hasn’t won 50 games since 1979? Because they are wiling to pay him, most likely.
Which could be a mistake, unless they get him to sign a team-friendly extension. The Wizards can absorb Young’s $49 million option for next season. In fact, they need it to reach the salary floor. But continuing to pay Young anything close to a max salary is a fool’s errand — one Washington knows all too well, given its experiences with John Wall and Bradley Beal, whose contracts set a second-round ceiling on the Wiz.
Like Wall, or Beal, there is the matter of Young’s fit. He has been, almost exclusively, a ball-dominant point guard, though in the past two seasons his usage rate has dipped below 30%, where it stood for five straight seasons, when he ranked among the league’s leaders. He wants to use a lot of possessions, either to launch an attempt from 30 feet, to get to his floater, or to fire a pass to the perimeter for an assist.
It works well. Young gets his numbers, averaging 26.5 points and 10.2 assists over a six-year span, and the Hawks were capable of fielding an offense that peaked as the league’s second-rated outfit in 2021-22, when they won 43 games. That is about where they ended up every year, give or take a few wins, and they peaked as an Eastern Conference finalist in 2021, losing to the eventual champion Milwaukee Bucks.
That was as good as it got. It was supposed to get better this season, when Atlanta gave Young every weapon possible — a two-way wing core of Jalen Johnson, Dyson Daniels, Nickeil Alexander-Walker and Zaccharie Risacher, plus centers Onyeka Okongwu and Kristaps Porziņģis — in the wide-open East.
It did not work. So, the Hawks gave up on Young, largely because they were always worse defensively with him, and now their offense is good enough — with NAW playing so well — to carry that defense into a similar 43-win territory without him. Young failed to elevate them any further than that.
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TRAE YOUNG’S ON/OFF NUMBERS |
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|
OFFENSIVE RATING |
DEFENSIVE RATING |
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|
YEAR |
ON |
OFF |
ON |
OFF |
|
2018-19 |
108.5 |
101.9 |
114.8 |
105.8 |
|
2019-20 |
111.2 |
95.7 |
116.1 |
107.9 |
|
2020-21 |
118.2 |
104.4 |
113.0 |
107.8 |
|
2021-22 |
117.2 |
107.2 |
114.9 |
107.8 |
|
2022-23 |
115.9 |
111.4 |
114.6 |
112.6 |
|
2023-24 |
116.6 |
113.2 |
119.1 |
115.3 |
|
2024-25 |
115.2 |
105.2 |
114.6 |
108.9 |
|
2025-26 |
119.4 |
112.5 |
126.2 |
112.9 |
Johnson is Atlanta’s future. His ceiling knows no bounds. He has been tremendous all season offensively, averaging 24-10-8, and he is capable of top-tier defense, too. He is the type of player who, when paired with another two-way star, could take the Hawks to the top of the East, something they have never done in the franchise’s history. Atlanta could very well conjure titles with him at Giannis Antetokounmpo’s side.
But that is a different trade scenario. Here we are discussing Young, whose defense is as deficient as his offense is brilliant, if not more so. This is the thing with him. He gets relentlessly attacked on that end in the playoffs, and it is a problem for his team. He would need a team full of two-way talents — a team like the Minnesota Timberwolves — to answer that question about whether he can play point for a title team.
Which brings us to back the Wizards, who scored Young on the cheap. To think they could win a title with Young is to think, in the next few years, as Young ages into his 30s, that some combination of Alex Sarr, Tre Johnson, Kyshawn George, Bilal Coulibaly and Bub Carrington transform into a squad as good as the existing Hawks, and that core enjoys playing with Young more than his teammates in Atlanta seemed to.
Young’s history is his history. He has the worst defensive rating of anyone in the league who plays as much as he does. He can simultaneously be among the league’s very best on offense and its least-effective on defense. Atlanta lived that experience for the better part of eight seasons and was over it.
So, why would the Wizards want Young? Why might a team that may well be among those who answered no to the question of whether they can win a championship with him still want him? To get better, of course. Young can do that. He could organize them into a playoff team, as he did in Atlanta, where his Hawks mostly topped out as first-round fodder, save for one fortune-filled trip to the conference finals.
That looks pretty good from where the Wizards are sitting, once again at the bottom of the standings.
Is it wise? That is up for debate. Getting better is also a strategy. Except, in Young, they invite in both improvement to a certain point and a ceiling at that point — a ceiling that is sub-championship level, most likely, if not for the absolute perfect roster around him (and the Wiz are far from fielding that).
Every team had to ask: Can we give up what we need to give up to get Young, fit his salary onto our cap sheet and still have enough around him to mask his deficiencies as a player? Washington talked itself into that scenario. Getting Young for relatively little, the Wizards can hope he accelerates the development of their core, and pray they make the playoffs before it comes time to pay Johnson, Sarr and the others.
That is a needle to thread. They better hope Kispert does not become the next Deni Avdija, who has blossomed in Portland since leaving Washington. And they better not let their team become The Trae Young Show, where their prospects’ development stagnates as he drives them back into the middle.
So, should the Wiz have done it? Only the Trae Young of general managers could make that call.