As a star departs, a boy asks, ‘When did Trae Young stop being the best?’
If I had to pick the quintessential Trae Young moment, I might go with a play he made in Game 1 of the 2021 Eastern Conference finals. Late in the third quarter, Young had the ball near the top of the key. He faced the Milwaukee Bucks’ Jrue Holiday, one of the league’s best perimeter defenders. Holiday seemed to think Young would go left, so he was drifting that way. And when Young crossed over to the right, Holiday was so thoroughly outfoxed that he gave up on the play and watched. A spectator, just like the rest of us.
Young was wide-open for three. He could have taken the shot right away. Instead he did something reckless and astonishing. He savored the moment. He stood there, as if the defenders were trapped in amber, as if time itself had stopped for him. He waited, as if to show us all how easy this game was.
At the last instant, just before another defender could reach him, Young gave a little shiver. A subtle shake of the shoulders. Just a little extra, because he could. Then he put up the three. Nothing but net.
I’ve been thinking about that moment this week, pondering its greater meaning, wondering how it might explain the loss I’m feeling. Young was Atlanta’s greatest basketball player since Dominique Wilkins. And after watching the vast majority of the games Young played since his NBA career began in 2018, I feel almost as if an old friend is leaving town.
On Thursday, the day after we learned the Hawks were trading Young to the Washington Wizards, I stood in the kitchen with two of my children. My 11-year-old asked me what player the Hawks might pursue now.
I said they might swing a trade for Anthony Davis. My 8-year-old wasn’t so sure. She said something about Davis’ contract. We either didn’t properly hear or didn’t quite understand. And so she was forced to repeat herself.
“HE DOESN’T HAVE AN EXPIRING CONTRACT,” the 8-year-old said, more forcefully this time, and I realized two things at once. One, she was right. And two, we probably talk too much about basketball in our house.
I’ve been a Hawks fan since the Dominique era, and now my wife and our four kids have joined me. We watch almost every game from the big red couch in the TV room, which means that even though we’ve never met Trae Young, he may be involved in some of my children’s core memories.
Anyway, we were standing in the kitchen Thursday, and I was about to make dinner, and my younger son asked me to name the Hawks’ best player.
After brief consideration, I said it was Jalen Johnson, the 24-year-old forward who averaged a triple-double last month.
My son took that in without disagreement. Then he had a follow-up question:
“When did Trae Young stop being the best?”
I did not have a good answer for that one. But the question seemed exactly right. There was a time when Young was indisputably the Hawks’ best player and arguably one of the best in the league, a time when I thought he could lead the Hawks to multiple championships. Instead, he was unceremoniously sent packing at age 27, when he should have been playing the best basketball of his career.
How did it come to this?
I don’t know the whole story. Perhaps in the future we’ll learn some crucial detail that brings all the pieces together. But in the meantime, I’ll tell you some approximation of the story I’ve told the kids.
This version begins in 2021, at the end of his third season with the Hawks, as Young leads them into the playoffs. Maybe you remember it, too. The thrill of watching these upstarts learn to play together. John Collins, all heart and vicious dunks. Clint Capela, the humble workman on the boards. Bogdan “Bogi” Bogdanovic, raining threes all over the court. They fire their coach after a 14-20 start and figure it out with Nate McMillan in charge. And so Trae Young swaggers into New York.
In Game 1 at Madison Square Garden, he hits a floater in the lane to win the game. Then he puts a finger to his lips to quiet the angry crowd.
In Game 5, also at the Garden, Young buries a three to seal the victory and end the Knicks’ season.
Then he takes a bow.
There is something irresistible about having someone like that on our team. He’s so small compared to the other players, about the same height and weight as a regular guy like me, and he doesn’t just defeat the giants — he does it with verve and style and joy. He dribbles through other players’ legs. He gives himself theatrical hand-goggles after making a pass that shows uncanny court vision. He embraces the nickname Ice Trae, giving himself an icy shiver after an especially cold-blooded shot.
On to Philadelphia, where the Hawks face the top-seeded Sixers and the city’s notoriously hostile fans.
“TRAE IS BALD-ING,” they chant.
He quiets them with three after three. The Hawks take Game 1. After losing the next two, they storm back from 18 down to win Game 4 and tie the series. Back in Philadelphia for Game 5, the Hawks fall behind by 26 points. They come back and win. Young scores 39 points.
“We keep fighting no matter what the score is,” he says afterward. The Hawks take the series in seven games and move on to the conference finals.
In the Game 1 victory against the Bucks, Young scores 48 points. That’s the night when he crosses over Holiday and stands there waiting for a long moment before swishing the three.
We don’t know it at the time — I don’t know it, you don’t know it, my kids don’t know it, Young himself certainly doesn’t know it — but this will be the peak.
The pinnacle of Young’s career as an Atlanta Hawk.
He is 22 years old.
Near the end of the third quarter in Game 3, with the series tied 1-1 and the Hawks leading 85-82, something terrible happens.
What is it about this city and its sports teams? Why did the Braves collapse against the Yankees in ’96? Why did the Falcons blow a 28-3 lead in the Super Bowl? Why did Young have to step on the ref’s foot?
There is no way to prove me right or wrong about 2021. I like to think the Hawks would have won the championship if not for that one false step. The Bucks won it all that year, and the Hawks were beating the Bucks until Young suffered the bone bruise in his right foot. He returned for Game 6, clearly not the same, shooting 4-of-17 from the field as the Bucks took the series. But the future still looked bright for both the Hawks and their young star.
A strong dose of early success can be a kind of poison. I say this from experience. In the early years, my own career felt like an unbroken series of victories. I was proud of my business cards. And then I was laid off, and laid off again, and along the way I had to learn some painful lessons about humility.
If I’d been advising Trae Young in 2022, the year after he bowed to the crowd at Madison Square Garden, I might have questioned his decision to bust out custom-made sneakers that said “King of Broadway.” This time the king didn’t play so well. The Knicks won, 113-89.
It may feel like an unfair comparison, but I think it’s useful to contrast Young with another point guard who came out of college looking neither very tall nor very strong. Steph Curry had a relatively slow start to his pro career. Unlike Young, Curry had a disappointing and injury-shortened third season. It was his fourth year when he broke out, hitting an incredible 272 three-pointers, and he kept getting better after that. Stronger, too. He hit the weights hard, adding more and more muscle, becoming a guy you could no longer push around. Against all odds, he became an above-average defender.
I say all this because every offseason I kept hoping Young would do something similar. Bulk up and improve his defense. Although he showed flashes of brilliance on defense, other teams often exploited him in mismatches. And although he was always a wonderful passer, his shooting peaked in the 2021-22 season and declined to 41.1% last season — with 34% on threes. Both of those numbers were below the NBA average.
In short, he did not keep getting better. The game did not keep getting easier. The team did not keep winning in the playoffs. Small guards became an endangered species. The game evolved, and Young did not change enough with it. And this season, after he suffered a knee injury, the Hawks played better without him.
I was still sad to see him go. We all were. On Wednesday night, as the trade reports circulated, my younger son tried to work through his feelings. He gathered some toys. One was a figurine of Trae Young. Another was Jalen Johnson, dressed as a Jedi Knight from Star Wars. My son held a third figurine, a guy with a mustache and a medieval helmet. He gave this guy the role of the Hawks’ general manager.
My son stood in the kitchen and acted out a drama. I held up my phone and hit record.
“I’m going to trade you,” said the general manager in the medieval helmet.
“No you aren’t,” said the imagined voice of Trae Young.
Now Jalen Johnson the Jedi Knight entered the chat. He wore a brown cloak and held a light-saber.
“This is my team now,” he said. “Bye-bye, Trae.”
They hugged.
The real Trae Young was not in uniform that night as the Hawks hosted the New Orleans Pelicans. With 7:13 left in the fourth quarter and the Hawks leading 100-81, the FanDuel broadcast returned from a break and showed Young, in glasses and a black polo shirt, making the rounds on the sideline.
“And it looks to me, Nique, like he’s saying some good-byes here,” play-by-play announcer Bob Rathbun said.
It was getting late on a school night by then, but I hit pause on the DVR and called the children into the room. It was real now. They needed to see this.
With about 40 seconds left in the game, Young walked toward the tunnel to faint applause. He shook a few hands and went on, followed by a camera operator.
“Lonely man in the hallway,” Rathbun said, adding a few words about his remarkable career, and Young kept walking, and the game went on.
AJC reporter Thomas Lake was a senior writer for Sports Illustrated 2010-2015. Four of his stories were selected for the annual Best American Sports Writing anthology. A fifth, “The Boy They Couldn’t Kill,” was named one of the 60 best in the magazine’s 60-year history. He lives with his family in Decatur, where he coaches youth basketball and plays pickup games.
About the Author
Thomas Lake is a senior reporter for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated and The Guardian. He's a co-founder of The Lake Family Band. Please email thomas.lake@ajc.com if you'd like to share a story idea.
