You know who gets a lot of credit for never winning? Trae Young. I’m not talking about championships. I’m not talking about making the playoffs. How about we get to a point where the Hawks can be a .500 team? Right now they’re not close. Right now the Hawks are 19-46 and have been one of the worst teams in the league all season. You can dish out the blame to whoever you want. All I know is Trae Young needs to be held responsible too.
Will Trae Young ever become a winning player? I think it’s a fair question to ask. Young has an Achilles heel that will never go away. The Hawks point guard is atrocious defensively. He’s not just bad, he might be the worst defender in the league. The Hawks have a defensive rating of 114.2 as a whole including Young’s minutes. When Young is on the court, it jumps to 115.8. Young has a net rating of -5.1 on the season. This man isn’t just bad on defense, he gets torched every night.
That’s not going away. How far can you go if you have a player on the court that gives up automatic buckets on the other end? Young is never going to grab a lot of boards either because of his size. Does the offense make up for it? To an extent, but it will never full balance out. I don’t see how the problem is fixable.
Number one being that Trae Young has a fatal flaw on the offensive end. Guess who leads the NBA in turnovers? That would be Trae Young at 4.8 per game. It’s one thing to give up easy buckets because you stink at defense. It’s another to compile on that problem by leading the league in turnovers. It’s unacceptable and there is no other way to put it.
I don’t care how many points Young scores or how well he shoots the ball. If he is a pogo stick on defense and gives the ball away likes it’s candy, Trae Young will never become a winning player. Steph Curry doesn’t lead the league in turnovers. How do you fix it?
Look, it’s not all on Trae Young. Travis Schlenk hasn’t shown an ounce of evidence that he knows what he’s doing. Young will never have a great team put around him in Atlanta. Still, it’s hard to put the blame on everyone else when the team’s “best player” is a deterrent to winning.
