his trade to the Washington Wizards<\/a> breaking while he was still on the bench at State Farm Arena watching the rest of the Hawks complete their rout of a pitiful, shorthanded New Orleans Pelicans squad.<\/p>\nYoung, who was out for a sixth straight game with a bruised quad (one that likely will heal rapidly once he gets to Washington, but could always flare up at any point if the Wizards threaten to lose their top-eight protected first-round pick to the New York Knicks), left the bench area for a minute when news of the trade broke and then returned to the same seat. Players started hearing what happened from fans behind the bench, and some \u201cThank you, Trae\u201d chants broke out in the crowd.<\/p>\n
It created a surreal moment for players and fans alike.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople show their phones from the crowd, you know, their Twitters and stuff like that,\u201d Hawks guard Dyson Daniels said, \u201cso I didn\u2019t really know how to feel. It was the last quarter when I got told. And you see all the news headlines and stuff on your phone, and you don\u2019t even know what\u2019s true, what\u2019s not.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the game, Young spoke to the team in the locker room and then said his goodbyes, which players said was an emotional scene for the face of the franchise \u2014 virtually every fan in a Hawks jersey at State Farm Arena sports Young\u2019s No. 11.<\/p>\n
The trade sent Young and his $49 million player option for next season to the Wizards for guard CJ McCollum and forward Corey Kispert; no draft picks were exchanged. The 34-year-old McCollum is on an expiring deal worth $30.7 million and, while needed for backcourt depth in the short term, likely isn\u2019t in Atlanta\u2019s plans beyond this season. Kispert is a good shooter who has otherwise underperformed his current four-year, $54 million rookie extension; it still has three years left to run after this season, although the final one in 2028-29 is a team option.<\/p>\n
Some other minutiae: Atlanta will generate a $1.4 million trade exception, and Young\u2019s trade bonus (which applies to this year only) will boost his 2025-26 salary by nearly $400,000 to his maximum of $46.4 million. His $49 million player option for 2026-27 remains unchanged, and he can sign an extension for up to two years beyond that once he\u2019s dealt.<\/p>\n
So in other words \u2026 it was a salary dump.<\/p>\n
Which is a poor end-game with a max-contract player. But this one had been a long time coming, and the era had clearly run its course in both directions. The Hawks had made the Play-In Tournament four straight times since the magical run to the 2021 East finals and are tracking to take the streak to five.<\/p>\n
Alas, no market for Young involved major assets coming back to Atlanta, even dating back to the Hawks\u2019 efforts to break up the zero-synergy pairing of Young and Dejounte Murray. Young is one of the league\u2019s most dynamic offensive players, but interest in him from other teams has always been tepid.<\/p>\n
To understand why, let\u2019s start with a moment that precedes Young playing for the Hawks, because in the lead-up to the 2018 NBA Draft, several teams took note of it.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a video of the NCAA Tournament selection show from that year, when Young\u2019s Oklahoma team was on the bubble and on camera as the field was announced. When the bracket showed the Sooners had made the field, all the Oklahoma players rose and celebrated with each other \u2026 except Young. I mean, he was happy too, but it stood out that the rest of the team was celebrating around him rather than with him.<\/p>\n
Leading into that draft, the background from scouts was that Young wasn\u2019t a bad guy, but that he was, in scout parlance, a \u201ctennis player\u201d \u2014 an individual playing a team sport. You\u2019ll rarely encounter a great passer who had as many accusations of selfish play leveled at him, as the rap on Young was that he\u2019d seek out the assist but not the hockey pass or hit-ahead that created advantages for everyone else, that he wouldn\u2019t give a full effort on defense (or even, like get in a stance), and that he\u2019d only cut away from the ball if it involved receiving an inbounds pass.<\/p>\n
Even as Young put together a brilliant rookie season and took the Hawks to the conference finals in his third year as a pro, confidently trolling Madison Square Garden\u2019s crowd as a 22-year-old, 164-pound guard while also skewering the Knicks\u2019 defense, he never quite beat those charges. The scuttlebutt was that even the players who were eating off his passes didn\u2019t like him or enjoy playing with him.<\/p>\n
But what\u2019s funny is that, as he got older, he got better at some of the things that had been more glaring failings in his first four seasons. He tried more regularly on defense, made hit-ahead passes more frequently to get other players advantages, recruited players in free agency (notably and ironically including his replacement, Nickeil Alexander-Walker) and would spend post-game media sessions pumping teammates for awards.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was always inviting guys to dinner,\u201d Alexander-Walker said. \u201cI wish I would have got that opportunity to play with him; he\u2019s the main reason why I\u2019m here. That\u2019s the part he was active in: me and him talking and getting me to (sign with) Atlanta and making it work for me.<\/p>\n
Instead, other factors conspired to limit Young\u2019s value, particularly his issues on defense. Even if he had played with messianic fervor on that end, his limitations at 6-foot-2 with fairly average athletic chops were readily apparent. Forget about on-ball defense; when he was the low man on the weak side, he had absolutely no chance of breaking up a play, and when \u201cfighting through screens\u201d against bigs he was Michael Spinks vs. Mike Tyson.<\/p>\n
All of that was perhaps easier to live with before he visibly lost a step over the last two seasons, rendering his isolations a little less explosive and his forays to the rim a little bit less frequent.<\/p>\n
Young at his best was an offense unto himself; just set a ball screen and let him cook, especially if he had a rim runner to work with. However, his lessened burst the last two years has made it easier for opponents to switch his screen-and-rolls and take away the lobs; he\u2019s also had a much harder time getting into the full-speed floaters that made him dangerous without getting all the way to the rim, and he\u2019s become much more dependent on long 3s for offense. His defenders were also less vulnerable to the devastating right-to-left move Young would use to reject screens, a move open to him because opponents were terrified of letting him get downhill on his right hand.<\/p>\n
Still, this version of Young remains a massively better offensive engine than anyone on Washington\u2019s 27th-ranked offense, and it\u2019s reasonable to think the 27-year-old Young still has some runway. My understanding of the Wizards\u2019 rebuilding road map is that they plan to be more respectably competent next year, and having a real starting point guard would go a long way toward accomplishing that. They also have a legit rim protector and rim runner to pair with Young in second-year pro Alex Sarr; fellow French-speaker Clint Capela thrived next to Young in the same role in Atlanta, and one can argue Capela\u2019s age-related decline made life significantly harder for Young the last few years.<\/p>\n
Contractually, the Wizards can take the plunge here because Young\u2019s $49 million doesn\u2019t hurt them. They were facing a \u201cBrewster\u2019s Millions<\/a>\u201d situation just to get the salary floor this coming offseason and still project to have near-max cap room, especially after low-key throwing a $14 million obligation to Kispert out the window.<\/p>\nBut let\u2019s get back to Atlanta. The other key explanation for the trade is that the Hawks\u2019 situation fundamentally shifted in the past 12 months. Young didn\u2019t change, but the team around him did. Once the franchise decided not to extend his contract after last season, the trade winds were blowing, but Atlanta\u2019s play in Young\u2019s absence this year made it much easier to move on.<\/p>\n
For the first time in the Young era, the Hawks have mustered a competent offense with him off the court, thanks to Jalen Johnson\u2019s emergence as a do-it-all, All-Star forward. Alexander-Walker has had a breakout year since coming from the Minnesota Timberwolves, taking advantage of Young\u2019s injuries (Young has only played 10 games this season) to more than double his scoring average to 20.5 points per game.<\/p>\n
The Hawks also fleeced New Orleans in a draft-day trade that likely will result in a high lottery pick (they will have the better of New Orleans\u2019 or Milwaukee\u2019s pick). They have an emerging stopper in the 22-year-old Daniels and other productive 20-somethings like center Onyeka Okongwu, 2024 top pick Zaccharie Risacher, mad bomber Vit Krej\u010d\u00ed and developmental success story Mo Gueye (who was awesome in Wednesday\u2019s win, including dispossessing Zion Williamson three times).<\/p>\n
All of that made it much more palatable to remove Young\u2019s $49 million salary from the equation a year from now, when the Hawks are looking at roughly $30 million in cap room depending on where the draft pick falls; alternatively, the Hawks can re-sign Kristaps Porzi\u0146\u0123is and operate as an over-cap team with oodles of flexibility.<\/p>\n
I should point out one key piece of flexibility Atlanta lost in this trade, however: It severely constrains the Hawks\u2019 options for any in-season pursuit of Anthony Davis. The Dallas Mavericks big man makes $54 million, and the players Atlanta acquired from Washington cannot be re-aggregated in any future trade this season. That means that stacking the salaries of McCollum and Kispert won\u2019t work as a salary match. Instead, any potential Davis deal would pretty much have to send Porzi\u0146\u0123is, Risacher and the expiring deal of Luke Kennard to the Mavs to meet league requirements.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, the rest of the Hawks will continue much as they have all season, embarking on a four-game Western trip without Young while standing in 10th place in the East. The Hawks owe a pick swap to the San Antonio Spurs and have no tanking incentive, and McCollum and Kispert should help juice the bench scoring (McCollum\u2019s defense \u2026 alas). Maybe they can make a run and get into the East playoff field.<\/p>\n
But the Young trade was never about this season, or about avoiding a fifth-straight trip to the Play-In. It\u2019s about Johnson\u2019s emerging stardom, the young core around him, and the pick from the Pelicans trade, all combining to make the unthinkable \u2014 a Trae Young salary dump! \u2014 suddenly seem like a worthwhile transaction to jump-start an increasingly bright-looking future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ATLANTA \u2014 So \u2026 that\u2019s it? After seven-and-a-half seasons, four All-Star games, a 2021 Eastern Conference finals run…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":400145,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[7218,64,63,590,85,7211],"class_list":{"0":"post-400144","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-atlanta-hawks","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-nba","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-washington-wizards"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400144","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=400144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400144\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/400145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=400144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=400144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=400144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}