Why would the Wizards trade for Trae Young?

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.

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But can you win an NBA championship with Young as your point guard?

That is the question every team must now ask themselves, if they had not already, since Young is reportedly working with the Atlanta Hawks to find a new landing spot.

If the answer to that question is a flat no, and it is for many, there should be 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 may have already reached.

Then, there is the matter of his fit. Young 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.

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It works quite well. Young gets his numbers, averaging 26.5 points and 10.2 assists over a six-year span, and the Hawks are 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 end 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 they 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 has not worked. The Hawks are giving up on Young, largely because they have…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/nba/article/why-would-the-wizards-trade-for-trae-young-164935639.html

Author : Ben Rohrbach

Publish date : 2026-01-07 16:49:00

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