ATLANTA — Where is Trae Young?
It’s a question OG Anunoby had to be asking himself every time his head was swiveling in all directions. The New York Knicks wing was guarding Jalen Johnson in a recent game, but his mind and eyes were preoccupied with Young lurking in the shadows.
When Young finally emerged from behind a medley of screens and was handed the ball, Anunoby pounced into the lane and the Atlanta Hawks star retreated. Mission accomplished, but then Anunoby had to find Johnson.
Anunoby turned around to find a trail of dust, the faint memory of Johnson spacing the floor and the Hawks of old. The Knicks wing kept searching for his man. By the time he finally found him, Johnson was throwing down a dunk.
The Hawks are a different team this season.
After the front office reshaped the roster to give coach Quin Snyder a group of athletic playmakers early in their career, Snyder finally has the personnel to match his preferred style of play. But with Young back as the unmistakable leader once again, leadership, the coaching staff and the players are doing things differently.
“I think this is an exciting time for Trae in the arc of his career,” Synder said. “Any time a team or a player has success at doing something well, you hit a point where you’re forced to adapt and you need help with that adaptation process.”
What Snyder wants is for his star to get rid of the rock, early and often. The (Trae) Young Hawks 2.0 want to minimize his time with the ball, so there is more unpredictability to their offense.
“Something the Hawks haven’t utilized before is Trae’s gravity,” new teammate Larry Nance Jr. said. “Him being on the court means 1.5 guys need to know where he is at all times defensively. On the ball, that’s fantastic. But what I think we’re starting to explore some more is using his gravity for others to make plays. We’re excited to start using decoy Trae Young a little bit.”
Whether Young is spacing to the corners or running without the ball, defenders tend to face-guard him tightly, taking themselves out of help mode. When he gets the ball with a head of steam, defenders who help have to be more aggressive in forming a wall. Young can pass through and around those walls, which is taking the pressure off of him to run the show at all times.
While the Hawks (4-7) lost another primary ballhandler when they traded Dejounte Murray, they are now flush with players who can make reads in open space. Snyder will sometimes open quarters with Young as far from the action as possible, leaving the paint empty for the likes of Johnson, Dyson Daniels and Zaccharie Risacher to see the floor.
“When I am off the ball, guys are worried about me and they’re connected to me and on my body,” Young said. “So it allows teammates to have a lot of space to go and create for themselves and others too.”
Now this group is figuring out how it revolves around Young, who also is evolving as a player.
“We’re not always waiting for Trae to create for everyone, but to learn to create for each other,” Bogdan Bogdanović said. “So he’s going to continue to do what he does the best. But, we need to come together and increase that level of creation as a team.“
In the early part of Young’s career, the bread and butter was the spread pick-and-roll. In previous iterations of the Hawks, the heliocentric system surrounding Young was too static.
The offense revolved around the Young and Clint Capela pick-and-roll, but their teammates were often glued to their spots on the floor waiting for a pass to come.
“For Trae, he’s a very unique, special type of talent that could do a lot on his own,” Hawks general manager Landry Fields said. “Statistically, he is going to do what he does. But the how behind it is something that Quin and the staff are working on. It’s been cool to see it elevate him and frankly, learning more to his own game.”
Snyder does not want to get away from those actions, but the offense needs to evolve if the Hawks are going to get anywhere with Young at the helm. Teams started switching and blitzing Young more to get the ball out of his hands. He is comfortable making the reads to get off the ball quickly to give his teammates an advantage.
It’s why Johnson emerged as a playmaker last season by screening for Young and now has the freedom to roam wherever he wants. Johnson’s challenge is understanding that because his role is versatile and his job is to make the percentage play.
Snyder wants Johnson to determine his plan of attack while the ball heads his way: Read before the catch. This season, Johnson serves as a secondary playmaker in a variety of forms, allowing him to attack against the grain of the defense.
When an opponent shifts to deal with Young attacking space, they have to rotate back to Johnson when he gets the ball. The quicker he makes his read, the more he exploits the defense’s momentum.
”I played every position in my life, so I’m sharpening things up,” Johnson said. “I’m still trying to figure things out, but I’m excited getting things underway.”
When Johnson sets the initial screen for Young, Onyeka Okongwu or Capela will screen for another wing in the corner to drag the defensive center away from the action. Because Atlanta has so many players who can make reads as a roll man and make smart cuts from the weak side, Young will almost always thread the needle to find someone open.
“As a guy like me who likes to run the floor, it’s amazing playing with him because you have to be ready at any time on the floor,” No. 1 overall pick Risacher said. “He’ll take care of the ball, so I just got to make sure I take care of making buckets.”
Jalen Johnson is averaging 19.1 points, 10.0 rebounds and 4.9 assists per game this season. (Dale Zanine / Imagn Images)
This causes teams to help off a shooter one pass away, but those open shooters are looking to cut behind the defense anyway and trusting Young will find them. It’s a Snyder-esque solution to playing a lineup of below-average shooters. This has taken the Hawks from the third-most midrange attempts in the NBA when Snyder arrived in 2023 to the fewest this season, per NBA Stats.
According to Synergy Sports, the Hawks’ 9.9 shots per game from cuts tops the league, which is a significant jump after ranking 13th in 2023-24. Entering this season, the last team — excluding the Golden State Warriors — to average at least 9.0 per game was the 2015-16 Milwaukee Bucks.
It’s a lot more read-and-react movement than Atlanta has shown in the past, but that means the Hawks are counting on several young players to adapt at game speed.
“Every team likes to say they play faster, but that’s one of the things that we’re trying to do,” Young said. “Play faster and have our wings run. (Snyder’s) doing a great job of putting everybody in their spots and giving me more options to go to throughout the game.”
Johnson doesn’t turn 23 until Dec. 18 and already is becoming a franchise cornerstone. He was rewarded with a five-year, $150 million extension in October and his emergence last season gave Atlanta the flexibility to trade Murray without worrying about getting another starting veteran in return.
“I think Jalen is a player that we want to build with and seeing him continue to blossom will factor into how we make moves and what we do,” Fields said. “He wants to be a great teammate and he does have a lot of leadership qualities within him that he’s just starting to scratch the surface on. But even he would say he still has a long way to go.”
Fields’ first big move as GM was to deal multiple first-round picks to San Antonio for Murray, but the pairing with Young never jelled as the Hawks exhibited contrasting play styles depending on who was on the court. Fields dealt Murray to the New Orleans Pelicans to recoup some draft capital while adding Daniels and Nance.
“I think we saw a number of different objectives that we had and have to face going forward and some hard decisions had to be made,” Fields said. “I think (Murray is) a fantastic player. I was happy with the guys we got back. There are a few things that we needed to shore up in order to make the long-term goal something that’s attainable and that was what we had to do.”
The Hawks are in a transitional period, stacked with rotation-caliber talent young and old across the board. The challenge in evaluating the roster is that it’s rarely healthy.
The team has been without veterans Bogdanović and DeAndre Hunter for most of the season, while last year’s 15th overall pick Kobe Bufkin — who played just 17 games as a rookie due to various injuries — has been out after re-aggravating a shoulder injury in the preseason. The brief flashes of growth they’ve shown in the past fall apart when players appear on the injury report.
“There was a lot of injury last year, but we’re not sitting here crying about that,” Fields said. “Where do we ultimately want to go and how? That identity of staying connected and what are we doing with the ball in our hands, the ball not in our hands and a level of competitiveness and effort, those are really important for us.”
Added Capela: “It’s one thing to say it. But it’s one thing to do it.”
The team mantra is “daily bread,” which is the work you’re expected to do without being asked.
It’s too early to tell if their new diet is working, but most of the East hasn’t fared much better. The conference is a hodgepodge of teams floating around .500. Most teams — particularly the Hawks — are missing defensive switches, getting lost in their help and dealing with new injuries.
But Atlanta’s front office has been clear that it has time to be patient, especially while Snyder experiments with his rotations due to injuries.
“I think you have to let those things breathe, particularly when you know there is a buy-in and commitment,” Snyder said.
Once again, the challenge is building that identity when many of the team’s reliable veterans are in and out of the lineup.
“The only thing you can do is whittle away at all the foreseeable obstacles,” Nance said. “Injuries, you can never plan for them. They’re just a part of the game. Made shots, missed shots, all part of the game. But defensively, this team has to get better.”
The early returns on defense show promise at least for the current starting lineup. Through Saturday’s games, Young, Daniels, Risacher, Johnson and Capela on the floor together rank eighth in defensive rating among the 29 lineups across the league with at least 100 possessions, per Cleaning the Glass. But with Hunter and Bogdanović out, the defensive rating often balloons when Daniels and Johnson hit the bench.
Snyder and Fields both say they envision a long runway for the Hawks’ development. This season they want to build an identity more so than making a deep playoff run. And the players agree. This season isn’t so much about mastering a scheme as it is a mindset.
“We have the same coach, but a lot of new guys and we didn’t have a winning culture,” Bogdanović said. “So we are trying to build something that is winning.”
It starts with Young. His competitive fire on offense has never been in doubt, but part of his reconfigured role is to bring consistent intensity to the other end. There’s been some progress, but this team has a long runway for a reason.
“To watch how he and Quin and the rest of the team are starting to vibe and incorporate some of the things that coach has been talking about, it’s been cool to see. But it’s small,” Fields said. “This has been good progress, but it’s not ultimately where we want to go.”
(Photo of Trae Young and Luke Kornet: Matt Stone / Boston Herald via Getty Images)
