While unpacking his bags in his hotel room at 1 a.m., Trae Young hears his phone buzzing. It’s rarely good news when you get a call in the middle of the night while on the road.
Are the kids OK? Did I leave my wallet on the team plane? Should I have rejected that Spain pick-and-roll when the defense started switching in the fourth quarter?
Well, it’s Quin Snyder calling, so probably the last one.
Most people don’t want a call from their boss after work at this hour, but Young embraces it. He spent the summer reimagining the Atlanta Hawks offense with his head coach, finally shaping the team in a mold that fit both of their ideals.
Young has more responsibility to ensure the Hawks run smoothly than ever before, so he often finds himself in his room late at night, running through everything that went right and wrong that evening.
Oftentimes, he’s not alone. That’s when the texts start coming in from Snyder. Before they know it, they’ve been on the phone for 30 minutes, itching to get back to work the next day.
“That’s the type of relationship we have. It’s not forced, it’s just genuine,” Young told The Athletic. “We both want to see each other succeed and we know we need each other and everybody else around us.”
After nearly two years, this partnership is building something to believe in on the court. It’s still a work very much in progress, but the Hawks (22-21) finally have a coherent and consistent identity.
“I don’t think we had one (in the past) at all, actually,” DeAndre Hunter said. “That was our issue. We’d play one way one game and then another game, play a different way.”
The front office gave Snyder the tools to fix that problem, but he couldn’t do it alone. He spent the summer pitching to Young how they could assemble the offenses Snyder built his reputation on before he arrived in Atlanta.
Before the season, Snyder detailed to The Athletic how the Hawks were going to take the ball out of Young’s hands early and often to get him involved with the offense in a more efficient way. Snyder called it an exciting time in the arc of Young’s career because this was the moment he was being forced to adapt and, therefore, evolve.
“He put it out in front of me and showed me how we can do it, and I can still get the same amount of touches because it helps our offense,” Young said. “But it’s maybe getting off the ball early and getting a pick-and-roll later in the shot clock that can help too. The ball’s in my hands, but I’m getting it in different ways.”
Dejounte Murray was replaced this summer by Dyson Daniels, reshifting the offensive dynamic back toward solely orbiting around Young. With Jalen Johnson’s emergence as a playmaker, Snyder wanted to create a reliable chain of distribution and get away from the duopoly he inherited that never quite worked for anyone involved.
The Hawks hoped it might work and maybe they could fight for a Play-In Tournament spot even after losing their second-best scorer. But now they are in the hunt for home-court advantage, as Young has taken a step back so the Hawks can take a step forward.
“We’ve been intentional about that. It’s not just kind of a dream,” Snyder said. “He can’t do this by himself and he knows that. No player can frankly. So figuring out the ways he can be efficient has been the idea, and he’s been the one looking at that and thinking about it and making those plays.”
Larry Nance Jr., who has played with Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Damian Lillard and Zion Williamson over his 10-year career, has witnessed just about every approach to leadership in the book. The secret sauce is in how and when you impose your will on the game.
He noticed in the past that the player he called “Old Trae” would go through phases of ill-advised shots, putting the game up to chance with pull-up 30-footers as his teammates watched him wind down the shot clock. The pleasant surprise for Nance is that Young has bought into impacting winning through positive decision-making rather than filling up the box score.
“You can see he’s approaching the game with a different mentality,” Nance said. “He’s trying to include and get the most out of his teammates, which has been fun to see. He’s making conscious efforts to get the ball shared around. Not just to get the assist, but just to encourage ball movement. He’s getting off it sooner and we’re benefitting from it.”
Young is averaging 23.1 points per game and shooting 40.2 percent from the field — the worst of his career — while averaging 11.6 assists per game, the highest of his career.
Heading into last week, Young was on track to be the first player to average 12 assists per game since John Stockton of the Utah Jazz achieved it 30 years ago. Young has fallen just below that mark over his past four games but has averaged 29.8 points a night to make up for it. And while his assists are down in recent games, he is still staying away from clearouts and taking the obvious shots he used to.
His isolation possessions have shrunk from 16.3 percent of his offense in 2021-22 to 9.0 percent this season, per Synergy Sports. He’s run over 1,000 pick-and-rolls, averaging 25.9 per game. At 20.2, Damian Lillard is the only player to even reach the 20s. And yet, Young is taking the fewest shots since his rookie season.
“I’ve been top five in assists since I’ve been in the league. But I’ve been able to score so easily and so well over the years that sometimes when I score a lot of points, people consider that selfish at times,” Young said. “For me, I’m not even focusing and worrying about what people gotta say.
“I know what I do. This ain’t my first year passing the ball and getting everybody involved, but it’s more known now because we’ve got a lot of young guys that are doing well right now.”
There’s an irony to Young’s scoring output dipping this season. The Murray trade made it clear that it was his franchise and all things offense could run through him.
That worked in the past to a degree, but it was apparent their 2021 Eastern Conference finals run was a flash in the pan. Though they were competitive in the first round in 2023 when Young put the team on his back, he knew it was not enough. Falling out of the playoffs last year and then finding out there was no trade market for him finally pushed him to embrace that he could gain the right kind of control over the game by letting go of the ball.
“I think the patience just comes from now I know how to play in the NBA game,” Young said. “At every level, there’s a different type of game. Now being in my seventh year, I understand how the game is and how you can control it from the beginning to end and how you need to to win.”
He was past the point of needing to do it all. Young reached that epiphany stage most young stars go through when the hot start to their career eventually cools off. Inevitably, everyone has to accept they are better off buying into something bigger than them.
“For a guy who has made multiple All-Star games playing the way he has to accept that we weren’t winning that way, (he’s trying) to adopt something new and trust this coaching staff,” Nance said. “Like, we know he’s our franchise guy. That’s the face. He’s a stud, he’s a beast. You’re never going to put something in that isn’t going to have his best interests in mind.”
The approach has led to some of the most gaudy numbers of Young’s career. He’s had three 20-assist games and a 19-assist night this season. His only other 20-assist game before that was when Philadelphia rested its starters against Atlanta in one of the last games of the 2022-23 season.
Young is doing this on one of the worst shooting teams in the league, averaging 21.0 potential assists entering Thursday. His lead over second-place Nikola Jokić is the largest in NBA Stats’ 12 years of tracking data.
“If you’re really good at something, you do it,” Snyder said. “The thing for him though is the ability to be good at a lot of things. His understanding of that allows him to trust a possession, that the ball needs to come back to him.”
Young no longer walks the ball up the floor; he kicks it ahead to any open player. Then, Young or Johnson, whoever is closest, will go to the ball, and they will improvise off of each other.
This has cut out a lot of the stagnant fluff from Atlanta’s offense and keeps everyone engaged.
“Our big-small pick-and-roll that me and him run, that’s been effective for us,” Johnson said. “I just try to be the connector when he gets off it quick. ’Cause at the end of the day, we want to keep the ball moving.”
Young passes it to Johnson 13.9 times per game, the most frequent connection with a teammate in Young’s career, per NBA Stats. Also, Johnson passes it to him 26.5 times per game, which is by far the most in Young’s career.
There are usually a couple of segments during the game when they don’t need to pass it to each other to create an easy bucket. Most teams are running inverted ghost screens now, where a big wing handles the ball and a guard sprints by his defender to cause brief confusion.
Since Young is not exactly a solid screener, he typically runs a ghost screen as he sprints behind Johnson’s defender, which allows Johnson an opening to attack. Because Murray and Young are both good pull-up scorers in isolation, a lot of target pick-and-rolls — where they hunt a mismatch — slowed the offense. Johnson needs to get downhill to be effective, so he is looking for a screen to just open his defender’s hips a few microns and then fire up the afterburners.
Young typically pulls his defender past the 3-point line to give Johnson room to play 4-on-4. At Johnson’s height, he just needs a little extra space to pass over the top of the defense, and Young removing a defender from the play makes it work.
Johnson broke out last season by becoming one of the league’s best playmakers out of the short roll. Young would draw a double off of his screens and then thread it to Johnson in the midrange so the big man could attack the paint with a numbers advantage. It’s gone a step further, as Young just gives the ball to Johnson and lets him run the same action while pulling his defender out of the play.
“He just allows me to be me,” Johnson said. “Trae creates so much attention and draws so much attention, so he allows me to just go out there and be myself.”
Now that the Hawks can put together lineups full of tall, athletic playmakers, it’s much easier for Johnson to run the offense while Young’s gravity pulls the help defenders out of the way. The next step for Young is to remain actively engaged once he steps out of the action, becoming an emergency passing outlet when the play goes nowhere. It happens at times, but not enough.
And that’s the catch with Atlanta. They are still inconsistent, alternating winning and losing streaks that keep the Hawks from jumping to the top half of the East. A big part of it is that they are one of the worst shooting teams above the break with Young shooting just 34.4 percent from there. Consequently, they rank 27th in 3-point shooting allowed, so the math game just crushes them in most games.
But Snyder is still encouraging his players to shoot with a simple acronym.
“LTFF: Let that f—er fly,” Nance said. “We put in so much work with our shots that we deserve the right to shoot it. For me, that has done a number on my offensive mentality, and the numbers back that up.”
The veteran big was shooting 52 percent from beyond the arc this season before fracturing his right hand. De’Andre Hunter moved into the sixth-man role and is shooting a career-high 42.5 percent, having the best season of his career. But their other core rotation players are all shooting well below the league average, and it’s just hard to win consistently that way.
It’s a reminder that while the Hawks are ahead of schedule in their rebuild, they can’t skip steps on the path back toward contention. Of course, Young always believed this would work once Snyder laid it all out for him.
“Just because everyone else had (low) expectations doesn’t mean I had those or we had those as a team,” Young said. “So I feel like we’re on track with what we set our goals out to be and I think we’re doing well right now. We’re not overachieving in our eyes.”
Young bought into the program but is extension-eligible this summer and will want a max deal as he enters his prime. It’s hard to imagine their offensive system working without an elite point guard like Young, but there are few times in the past 40 years that a team won a title with its best player being a defensive liability.
The Hawks have a crowded roster and will likely make more moves. Whether they want to find more minutes to develop their recent draft picks or go all in on a playoff run, the first half of this season proves there is a path forward with Young at the helm.
“You just have a lot of guys that’s embraced their role and that’s something I’m proud of,” Young said. “I’m doing it the same way, too.”
(Photo: Alex Goodlett / Getty Images)
