What Would a Championship Version of Trae Young Look Like?
As trade talks swirl, let's look at why Young’s offense-first profile has proven so hard to build around — and what would need to change for him to play a meaningful role on a title team.
Trae Young and the Atlanta Hawks are headed for a breakup, it seems. Per ESPN’s Shams Charania on Monday, the Hawks and the four-time All-Star are actively collaborating on a trade to end his eight-year tenure with the club.
Perhaps that’s not too surprising: the writing was probably on the wall after Atlanta bypassed a contract extension for the 27-year-old last summer. Despite Young having 2 years and nearly $95 million left on his deal,1 the particulars of the Hawks’ current situation — with coin-flip playoff odds but one of the league’s more intriguing young cores, which seems to be doing just fine without him — has accelerated their desire to move on.
More interesting might be whether a player like Young is capable of leading a true contender, or what changes he would need to make to his game in order to facilitate that. Because, really, that question is the one that now sits at the center of every hypothetical trade discussion involving him.
As I wrote in Tuesday’s edition of Scoreboard, my daily newsletter for Sherwood News (which you should all sign up for, if you haven’t already):
When Young first joined the Hawks in 2018 — through a draft-day trade with Dallas for Luka Dončić (who was himself abruptly traded last season after years of being the face of that franchise, ironically enough) — his audacious deep-shooting and scoring swagger made him feel like Atlanta’s own Steph Curry, a jolt of stardom for a franchise long starved of that. But the shine has been coming off of Young’s star for a while now, as Atlanta’s progress toward a championship with him as their best player stalled: after a trip to the Eastern Conference finals in 2021, the Hawks lost in Round 1 of the playoffs in 2022 and 2023, and they were eliminated via the play-in tournament in both 2024 and 2025.
Fellow Substacker Above the Break does a great job here of detailing all of the reasons why that happened — from Young’s contract and injury issues to his notorious defensive shortcomings and increasingly mediocre offensive efficiency. It may well be that a player like Young, who limits a team’s flexibility so much both in terms of his playing style and salary-cap hit, can’t be the best player on a title team in today’s NBA, despite how electric he was early on when he came out of Oklahoma.
(And in fact, the most likely team to acquire Young being Washington is not exactly an indicator that he’ll be vying for a title anytime soon.)
Still, I wanted to see if all hope of playing winning hoops with Young is lost or not, and whether we have any case studies for Trae-like players who did evolve into something more workable for winning teams. So first, let’s establish just what kind of player Young is — and has been in the past. Here are his percentile rankings relative to the league2 across 15 different categories that correspond to particular key metrics:
