NEW YORK — The NBA Cup courts, gaudy as they are, create a spotlight.
In the middle of the New York Knicks’ radioactive orange court was a circle that, in the winding moments of Wednesday’s game, became Trae Young’s center stage.
The show was over, but he couldn’t just take a bow like the last time. This isn’t the same Trae Young anymore.
Three days earlier, Young and his brother came up with the perfect celebration for if he found himself dribbling out the clock in the Madison Square Garden spotlight again. When the Atlanta Hawks beat the New York Knicks 108-100 to advance to the NBA Cup Las Vegas showdown, Young got down on one knee and threw some invisible dice.
“I rolled an eight, and I picked it up and I rolled it again,” Young said. “So I picked up the money after that and we left.”
The league has been trying to make sense of Young’s season up until the past two weeks. His scoring numbers were way down across the board, the lowest they’ve been since his rookie year. But watching him for 48 minutes, there is a palpable patience to his game management. He doesn’t spam 3s the way he used to, and he more gracefully waltzes his way through the defense.
The Hawks have been unstoppable since they got healthy and in a rhythm. They were tied for 10th in the East two weeks ago. Now they’re tied for fifth.
The real celebration came a few minutes earlier when Young waltzed through the Knicks’ porous pick-and-roll coverage to loft an alley-oop to a completely abandoned De’Andre Hunter. As his teammate threw it down, Young skipped down the court, giddy to dismantle a rival so effortlessly.
There wasn’t an Ice Trae celebration or any 30-foot daggers in crunch time.
Young was passive in the biggest moment, just as coach Quin Snyder wants him to be. This is what the Hawks have been building toward over the past month.
“I think this is an exciting time for Trae in the arc of his career,” Snyder said in November. “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.”
The adaptation was put into play with a new roster, in which Jalen Johnson and Dyson Daniels can be the secondary playmakers when the defense goes all out to get Young off the ball.
“Playing with Dyson and his ability to play behind the defense, I haven’t had a guy that is so unique in a way,” Young said. “I know I can throw it to him if they trap me and he can make the right pass or the right floater.”
Wednesday’s game embodied the Hawks’ identity midway through the fourth quarter when something glitched in the NBA code and the longtime NBA Cup loyalists witnessed a run of play that was as sloppy as it was spectacular. Atlanta’s offensive system is a collection of concentric circles that revolve around Young’s gravity, but there is also a raw side that mimics the Knicks in a way.
They can dominate the offensive glass to complement their full-bore offensive flow. They will loop around one another at full speed and get off a look with a shot quality rating of “meh” and then somehow clean things up.
Even the clean-up needs a clean-up. Everybody has to do their chores to make the Hawks work.
But when crunch time arrives, the Hawks can bring Johnson and Daniels in the mix to run small-small pick-and-rolls with Young. Teams such as the Knicks will show two players on Young, and that’s when he threads the pass to his rolling teammate.
The Hawks have done some of this in the past with their bigs, and last year Johnson showed he had the potential to thrive in this role. What makes them so dangerous now is that Johnson and Daniels can catch on the short roll and slow things down, giving them time to manipulate the help defense until someone is open.
“We’re catching in the pocket and playing four-on-three and making the right decision,” Daniels told The Athletic. “For me, it’s about me and the big playing one-on-two. If he steps up, then I have the lob. If the guy pulls in from the corner, then I have the kick-out. I’ve been in that position a lot of times this year, so I’m starting to get used to it.”
Johnson shows good patience to draw a crowd and then find the outlet on his roll, but watch how Daniels uses his eyes on the second play to send Knicks defender Josh Hart the wrong way on the weak side. The Hawks were getting the most absurdly open looks by twisting up New York’s underneath help defense.
It’s really tricky for most defenses to handle these short roll attacks when they blitz Young because they have to pressure him so high up the court. Once you blitz your defenders, those guys are just out of the play, and Atlanta’s new playmakers work too fast for them to recover.
Good thing the Hawks didn’t give up on Hunter yet. With the wing infusion they’ve experienced the past few years, they could have easily pushed to clear out the vets. But his work on the weak side Wednesday showed he is one of the most effective floor spacers coming off the bench in the league.
His ability to nail quick catch-and-shoots in the corners or read when to attack open space off the ball means the Hawks’ offensive spacing is a strength in crunch time. Once defenses blitz the ball out of Young’s hands, Hunter becomes the end node to the short roll chain.
The Hawks have enough defensive energy, even when they bring the bench units in, to change the tone of a game to their liking. They spent the third quarter snuffing out the Jalen Brunson pick-and-roll thanks to Daniels’ seemingly infinite deflection collection. That allowed their transition offense to get going and flip the lead in their favor.
What makes Atlanta look like a team on the rise is the balance the Hawks have across the board. Though Young is still the epicenter of the offense and the cog they try to hide on defense, the pieces are fitting in around him and carrying the burden effectively.
Young always reveled in hitting the big shots and closing the door on the opponent himself. It was him versus the Knicks crowd that chanted eff him throughout the night. This time, he responded by putting his teammates in a position to shut them up.
“When (the defense) gets more aggressive, the key is Trae trusting those guys,” Snyder said. “That’s a big part of the way that we play.”
The question around Young was always whether he could carry a team. The Hawks are responding that it’s a fallacy, that carrying is the opposite of what he needs to do. His opportunities to strike come in the flow of the game, but the best teams in the league thrive when their best player is setting up everyone else.
When the Hawks relied on Young to do it all on offense, it was a roll of the dice. That’s what happens when you’re throwing up 30-footers. The Hawks aren’t relying on that anymore, and the results are showing. It’s still too early in their development to think they’re ready to make a playoff run again, but the picture is coming into focus for them faster than expected.
(Photo of Trae Young driving to the basket against Karl-Anthony Towns and Mikal Bridges as Clint Capela sets a pick: Brad Penner / Imagn Images)
