Trae Young therapy and finding hope in hating the Hawks
The most painful loss of the 2020-21 season seems to have laid the blueprint for the Knicks going forward. Could the Knicks be taking on the Hawks’ strategy for team building… but better?
How do you, fellow emotionally-stable New York Knicks fan, feel about the Atlanta Hawks?
Yes. Those annoyingly competent Hawks. Led by that bedraggled papier-mache feather of a point guard. Last seen in that beautifully doomed five-game blink of a postseason.
I’m guessing not great, feelings-wise, about that lot. Is hate too strong a word? Probably not. Hate gets a bad wrap these days. We should lean into harmless authentic hate, to the intense dislike of intensely unlikable things, when the feeling moves us. Things like Brussels sprouts, or paper cuts, or — oh, I don’t know — Trae Young.
Pick a gripe, any gripe: his gnat-like vibe, all slippery discombobulation, an infuriating 180-pound-bar of scuttling human soap; the way his wraith-wispy locks creepily emulate his flailing playing style; or the boot-to-gut way he masterfully captained the gentleman’s whooping his smug-squawking Atlantans gave our beloved ‘Bockers back in the spring.
Like I said: intensely unlikeable things.
But, fear not. Heartfelt hate and playoff pain aside, there is hope to be found, for Knicks fans, in the soaring success of those pesky Hawks. Truth be told, they unapologetically romped their way to a surprise Eastern Conference Finals appearance last season, and were a brutally bizarre Trae misstep away from probably-not-but-just-maybe-possibly going one fairytale step further — and playing for all the shiny marbles, in the NBA freaking Finals.
How did they do it?
Well, allow me to re-introduce — via some familiar player archetypes — the Hawks we love to hate.
Trae Young: elite pick-and-roll point guard and defensive piñata.
Bogdan Bogdanovic: versatile veteran scoring wing.
De’Andre Hunter: promising young two-way wing.
John Collins: uber-athletic shot making power forward.
Clint Capela: rim-protecting, non-shooting, elite rebounding defensive big.
Kevin Huerter: sweet shooting scorer off the bench.
Lou Williams: certified bench bucket.
Danilo Gallinari: floor-spacing 4 off the bench.
Onyeka Okongwu: schematically versatile defensive big off the bench.
Now, wipe away the tears, maybe dial back the high-pitched profanities, apologize to your innocent and within earshot loved ones, try to take a deep breath; and think happy new-Knicks-roster thoughts.
Kemba Walker: elite pick-and-roll point guard and defensive piñata.
Evan Fournier: versatile veteran scoring wing.
RJ Barrett: more promising young two-way wing.
Julius Randle: far superior uber-athletic shotmaking power forward.
Mitchell Robinson: rim-protecting, non-shooting, elite rebounding defensive big.
Alec Quickley: sweet-shooting scorer off the bench.
Derrick Rose: certified bench bucket.
Obi Toppin: floor-spacing 4 off the bench.
Nerlens Gibson: schematically versatile defensive big off the bench.
They’re the same picture!
OK. They’re not. Obi isn’t Gallo in the same way that Collins isn’t Randle in the same way that Kemba’s knees aren’t Trae’s knees.
But, the point is, they’re very similar archetypal pictures. To magpie the blueprint that beat you would be a typically unemotional and predictably practical Tom Thibodeau move, but it was probably more subconscious fluke than deliberate ploy: Thibs doesn’t want to be the Hawks, he just wants to win. It just so happened that winning, this offseason, looked like acquiring an elite pick-and-roll point guard and an offensively proven shooting guard. Resulting in an upgraded Kemba-Evan duo, who at a squint look suspiciously similar, stylistically, to the Trae-Bogie twosome. You know, the one-two punch that pretty comprehensively and very publicly pantsed the Knicks’ feel-good playoff return.
Far from being some poetic homage to the Hawks’ collection of well-rounded players with complementary skillsets, the Knicks front office likely and simply just wanted a point guard not named Elfrid Payton and a two guard it wasn’t so easy to hide a defensive turnstile like Trae on. Not a particularly complicated trail of motivational breadcrumbs here. A blind goldfish could have devised an offseason masterplan based on the no-shit realization that having players who cannot shoot a lick or cannot dribble a jot is a little limiting, it turns out, come playoff time.
So, the archetypical similarities aren’t surprising, but their significance is debatable, depending on how you feel about the extent of their differences. We can talk about the imperfect equivalences of Mitch-Clint, Evan-Bogdan, or RJ-De’Andre until the cows come home, and there are obvious differences in the cost of both teams — with the Hawks set to be around $18 million dollars more expensive than the Knicks next season — even before Trae’s max extension kicks in in the summer of 2022. But where the on-court analogy maybe falls apart most is the difference between the differences between Trae-Kemba and Randle-Collins.
As it so often does, it boils down to a bottom line discussion of the respective brilliance of the two teams’ two best players: Trae Young and Julius Randle.
Common NBA consensus has Trae a tier or two above Julius, which is hard to argue with given Young’s playoff heroics and Randle’s struggles: but it is at least interesting to consider the context of those heroics and those struggles, contexts that from a roster construction perspective were polar opposites. The rest of the Hawks were a near perfect complement to Trae’s strengths and weaknesses: a capable and willing offensive orchestra for Trae to conduct, with the defensive size and switchability to hide him on the other end. In comparison, the Knicks started one player that couldn’t shoot, one that couldn’t dribble, and one that couldn’t catch.
“Here, Julius, take this bag of offensive turnips. Now go and make us some offensive lemonade.”
(He also, you know, played like a forearm-sized turd. But shhhh. Ignore the stink. Best to focus on the regular season roses.)
This cuddly contextual caveat aside, ultimately and regrettably, until proven otherwise, the difference that matters in rendering the cute new roster similarities a little less cute, is the fact that Trae Young — despite being a follicly-challenged stale fart of an opponent — is a capital-M-Menace of a basketball player. For all the theatrical villainy Trae performed with against the Knicks, his playoff run as a whole was powered by a scarily obvious superstar voltage: no-one in the Hawks Cinderalla spring had a good answer for the pocket-sized offensive bazooka that is Rayford Trae Young.
The man averaged 29 points and 10 assists on 44% shooting against Reggie Bullock and the Knicks. He averaged 29 points and 11 assists on 39% shooting against Ben Simmons and the Philadelphia 76ers. Then he averaged 28 points and seven assists on 43% shooting against Jrue Holiday and the Milwaukee Bucks.
Trae stepped up and indiscriminately scorched everyone, including two of the best point of attack defenders on the planet, on the biggest stage in basketball. He deserves his flowers for doing this. But it’s difficult to totally disentangle his emphatic success in the 2021 postseason from some less favourable counterfactuals: perhaps, defensively, if he faced a team without a standstill shooter — Bullock, Furkan Korkmaz, PJ Tucker — to hide on; or, offensively, if his teams collective shooting took more of a hit than the loss of Hunter, who didn’t play beyond the first round, and whose minutes after the Knicks series were swallowed up by more Huerter, more Williams, and more Collins: resulting in more shooting for Trae to play with. His spectacular play isn’t diminished by the fact that he was enabled by his context, but nor is the fact that he was enabled by his context diminished by his spectacular play.
This is where Knicks fans can take hope and solace from Trae and the Hawks success, because this is the contextual failure of last season’s roster that Leon Rose and his front office emphatically fixed this offseason, by putting together a complimentary collection of players that amplify each others’ good and muffle each others’ bad.
So, again: how do you, fellow emotionally stable New York Knicks fan, feel about the Atlanta Hawks?
Oh. OK. I see. You’d still rather gargle molten lava for eternity than lose to them again.
Well, yeh, that’s a fair point. Me too.
In a perfect world, come Christmas Day’s rematch: the contextual weights on the superstar scales that a few months ago favored the Balding Offensive Bazooka over our beloved Forearm Sized Turd will be a little more balanced. Trae will be desperately and in vain searching Madison Square Garden for the comforting festive perch of his favorite defensive armchair, one Reginald Bullock. But instead of this cushy pillow of a matchup, he’ll have to contend with a 48-minute revolving two-way door of Evan Fournier and Deuce McBride. That this time, instead of bowing at center court, mocking the Garden like a pantomime tumble-weed in sneakers, he’s straight up begging the Manhattan masses for mercy.
That sounds like a nice, emotionally-stable revenge fantasy to finish on, doesn’t it?
Excellent. So in summary: Yes, we hate the Hawks — but remember, kids, if you’re going to hate them, hate them and smile, a safe hate, an insulated hate. A hate armed with the the appropriate veneer of optimism for what the structure of past Hawk success might mean for the ceiling of a familiarly-remodeled Knicks future.
