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Atlanta Hawks star Trae Young resigned to Luka Doncic comparisons

By Christopher Jeter

Atlanta Hawks Luka Doncic Trae Young. (Photo by Austin McAfee/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Atlanta Hawks Luka Doncic Trae Young. (Photo by Austin McAfee/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images) /
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Whether Trae Young likes it or not, fans will always judge the Atlanta Hawks point guard against the man he was traded for in 2018, Luka Doncic.

There may not be two players who will spend their careers more closely linked than Atlanta Hawks star Trae Young and Dallas Mavericks phenom Luka Doncic since the old days of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird.

The latest batch of NBA All-Star Game voting results were released on Jan. 16 and the early returns have produced the predicable mix of:

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Among that latter category, two players have risen to the top of the rankings, specifically first place in voting for Eastern and Western conference guards: Doncic and Young. It’s fitting that these two are the leading backcourt vote-getters in their respective conferences.

After all, Doncic and Young share plenty of other commonalities: they’re both in their second NBA season, they’re putting up tantalizing per-game statistics for their disparate clubs — the Atlanta Hawks and the Dallas Mavericks — and they’re both responsible for a significant percentage of this season’s highlight-reel plays.

Oh, and they were traded for one another during the 2018 NBA Draft.

That June 2018 swap forged an eternal CatDog-like link between the respective careers of Doncic and Young, as it opened the floodgates for any columnist or television/radio gasbag to disgorge the usual “who won the trade” and “which player would be better” takes, with the Hawks and Young garnering the short end of those prognostications.

Even Young himself realizes that the comparisons to the 2018-19 Rookie of the Year will probably never go away. Here’s what he told ESPN’s Royce Young on Dec. 4:

"Trae Young worries there might be only one thing that could put a stop to the seemingly endless Luka Doncic comparisons.“Retirement,” Young says with a laugh. “I think that’s what it’s gonna take.”The two electric guards have been tied to each other since the Atlanta Hawks and Dallas Mavericks pulled off a trade on draft night in 2018, when Atlanta sent the No. 3 overall pick to Dallas in exchange for the No. 5 pick and a future first-rounder (that pick would become Cam Reddish).“We’re going to be compared throughout our whole careers,” Young says on Doncic. “That’s fine, that’s what it’s going to be — it happened on draft night, and I don’t think it’ll stop until we’re both retired.”"

To be fair, you can’t blame people — specifically Hawks fans — for gazing at Doncic’s stepback 3s and lobs to Kristaps Porzingis and Dwight Powell like those memes of Squidward looking out the window at Spongebob and Patrick, knowing that the Slovenian basketball savant could’ve been doing all of those things in a Hawks uniform.

But general manager Travis Schlenk opted to go with what was thought of at the time as a Great Value Stephen Curry as the key piece to his dime-store Golden State Warriors ensemble.

And those sentiments have probably only intensified now that Doncic is the engine of a Dallas offense that is outpacing the league by 7.7 points per 100 possessions, per Basketball-Reference, and is a big reason why the Mavs are fifth in the West with a 27-16 record.

Meanwhile, the Hawks have achieved their goal of resembling the Warriors. Unfortunately, they look like this year’s Curry-less, Klay Thompson-less version of the Warriors as two of the three teams on target to have the best odds to secure the No. 1 overall pick in the 2020 draft.

But Atlanta’s place in the standings isn’t primarily because of Young’s failings, but rather the failings of everyone else on the roster; it isn’t his fault that the Hawks are the most abysmal offensive and 3-point shooting team in the association.

He didn’t trade for Evan Turner — who is living up to his RAPTOR-projected “scrub” status — nor did he sign ball stopping wing Jabari Parker or draft Cam Reddish and De’Andre Hunter, who both have the aim of a Stormtrooper from behind the arc.

At some point, it doesn’t matter how many Rhodes Scholar-level passes you make if the open shots they lead to don’t find the bottom of the net. For every read-and-dime that looks like these:

You get three or four possessions that end like this:

Consequently, you get a bad Hawks team that craters even further when Young is off the floor: Atlanta’s offensive rating nosedives from 108.4 to 91.5 when he’s on the bench. With Young, they’re a respectable offensive team; without him, they’re easily the worst. LeBron would struggle to win with this collection of bricklayers, let alone Doncic or Young.

Yes, Young still has some worrisome warts that may never go away. He’s still one of the worst defenders in the league — his lack of speed makes him easy to beat off the dribble and his slight build makes it easy for big men to eclipse him on screens — and that glaring weakness dulls his overall value.

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Atlanta has a minus-6.5 net rating with Young in the lineup, though it’s still better than their minus-13.2 average without him), especially in comparison to Doncic, who has improved on that end of the court.

But we’ve seen far too many clips of Young drilling deep pull-up 3s, fooling defenders with his yo-yo-like dribbling ability and punishing scrambling defenses with timely passes to act as though the Hawks made a huge mistake in taking Young over Doncic, even as Doncic continues to play at an MVP level.

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Of course, this won’t cease the comparisons. But hopefully, as illustrated in the All-Star voting, the conversations surrounding these two will center around how good these two will be for the next decade or so.

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