1. Passing Nearly a year ago, I made a thread asking whether Trae Young is the best passer of his draft class. While Doncic is an absolutely incredible passer and is better than Young in punishing help defenders cheating on perimeter shooters, I still think that Young will be the more productive playmaker based almost entirely on creating quality shots at the rim. Indeed, Young was transcendent at assisting his teammates at the rim in college but this aspect of his game has somewhat been blunted (although John Collins does profit from his largesse) because of the lack of spacing and a putrid center rotation. With the addition of proven shooters this offseason, spacing has been improved by leap and bounds while Capela, a fine rim-running big, is finally back on the hardwood after nearly a year out. All this seems to indicate that Young will now rack up assists in the paint like nobody's business. 2. Spot-up shooting I strongly believe that, although Young is an excellent on-ball scorer, he should spend half the time off the ball. The stats speak for themselves: He shoots 52% on spot-up threes and nearly 70% on corner threes. Up to now, due to a lack of another credible ballhandler, Young was forced to handle the ball far too much and was not able to feast on easy catch-and-shoot opportunities. Enter Bogdan Bogdanovich, an excellent secondary ball-handler during his time in Europe and at the Kings who can finally create good looks for Young off the ball. 3. Foul-shooting When he first came to the NBA, Young was regularly getting his shot swiped from behind in the lane or from the side off screens: he was and remains an undersized point guard. In true Trae Young fashion, ye has been able to turn a glaring disadvantage into an opportunity to bait his defenders into cheap fouls. He has mastered the ability to stop on a dime and his forays into the pain has a herky jerky style (similar to Doncic) where he is constantly monitoring defenders before and behind him. He often get his defender in jail whereby any attempt to contest a shot from behind or from the side will result in a shooting foul due to his defender inadvertently jumping into him when trying to contest Now, one may well ask: if Young is so adept at drawing fouls in such situations, why do defenders still gets baited into giving it away over and over again? The answer is two-fold: (1) Young is an excellent off the dribble shooter and has a lethal floater that he can pull off from the top of the key. This causes defenders to stay tight to him offscreens and into the lane. Still a minimum of defensive discipline will prevent the defender from giving away the foul most of the time as Young is not creating but inviting contact, so what gives? (2) Young uses the defenders' instinct against themselves. Being undersized, his defenders' instinct will often compel them to contest when they really shouldn't. Until they stop running behind him off screens or into the lane and instead properly rotate to cut his driving lanes, they will continue to give away cheap fouls. Defense Young will continue to be one of the worse (if not the worst) man-to-man defenders in the league as I don't think he has the tools to really improve on this end. His team defense should improve by leaps as he is now playing with quality defensively-minded vets instead of rookies and his scoring load should be considerable lessened.
Trae Young likes to play Harden ball, just like Luka. Thats the style you are gonna see more and young players playing when more analytical guys keep getting front office jobs. super high usage for your best young talents. And incorperating the stepback into your arsenal. Trae is averaging a staggering 15.2 FTA's per game. Luka is up there as well. The numbers and film is clear. Harden ball is working for trae right now, why change it up
He will change it if he wants to be a champion. I will need to see someone other than LeBron win a championship playing that style to believe in it. And even LeBron usually needed crazy stuff to happen for him to win championships. For now, these guys are similar to quarterbacks in the NFL that want to be a major part of the running game.