The Trae Young Decision Is Here…

The Trae Young Decision Is Here…

The Atlanta Hawks were unquestionably one of the biggest winners of the NBA offseason, adding a ton of great pieces around Trey Young. And there’s a lot of Hawks optimism out there right now. And in a very weak Eastern Conference, there’s a real path towards Atlanta being one of the best teams in the East this year and making a deep playoff run. However, all of that optimism is missing a very important piece of context around Trey Young’s future in Atlanta that for whatever reason nobody is talking about. Let’s take a look back at this Hawks off season. However, they moved back in the draft and picked up an extra Pelicans pick at the time of the draft. Most people agree that that was the worst move of the entirety of the offseason and the Hawks were on the right side of it. So, that’s a great thing. They got Chris Porzingis for essentially nothing. Yes, a late first round pick, some other roster pieces, but essentially it is all additive bringing in KP in a contract year this year. And they added bench pieces like Luke Canard and Nquille Alexander Walker who I actually think could start for them in different lineups to shore up their perimeter depth. And this is a team that just a few years ago was in the middle of this disaster Deontay Murray trade situation where they didn’t really have that much of a future. They’d given away their future picks. Their two best players in Deontay Murray and Trey Young did not fit well together. And they’ve gone from that to trading Deontay Murray to the Pelicans, getting Dyson Daniels back, who’s been fantastic for them. They get the first pick in the draft and get Zachary Rishet, who looked solid for them last year. And they’ve completely rebuilt their rotation in a very short amount of time and have flipped this team from one that didn’t look like they had much of a future to potentially one of the brighter futures in the entirety of the Eastern Conference. And there is just a lot of optimism around Atlanta right now. I’ve seen a bunch of smart basketball people, including people like Zack Low, put the Hawks in this really top tier of the Eastern Conference as a could plausibly win the entire conference and make the NBA Finals kind of tier, which to me feels strong, but still I can see it and I certainly respect that opinion. But hidden among all of this optimism is a simple truth. This is the Trey Young season. Trey Young currently has a player option for the 2026 off seasonason for $49 million and could theoretically be a free agent. And for some reason, nobody’s talking about it, which sets this season up as the most pivotal Hawk season in recent memory. A team that could potentially make the conference finals or the finals this year or a year from now look completely different and not even have Trey Young on the roster. Really quickly Young situation. This off seasonason, it appears as though they are putting together a team that prioritizes Trey Young and making sure that he has the proper team around him in a way that they did a handful of years ago where they did make the conference finals, which is interesting considering Trey Young is not signed long-term to the team. But if you look at the roster, I think right now you can project the starters as Trey Young, Dyson Daniels, Risha, Jaylen Johnson, and Inca Kongw. And off the bench, you’ve got KP, Luke Canard, Nikquil Alexander Walker, some other young guys like Asa Newell and Kobe Buffkin and some others. And generally speaking, I like the team. I think there are definitely some shooting concerns with the starting five, but you can’t really go away from that because Dyson Daniels has to start alongside Trey Young. He’s too good defensively for him to not start. And you’d like Risha to be in that starting group as well as he continues to grow and develop as the former number one overall pick. And I think there are some adjustments you can make there to the starters where you can bring in Chrisaps Porzingis as potentially the starting five instead of a Congu if you really just want to add more spacing and kind of offensive dynamism to the group. And I think generally there is a lot of flexibility with lineups because off the bench you’ve got some really big pieces like Chris Porzingis, Nikquille Alexander Walker. I think come playoff time you could even see lineups that are young Daniels, Nikquille Alexander Walker, Jaylen Johnson and Aongu or KP in place of a Kongu. All of this obviously depends upon health, but there’s a lot of things that make sense if your goal is to build a team around Trey Young. And Jaylen Johnson specifically is going to be a huge X factor for them. If he’s healthy, which was the problem for him last year, he is there. Okay, Trey Young is off the floor. We need someone else to run the offense guy and they need him to be able to at least keep things afloat in the relatively limited minutes that Trey Young will be off the floor, especially in the postseason. Trey Young’s probably going to play 38 minutes a game, maybe even more than that. And in those 10-ish minutes, they need Jaylen Johnson to create good offense for them. And he’s a good player, but there’s still a lot of room to grow for him in that specific area of his game. And if you look at this team and you look at it in a positive lens, Risha develops, they’re healthy. Porzingis, you’re not relying on him a ton in the regular season because you have a Kung Wu to start at the five and so maybe he’s healthy for the entirety of the year. This could be a top four team in the Eastern Conference. And a large part of that has to do with unquestionably a great off season in Atlanta. But the thing that I just can’t get out of my head is what’s happening with the future of Trey Young in Atlanta. Currently, he is eligible for a massive contract extension and the Hawks have not given him one. I would suspect that part of that is because the assumption for Young as well as a lot of other stars kind of in his tier around the league is that for the last handful of years it’s just been assumed that players like that are going to get max contracts. You look at someone like Bradley Beal, who Trey Young is obviously better than, but a couple of years ago in Washington, yeah, you’re getting the max contract. You’re our best guy. You’re going to get a max. Now you’re looking at max contracts that are worth 6070 million a year. and teams are starting to realize that maybe they have options in terms of negotiating with these players rather than just handing them the full max. Actually having a conversation saying, “Okay, what if you took 55 million a year instead of 65 million a year?” And I would speculate that that is why Trey Young does not currently have an extension with the Atlanta Hawks. It’s not that they don’t believe in him. He’s obviously a very good player and they’ve built their team for him. But they’re trying to negotiate the exact number rather than what has happened in the past which has been you’re our best player, here’s a max contract, let’s move forward. And obviously that’s what Trey Young wants. Trey Young sees himself as a maxed player, sees himself as one of the best players in the league and thinks that he should just get the most money possible and then they move forward. And this has been an interesting situation in Atlanta really for the last couple of years. My read on the situation is that if they had gotten an offer for Trey Young that they liked via a trade, Trey Young would have been traded at some point over the last couple years, specifically in that time period where they were trying to figure out what to do between him and Deontay Murray. Obviously, they ultimately traded away Dejante Murray, they get Tyson Daniels. It was a great deal, but I definitely think they were exploring the possibility of trading away both of their guards, and they just didn’t get offers that they liked in exchange for Trayon. Not that they didn’t get good offers, but the kinds of things that they would have been wanting to get back to part with Trey Young, multiple first round picks, young players, things like that. Those kinds of offers just never materialized. And so, it’s this weird in between of they like Trey Young. They’re building their team around him. They know that he’s good, but they’ve never really shown full 100% commitment to him over the last couple of seasons, whether that be with a contract extension or kind of sort of semiexploring the possibility of trading him to a variety of teams at various times. Which raises the question, as a guy that could be a free agent next off seasonason, how committed generally and overall are the Atlanta Hawks to Trey Young? If this team has some injuries and just isn’t as good as everybody is expecting and they’re 10 games under 500 at the trade deadline because KP’s played 15 games and Jaylen Johnson’s only played 30 games, then what do you do? Because then you’re looking at a situation if you’re the Hawks where Trey Young could walk for nothing in a handful of months. You’ve built this team for him, but you haven’t necessarily committed a ton of long-term money to the pieces around it. And you could theoretically look at it and say, “Okay, now’s our time to trade Trey, and we’re building something completely different than anyone really expected in Atlanta.” There’s also going to be much more cap space in the summer 2026 than what we just saw in the summer of 2025. So that is a big concern as well where teams might not be willing to trade a bunch of stuff for Trey Young, but if they can just bring him into their cap space, there’s obviously a lot of excitement there for the fan base, that could be a major concern as well. And it just creates this situation where everybody’s looking so positively at the situation in Atlanta, but it really relies upon one health. They have a couple of guys on their roster specifically Jaylen Johnson last year and KP really for the entirety of his career. They were definitely concerned about injury-wise. And it just puts a lot of pressure on Trey Young establishing himself as okay, we are going to win 50 games when you put a good team around this guy kind of player. I’m not saying he isn’t that. I’m just saying there’s a lot of pressure on him to pretty much prove that to the organization if he and the team want to reach their goals for the season and Trey Young’s goals for the offseason, which of course is that max contract extension. The other wrinkle to this that’s very interesting to me is that in a scenario in which the Hawks are good at the trade deadline, they still have a bunch of assets. They have that extra pick that they got in that trade with the Pelicans. They have some of their own future first round picks as well. Someone like Reese in a theoretical universe where they’re trading for a star wing, I think, would be a pretty interesting core piece and headliner piece of a trade for one of those kinds of guys. And that could allow the Hawks to really accelerate their chances in what is going to be a very weak Eastern Conference with the exception of some teams at the top like the Knicks and the Cavs. So, it really gives them that flexibility to move in either direction. It just creates an interesting situation for Atlanta where there’s so much optimism and everybody seems to be so excited about them because of their offseason and it was unquestionably one of the best offseasons in the entire league. But their overall lack of commitment to Trey Young over the last handful of seasons and literal lack of commitment to him in terms of a contract extension beyond this season sets them up as one of the major kind of swing players in the entire conference as a team that this time next year could be celebrating a finals trip or this time next year Trey Young could just not be on the roster and they could be moving in a completely different Direction.

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The Atlanta Hawks were unquestionably one of the biggest winners of the NBA offseason – adding a ton a great pieces around Trae Young… and there is a ton of Hawks optimism right now – and in a very weak Eastern Conference, there is a real path towards Atlanta being one of the best teams in the East this year and making a deep playoff run…

However, all of that optimism is missing a very important piece of context around Trae Young’s future in Atlanta.

#traeyoung #hawks #atlantahawks