Last year’s NBA trade deadline, which saw Luka Doncic, Anthony Davis, De’Aaron Fox and Jimmy Butler all get moved, is going to be impossible to top. That doesn’t mean that things will be quiet this year, though, because there’s still nearly a month to go until the deadline and already, we’ve seen a big name get dealt.
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On Wednesday, Trae Young was traded to the Wizards for CJ McCollum and Corey Kispert. It’s an unsentimental end for his tenure in Atlanta, where he’s spent his entire eight-year career.
This hasn’t been Trae’s best season. He’s only played 10 games so far after missing all of November with a strained MCL, and though it’s a pretty small sample size, his points, assists and 3-point shooting are all way down. The Hawks are also only 2-8 when he plays, and 16-13 when he doesn’t.
The Hawks had clearly become Jalen Johnson’s team even before Wednesday’s trade, but it’s been kind of incredible how fast Trae’s star has fallen from being the foundation of the franchise to someone deemed expendable. He was an All-Star just last year, and finished the year with the assist title after averaging a career-high 11.6 dimes.
On the most recent episode of No Fouls Given, Danny Green and Paul Pierce had some strong feelings on the trade. Green said it feels like the Hawks rushed into a deal without maximizing their return.
“Blasphemy,” Green said about Trae only bringing back a veteran starter like McCollum and a fringe rotation guy like Kispert, with no draft compensation added in. “Bro, it’s wild,” he added, questioning why Trae would want to go to a dismal situation like the Wizards, but he also wondered what the Hawks were thinking.
“We’ve seen Rudy Gobert go for multiple players and picks,” he continued. “We’ve seen Desmond Bane get traded for players and picks. Trae Young is a four-time All-Star, career average of 25 and 10 … It’s kinda crazy that Atlanta just kind of gave him away. They didn’t get no youth, no draft capital, like I don’t understand why you would not get something like that in return … You ain’t gotta rush.”
Pierce was even less kind to the Hawks. “I’m never shocked at what the Atlanta Hawks, as a mid franchise, as a franchise who is not respected as an organization because of ownership,” he said.
“They never do anything that surprises me,” he went on, “so for them to give up a four-time All-Star, a guy who’s one of the elite point guards in the league, who’s gotten them to the Eastern Conference [Finals], and not even get a draft pick out of it, that tells me you just wanted him out of your city, out of your state. Like take him, in his prime.”
Visibly frustrated, the former Celtics star proclaimed that trades like these are the reason why organizations like the Hawks would never be elite or win championships in his lifetime.
“I guarantee that. If they do, I will crawl from L.A. to New York, like on my knees. So it’s not shocking to me, and they’re gonna be a middling franchise for eternity, it’s just what it is,” he asserted.
Unless it comes out that Hawks general manager Onsi Saleh pulled a Nico Harrison and only engaged in talks with the Wizards because he just had to have McCollum and Kispert (extremely unlikely), then you have to ask: why didn’t the rest of the league offer more?
Anything being sold is only worth the price that others are willing to pay for it, and if this is all the Hawks could get for Young, then there was nothing else they could do. Maybe you can blame them for not doing more to prop up his value as his game has been picked apart this year, but if they decided that they were better off without him, then this move is addition by subtraction.
Gobert and Bane, two players that Green mentioned, plus Mikal Bridges, who also brought back a huge haul, all have some things in common. They’re all 6’6″ or above, and solid (in Bane’s case) or elite defenders. In today’s NBA where teams relentlessly pick on the weakest defensive link in the opposing team’s chain, Trae, who is only 6’2″ and has an abysmal defensive reputation, just doesn’t have the same value.
What the Wizards do with Trae will be telling. Will he start? Will he sign a big extension? Or was this just a way to clear Washington’s books sooner so that they could pay their up-and-coming young guys? No matter what, this deal will be a defining test case for how much offensive prowess matters if a player can’t get stops on defense.
In the meantime, Pierce had better hope that Jalen Johnson doesn’t continue his ascent into one of the best players in the league, and that the rest of the young Hawks don’t round into shape any time soon. He already lost one of these bets when he had to walk 15 miles to work in his bathrobe after the Knicks beat the Celtics in Game 2 of last year’s Eastern Conference semifinals, but crawling over 2,500 miles if the Hawks ever win a title will be much, much worse.
