TRAE Y OUNG HAS SPENT THE ENTIRETY OF HIS 2 3 YEARS ON EARTH BEING OVERLOOKED.
It’s cliché because it’s true.
Basketball is a result-based industry. You either can score or you can’t. You win or you lose. e parameters of success are rather simple.
Young lived his life being the exception to that rule. His story is that of doubt, accomplishment and more doubt.
Many claim they don’t care what the outside world thinks of them, but they are lying. Not Young, though, for every ounce of his success is due to giving a metaphorical middle nger to his long list of detractors.
He could have easily drowned in the noise. Instead it hardened and uplied him to unprecedented success.
THE CLIMB
This is a safe space. We can all be honest here. Predicting a less-than-stellar career for Young was the easy side to be on.
Young stands all of 6-foot-1 and 164 pounds - and that is probably generous. He was undersized in high school. Too small for high-end college basketball. And certainly not t for the strength and length lling up NBA courts.
In the spirit of fairness, he was a ve-star recruit with oers from Kansas and Kentucky. ESPN listed him as the No. 23 recruit of the 2017 recruiting class.
But did anyone really think he’d be an All-America
First Team member while leading the country in points and assists as a freshman? And at Oklahoma, of all places. Of course not. But that’s what he did.
“He was unbelievably skilled with the ball,” then-Oklahoma coach Lon Kruger told Fox Sports. “His imagination, his lack of fear. He’s aggressive and attacking. He had the ability to not only have vision for what comes ahead but the skill to complete the play.”
en he walked into the league and put up 19.0 points and 8.0 assists per game as a rookie. In only his second season, Young became the h player in NBA history to average at least 29 points and nine assists on a nightly basis (James Harden, Russell Westbrook, Tiny Archibald and Oscar Robertson).
Young started in the All-Star Game that 2019-20 season. He should have been laden with praise and hype as one of the game’s young superstars.
Instead, he was criticized for the Atlanta Hawks winning only 49 games in his rst two seasons. He was a “Good Stats-Bad Team” guy in the eyes of many.
And then there was the Luka thing.
e Dallas Mavericks draed Young with the h overall pick in
the 2018 Dra . In a moment he had dreamed of his entire life, Young shook Commissioner Adam Silver’s hand wearing a hat of the team he would never play a minute for. His selection was part of a previously agreed upon trade with the Hawks, who had selected Luka Doncic two picks before.
Dra Day trades are common. It links the two players forever in NBA lore. Unfortunately for Young, Doncic - who plays the same position - quickly emerged as one of the NBA’s best players, for he spent his rst three seasons accumulating Rookie of the Year honors and two AllNBA selections to go with two All-Star nods.
You don’t have to be barely above 6-feet tall to come up short in that comparison.
For Young to get the respect he deserved, he needed to prove he was a winning player, that his statistics carried weight, that being undersized wouldn’t deter him from succeeding in the biggest moments.
TURNING POINT
If Young one day becomes an immortal resident of Springeld, Massachusetts, the season that put him on the road to the Hall of Fame will be the 2020-21 campaign.
It won’t stand out on his Basketball Reference page.
His scoring dipped four points to 25.3 points per game, and he went from All-Star starter the previous season to observer a er not being selected at all.
But, a er a coaching change and maturation by Young and his teammates, the Hawks started winning. ey nished the season 41-31. eir 27-11 record from when Nate McMillan took over for Lloyd Pierce resulted in a h-place nish in the Eastern Conference.
Young is either a showboat or a showman on the court, depending on whatever personal bias you have. And that was never truer than in that year’s rst-round series versus the New York Knicks.
Playing on basketball’s most grand stage, Young was showered by chants of “F--- Trae Young” and “Trae is balding.” One fan of poor morals even spat on him. No matter, Young responded by drowning Madison Square Garden with bucket a er bucket. He capped his performance by waving good-bye to the fans as he eliminated the Knicks from the postseason in ve games.
“He hates when I say this, but he’s got that short-man syndrome, where they’re just mad, and they’re gonna show you that they belong,” Rayford Young, Trae’s father, told FOX Sports.
“He has worked really, really, really hard to get here. And that’s not to say that other players didn’t. But he didn’t have some of the advantages that those guys had as far as athleticism, the size, the speed and all that. So whenever he hears the boos, or he hears people saying that he can’t, he’s gonna show them that he can.”
Call it short man syndrome. Call it condence. Call it embracing your role. Whatever it is, whatever is said by opposing fans - Young has been through it all. And, as the 2021 NBA Playo¢s showed, it doesn’t faze him.
“Ever since I was in middle school -- when I was going on the road in middle school -- I always loved playing on the road,” Young said, via ESPN. “I loved playing against the opposing crowd, an opposing team. It feels like you’re really just with your team, and it’s just them in the build
EVERY REBUILD NEEDS A FACE OF THE OPERATION. EVERY HIGH DRAFT PICK IS TASKED WITH LEADING THE LONG JOURNEY UPWARD. FEW SUCCEED.
ing. I think that really brings our group together.”
A seven-game series win over the Philadelphia 76ers put the Hawks in the Eastern Conference Finals, where they ran into the buzzsaw that was the Milwaukee
Bucks. But no matter. Young had ocially put his stamp on the league. Doncic, for all his personal accolades, had yet to win a postseason series aer two berths. Young won two series in his rst playo experience.
Every rebuild needs a face of the operation. Every high dra pick is tasked with leading the long journey upward. Few succeed.
Young embraced it. But better yet, he has shown the fortitude necessary to forge on.
“It’s been a tough journey,” Young told the New
York Times. “It took a lot of losses to get here. For us, I think the guys who have been here since the rebuild, this feeling is a lot better than what it’s been. We know it (was) our rst year in the playos together, and it’s only the beginning, too. at’s the best part about this whole thing.”
Remember that 2017 recruiting class? It featured the likes of Marvin Bagley, Michael Porter Jr., Mo Bamba, Jaren Jackson Jr., Collin Sexton and Lonnie Walker, among others. Trae Young was named an All-Star in 2022 - and a starter at that. No other member of the ESPN Top 100 recruits from that year has gotten so much as one nomination.
Not bad for a kid from Norman, Oklahoma.
“This is my 25th year of coaching high school basketball, and I’ve never been around any kid close to having the confidence and belief in themselves that he had from day one, when he was 14 years old and weighed 110 pounds, to when he left and went to OU,” Bryan Merritt, Young’s high school coach, told Fox Sports.
“When he was in ninth grade, he would’ve told you £at-out that he could beat LeBron James or Kevin Durant, and he would’ve really believed it.”
GOOD ON HIS FEET
The true sign of an NBA superstar is his feet. More specifically, the sneakers he laces up. Basketball is the only sport where players wear gear named for an opponent.
Young doesn’t have to worry about that.
An Adidas athlete, his signature shoe was released with £air and an advertising campaign tting of Young’s journey:
“There’s over 450 million hoopers out there,
Under a million make varsity.
One will outscore the country.
Average 43 points per game. And put Norman on the map.
Less than 1 percent of high school players get a college scholarship.
Odds a freshman would lead the nation in scoring and assists?
One-and-never-been-done.
1.3 percent of college players get draed into the NBA. Even less likely if you’re 6-1.
Only one will wear shorts to the dra.
Of the 30 rst round picks, one will become the youngest ever with 18 assists in a playo game,
Be the only one to drop 48 and 11 in the conference nals,
And put ATL on prime time.
One will know this is just the beginning.
Trae had a one in half billion chance to get here.
But he saw a possibility to be the One.”
It’s hard to top that. No wonder Trae Young is standing tall these days.