Injuries have riddled the Hawks in the infancy of this season, and as they’ve tried to navigate them, they’ve leaned heavily on their top guard, Trae Young.
In Friday’s 123-115 loss to the Kings, the Hawks fought back from an 18-point deficit going deep into their bench to find the right combinations. The Hawks closed Friday’s game with Keaton Wallace, Garrison Mathews, Jalen Johnson, Clint Capela and Trae Young, who played 40-plus minutes for the second consecutive contest and third time in five games.
Despite the Hawks making a 19-5 run, where Young scored nine points and had five assists, which created 14 Hawks points, they just did not have enough to overcome several overturned calls.
The Hawks have asked a lot of Young, so following Friday’s loss, coach Quin Snyder wanted to make sure the guard received some recognition for it.
“I thought we played with courage,” Snyder said when asked about dealing with deflating calls. “We were down, I think, 18 on two separate occasions. We just competed. It was our best fourth quarter defensively of the year. That’s something we talked about. We didn’t have that competitive endurance.
“And everybody should get their pens out and start writing about Trae Young because he was poised with the officials from the very beginning of the game. He got blitzed. He trusted his teammates. He wasn’t selfish. He got off the ball early to shooters, then he started hitting Clint in the (pick and) roll. He managed the game, took a charge with six minutes left in the game. And if anybody doesn’t look at his performance tonight and respect the mental toughness that he has to play with right now, when everything’s going through him ... with admiration for his competitiveness and the trust he has in his teammates. He was the guy was unbelievable. It was unbelievable, and not diminishing other guys’ efforts, but that was a hell of a performance, and we shouldn’t lose track of that because we lost the game.”
Young ended Friday’s game with 25 points and 12 assists. The game was the 160th time in his career in which he had 20 or more points and 10-plus assists. He is one game from tying Hall of Famer Jerry West for the 12th-most such double-doubles in NBA history.
Through the first six games of the season, Young has averaged 27.7 points, 5.2 rebounds, 11.7 assists and 1.3 steals per game against 5.7 turnovers. He ranks in the 90th percentile for point guards in usage and assist percentages behind James Harden and Ja Morant, according to Cleaning the Glass.
The Hawks have needed everything from Young in the absence of five of the team’s top nine rotational players. They’re at plus-15.3 points per 100 possessions played when Young is on the court versus when he is off.
But Young looks to keep perspective.
“It’s a long season,” Young said. “I’m not one to get too high or too low at any point. I’ve been on three-, four-games losing streaks, and we won two, three right after. We just got to find a way to win one game. I think that’s the thing about this league, is it so hard to win, no matter who you’re playing. But every night you can win at the same time.
“So I think the hardest part is figuring out how to win. Once you win a game, you can fight for 48 minutes and you’re in a tough battle in the fourth quarter and you pull it out, they give your team more confidence in different ways, more confidence to finish out games. So I feel like we haven’t done that, and we got to get back to figuring out how to win one game at a time, and then try to stack more.”
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