Time is fleeting for Hawks to make use of Trae Young’s brilliant season

This hasn’t been the season that the Hawks would have wanted. The season-ending shoulder injury to Jalen Johnson went a long way toward submarining their hopes to elevate themselves beyond their enduring home in the Play-in Tournament.

At 27-31 and in eighth place in the Eastern Conference — five games behind sixth-place Detroit — it appears that the Hawks are bound for their fourth consecutive season in the pre-playoffs event for the seventh- through 10th-place teams in each conference.

But it doesn’t diminish, and maybe even accentuates, how well that Young, in his seventh season, is playing for the Hawks.

“He’s been great,” an NBA scout, one whose opinion of Young has been tempered in the past, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I think he’s trying to show you can build it around him. You’ve got guys like him and Lonzo Ball, the question is, are they really winners? They individually can perform — are they going to elevate the group? He’s showing that ability, so I think it’s been a positive leap for him in terms of becoming an actual leader this year.”

That leadership — the capacity to help his team win — was on full display Monday with his 14 assists. It elicited the highest of praise from Hall of Famer and Hawks legend Dominque Wilkins in his role as analyst for the telecast on FanDuel Sports Network.

“I would have loved to have gotten some of these passes,” Wilkins exclaimed on the broadcast. “I couldn’t tell you what I would have scored if I played with that guy.”

He voiced his yearning after Young made a pass that actually didn’t even result in a basket. In the second quarter, Young ran a screen-and-roll with center Clint Capela. Out of a double team on the right wing, Young fed a rolling Capela by threading a bounce pass through Kyle Anderson’s legs, one of Young’s signature nutmegs.

Received chest high and leading Capela to the basket, it was practically a perfect pass. (Capela was not able to finish at the rim against the estimable defense of Heat center Bam Adebayo.)

Wilkins’ remark is the sort of thing that former players-turned-analysts sometimes say. It’s another way to express how well a player is playing. But what struck me was how genuine Wilkins seemed to sound.

He went on to give Young perhaps the supreme compliment for a point guard — that Young’s skill at delivering the ball to open teammates reminded him of Magic Johnson from the times that Wilkins played with him over the summers during their careers.

All Wilkins had to was hold his hands up and Johnson got him the ball.

“It was amazing,” Wilkins said.

On the next possession, Young worked another screen-and-roll with Capela, this time lobbing him an alley-oop for a dunk, the pass clearing Adebayo’s reach by inches. Young continued to have difficulty scoring, but compensated by setting teammates up for scores. He swung a pass behind his back to forward Georges Niang, the recent trade acquisition, for a 3-pointer. From perhaps 30 feet away from the basket, he tossed up a precise pass for an alley-oop to center Onyeka Okongwu.

His playmaking was so critical that coach Quin Snyder kept him on the floor for the game’s final 15 minutes as the Hawks tried to hold off the Heat. With Young on the floor, the Hawks outscored the Heat by 26 points. When he was off, Miami had a 14-point advantage.

The win ended a three-game losing streak for the Hawks, a needed reprieve. The previous night, they had scored 143 points at State Farm but still lost to Detroit.

It was a more hopeful night for the remainder of the season and even the seasons to come. The Hawks’ plan appears to be to build around a core of Zaccharie Risacher, Jalen Johnson, Dyson Daniels, Okongwu and Young and surround them with high-character veterans like the newly acquired Terance Mann and Niang.

Okongwu scored 17 points. In a bid to be Defensive Player of the Year, Daniels collected seven steals along with 10 points and 11 rebounds. Daniels is averaging an NBA-best 3.1 steals per game. The last time a player averaged 3.0 or better was 1993-94. Risacher did not show up much in the box score but defended well.

But it continues to revolve around Young. Now without a consistent scorer in Johnson (who was averaging a career-high 18.9 points per game before being lost for the season), the Hawks have called upon Young’s offensive skill even more.

In the past 10 games, Young has averaged 30.3 points and 11.9 assists per game while shooting 43.0% from the field (compared with his season averages of 24.0 and 11.5 and 40.7%).

Since the start of his career in 2018, it’s the 10th time that he has had a 10-game span in which he averaged 30 points and 11.5 assists, some of them overlapping. The rest of the NBA has managed it only once — three-time MVP Nikola Jokić earlier this season.

And yet, this most recent run of 30/11.5 excellence by Young was breakeven for the Hawks — 5-5.

The Hawks have 24 more regular-season games remaining — starting Wednesday at Miami — to utilize Young’s brilliance and demonstrate that this new assortment and vision has promise.

It would be great if it could happen. For Young, for the franchise and for everyone who cares about this team.