Retro Scouting Report: Trae Young

The greatest showman of college basketball's last decade, Young reveals a lot about how to evaluate unique traits

When we started this series on retro scouting reports, the goal was to look back at some of our mistakes and find ways to avoid making them in the future. Sometimes it’s just as important to look at our triumphs and see what we got right. If we see similar markers and overall trends replicated in future drafts, we’ll remember where to look for comparison.

Trae Young stands out as one of our most proud triumphs. The 2018 draft was one we feel, for the most part, pretty proud of when it comes to evaluating talent. We had one miss — and it was a big one — with Mo Bamba atop our board. We’ve written about those miscues before and gained a lot from the revisit.

With Trae, he represented the first time we’ve seen a prospect in our years of scouting where, despite obvious defensive concerns, the offensive portfolio was so enticing and complete that we were confident in overlooking the issues. From Young, we developed one major theory: to be an undersized point guard in the NBA, you either have to be a great shooter or a great defender. Both won’t suffice.

Young’s shooting ability jumps off the screen and is even more mesmerizing in person. We saw the Oklahoma-Rhode Island NCAA Tournament contest in Pittsburgh in 2018, where Young almost single-handedly willed his team to victory. By that point, Young was well established as a collegiate star, but his NBA pedigree wasn’t certain yet. Questions about size, durability, defensive acumen and whether his shooting would hold up in a physical league seemed to cloud just how high his draft stock could soar.

We were confident enough in the film to place him in our top-three.

A look back at Young’s collegiate time confirms much of our 2018 thoughts: he was exceptional as a shooter, skilled as a scorer and really complete as a passer, using both hands and making plays for others in ball screens or the open floor. As we’ve gotten better at scouting and looking at players with a nuanced eye, we found a few more points that are glaring about Young:

• His shot-making from an off-balanced state was so lethal that he’s borderline impossible to guard one-on-one. There’s an element of being off-rhythm that is so difficult to defend or predict, and since Young made a large enough volume of those shots at Oklahoma, it should have been a focal point of his isolation scoring upside.

• The ball handling is what makes everything go. Without that, the quick translation from dribble to shot would be sloppy, and he would be unable to punish defenders who crowd him.

• The floater is a necessity. Young has exceptional touch at the rim and makes free throws when he gets to the line, but having the counter to conserve his body alleviates any pre-draft concerns about his frame holding up with NBA physicality.

All these years later, Young has turned into one of the league’s most exciting young stars. He brought the Atlanta Hawks to the Eastern Conference Finals and is one of the best scorers and passers in the game. That same verve has fit into the Hawks offense seamlessly, and his coaching mentors have let the ball stay in his hands through large doses of high screen-and-roll.

One area this tape reminded us of that isn’t seen as frequently in the NBA: off-ball screening actions for Young. He’s a great movement shooter because he gets his feet set so quickly, his hips turned and aligned in a moment and, frankly, doesn’t require either to get a quality shot off. There’s so much gravity there that, if the Hawks wind up adding or developing another facilitator, Young could once again be used as a gravity creator.