As a 22-year-old point guard, Trae Young has led the Atlanta Hawks to the Eastern Conference finals. It has been a remarkable run, and while his foot injury is threatening to end it, Young is unquestionably the heart and soul of this Hawks squad, and he's also one of the most unique new superstars in the NBA.
When he arrived in the league, he was known for his long-range shooting prowess. While deep 3s are still an important part of his game, his definitive moves might actually come inside the arc, where his floaters and his lobs have both become cornerstones of his awesome offensive foundation.
When Young gets going downhill off a high ball screen, he turns into one of the scariest playmakers in the league in part because he's able to put defenses into a helpless pick-your-poison predicament. Even though he's one of the smallest rotation players in the playoffs at just 6-foot-1 and 180 pounds, Young is terrifying in the paint. His floater is one big reason why.
He told ESPN's Malika Andrews that it's a shot he has been working on for years, in part because he knew it would come in handy given his relatively small stature.
"Ever since I was a kid, I've always worked on my floater, knowing I wasn't gonna be the tallest guy in the world," Young said. "I always knew I needed a floater."
Young comes from a basketball family. His dad, Rayford, set records at Texas Tech and went on to play professionally in Europe. The elder Young helped his son develop his game from a early age. Part of that development included drills that would teach Young how to shoot the ball over much taller players. But Rayford stands just 5-11 himself, so he needed props to emulate the length of big men.
"Me and my dad, we would go to the Y," Young said. "He'd bring a broom, or we'd have one there, [and] just put it up above the rim and I'd try to shoot over it. ... [He'd] try to raise it, and try to block my shot all the time. I think that really helped me for guys like Brook Lopez and the Andre Drummonds of the league, the tall guys."
As a youngster, when he wasn't hitting teardrops over brooms, he was studying a couple of the world's best small point guards. Young says it was Chris Paul and Tony Parker who showed him that he had a path in pro basketball. If they could thrive at their size, Young knew he had a shot, too. When asked about his mentality on the floor, Young took some time to compliment the other great point guard still standing in these playoffs, a player he could match up against in the Finals.
"Just his mentality," Young said of Paul, whose Suns are one win away from the NBA Finals. "I mean, just being the undersized PG, that's tough and you're not just gonna be able to roll over, it's something that I really took from CP. I don't know if he knows that, but that's something that I really love about his game."
Growing up in Oklahoma, Young was also inspired by Parker, who found ways to score in the paint despite being a smaller player. Parker had his own great floater and, as Young explains, his "ability to get by his first defender and get into the lane and create."
Half-Paul, half-Parker sounds about right as a description for Young. But while both Parker and Paul have deployed hundreds of floaters over the years, they can't hold a candle to Young's use of the shot.
In just his third season, Young has become the NBA's most prolific user of the floater. This season, Young converted 45.6% of a league-leading 252 attempts. Nobody else in the league crossed the 200-attempt mark. But his reliance on the shot has increased even further in the postseason, up from 4.0 attempts per game to 5.5 in the playoffs.
Since the league began tracking these shots, no single player has ever attempted nearly as many of them in a single postseason as Young has this year.
Stats are one thing and buckets are another. Young has used these teardrops to punish opponents in key moments throughout the Hawks' run. His biggest two buckets in the Hawks epic Game 1 win against the Knicks at Madison Square Garden were both floaters, including his game winner.
But here's the scary part: The floater is only half of the equation. Young is also one of the best lob-throwers in the league.
While Young's floaters help him score in the face of the world's best rim protectors, his ability to throw lobs makes those interior defenders hesitate to contest his floater. Once Young gets past his own man, inevitably one of his large teammates -- either Clint Capela or John Collins -- becomes a huge threat near the rim and, as lob threats, they force the opponent's defending bigs into a hopeless predicament. With Young racing toward the rim, the rim protector can either try to contest the league's most prolific floater or give that shot up and protect against the lob.
The floater threat is legit, which is why many defending bigs have left their assignment to contest it. In turn, that's why Young has assisted on more alley-oops than any other player in the past 25 years. Check this out:
The data are clear: Lob City is now located in the heart of Georgia, folks, and Young is the new mayor. Atlanta's point guard was the passer in the league's top two most prolific lob combos this season. Young to Capela ranked first. Young to Collins ranked second. And he's been just as prolific in the postseason, tossing four times as many successful lobs as any other player.
When you factor in the floaters and the lobs, opposing defenders have no good choices -- and that's the point. Young has become both the NBA's most prolific floatman, its most prolific lobman -- oh, and one more thing: He's also one of the league's best 3-point assisters. In cases in which perimeter defenders try to help off Atlanta's shooters, Young will make them pay, too. He ranks third in the postseason with 44 assisted 3-point shots.
The bottom line is when Young is driving toward the rim, great things happen for his team.
Whether it's a floater, a lob or catch-and-shoot 3, Young is going to read the defense and create the best scoring option for his team. Throughout his first two years in the league, it wasn't hard to find skeptics arguing that Young's game was gimmicky and that he was not a winning player. No matter what happens in the rest of this series, one thing is for sure: Those skeptics are suddenly a lot harder to find.