Atlanta Hawks: Trae Young as Unanimous First Team All-Rookie Makes Sense
By Chris Guest
A quick look at what might turn out to be Trae Young of the Atlanta Hawks consolation prize in his extremely productive first season in the NBA.
The All-Rookie teams were unveiled last week, and two Atlanta Hawks players made the cut. Trae Young was a unanimous selection to the All-Rookie first team, and Kevin Huerter was the final addition to the All-Rookie Second Team.
This makes three out of the past four Atlanta Hawks first round draft picks All-Rookie selections, with only the injury-riddled first season of Omari Spellman breaking the trend.
Of course, the big award – Rookie of the Year – has yet to be determined, though the belief is that Luka Doncic of the Dallas Mavericks, who was also awarded a unanimous First Team selection, will be crowned the ROY during the NBA Awards in June.
Certainly, Young has a case to be named the Rookie of the Year himself, though the fairest way to do it is to crown them both Co-Rookies of the Year. Still though, Young did produce three of the top five rookie scoring games during the 2018-19 regular season, as well as all five of the rookie class’s top assist games:
Even if the voting bloc of writers becomes utterly hypnotized by the Doncic hype, at least they recognized Trae’s brilliant season by unanimously believing he had one of the best rookie seasons during the 2018-19 campaign.
In recent memory, Ice Trae joins Ben Simmons, Donovan Mitchell, Malcolm Brogdon, Dario Saric, Karl-Anthony Towns and Kristaps Porzingis as unanimous selections in the previous three seasons. Pretty good company for our rook.
dark. Next. Ranking the 12 Best Fits for Hawks in Free Agency
Despite being the best rookie in Atlanta Hawks franchise history, it seems rather likely that Young will be left out in the cold come awards season, though the voting returns for All-Rookie make this writer hopeful. Did Young’s incredible play down the end of the season provide some recency bias to the voting results – leading to a potential ROY award for Trae? Only time will tell, but there’s no question that he should be in the conversation for this year’s ROY award.