Atlanta Hawks: Comparing Reddish’s Slow Start To Trae’s Last Year

Comparing Trae Young’s and Cam Reddish‘s equally slow starts to their rookie campaigns.

It’s no secret that Trae Young is a true rising star for the Atlanta Hawks today. Each game with 30+ scored fades away the memory of his first couple months as a pro, just a bit.

Trae’s Summer League performance was well-documented, but worry really hit Hawks fans when his struggles carried through to the first month of the season.

Outside of a 35 point showing in Cleveland, Trae was struggling to find the net in his first handful of games.

At the end of his 16th career game, Young was shooting 39% from the field, and 24% from three. He picked it up, especially when the Calendar flipped from 2018 to 2019, and of course ended up giving Luka Doncic a run for Rookie of the Year.

Jump forward a season and the Hawks have a new rookie who’s struggling to put the ball through the basketball.

Cam Reddish – the 10th overall pick out of Duke – is averaging just 5.5 points in 23.5 minutes per game, while shooting a measly 19% from deep. Making matters worse, he has more turnovers than assists and shooting 25% from the field overall.

This is all a bit concerning, espically knowing that Cam was considered to be one of the best offensive guards to come out of College last year.

Part of the problem could be the lack of a transitional period.

Reddish was held out of Summer League with injury, and after just a few preseason games, he was ruled a starter for the season opener. He ended up starting the first 8 games of his career while Kevin Huerter recovered from a knee injury.

It’s a role he’ll be taking back now after Huerter was once again injured.

Reddish’s NBA entrance will continue to be a baptism by fire, just as Young’s was.  Trae didn’t become the one we know today until late November, and wasn’t consistently great until the new year.

His shooting percentages went up monthly, as did nearly every other offensive stat.

This type of improvement but not be realistic to Reddish, who will still likely find himself off the bench more often than not, and won’t have the ball in his hands as much as Trae did last year, but, it just shows Hawks fans they need to be patient.

Reddish has had his moments, especially as a driver, but sometimes gets tunnel vision while heading towards the rim. He sometimes is athletic to a fault:

https://twitter.com/shaqtin/status/1190069434695790593

The biggest thing refinding that silky jumper he had at Duke. Just like Trae last year, his shot doesn’t seem to have followed him from college to the pros.

He wasn’t ever lights out for Coach K in Durham, but 33% on 7.4 attempts per game is great compared to what he’s done in Atlanta thus far. Even if nothing else translates to the bigs however, I do expect the jumper to show up soon.

Only the rarest of rookies can come in and start contributing right away, and it’s already obvious Cam won’t be that guy.

He just needs to slow things down, and focus on (re)finding that shot.

We’ll have the recap after tonight’s game versus the Suns, so check back to see how Reddish performs in his next start.