The Atlanta Hawks spend this offseason building a team to surround Trae Young. They did that pretty dang well too, and will enter the 2025-26 season with real wind at their backs and a chance to win a weakened Eastern Conference. But they're also playing a dangerous game by neglecting to extend Trae Young this summer, instead electing to play out 2025-26 and reassess next offseason.
Jake Fischer of The Stein Line reported earlier this month that a Young contract extension... may never have even been on the table this summer.
Sources say Young’s side has actually been resigned for some time to the prospect of seeing out the final guaranteed year on his current contract rather than securing an extension, like his current contract, worth in excess of $200 million. He’d then have to make a decision about his $49 million player option for 2026-27.”
It doesn't sound like the Hawks are solely to blame for not getting an extension done this summer — conversations don't seem to have ever really started in earnest. But if the Hawks believe in him as the longterm centerpiece, and believe that future Hawks teams should be built around him, then getting a deal done should have been as big a priority as shoring up the other positions this summer.
Hawks had a great offseason, but are playing a dangerous game
Now, maybe the Hawks front office believes that surrounding Young with a talented roster shows enough commitment to his success that he'll happily sign an extension next offseason. That's not a crazy proposition; if 2025-26 is going to be a test run, the Hawks built a pretty sturdy car for it.
But that strategy comes with plenty of risk; even if things do work out in Atlanta this year, and the Hawks get back to the Eastern Conference mountaintop, that doesn't guarantee Young will want to stick around via extension. Plenty of great players have left teams after having successful seasons with those teams. If Young has a career year, which is surely in the cards with the most potent roster he's played with in his NBA tenure, he could decline his player option for 2026-27 and hit unrestricted free agency next year!
The Hawks seem interested in trying out this roster and seeing how all the pieces fit. That would make sense if all the pieces were guanranteed to be in place for a long time, but... they're not! And the main piece not being present would make completing the puzzle pretty dang hard.