When I watch Trae Young play basketball, I can actually feel bile rise in my throat. Man, he drives me crazy.
It’s not just the fouls, although of course if you’re looking for a reason to dislike Trae, his halting, sudden-leap-into-a-defender-then-slingshot-away-as-if-wronged-on-some-sort-of-molecular-level appeals are a consistently justifiable one. (They are both infuriating and worrisome, in their success, that this otherwise glorious game to watch is maybe a little bit broken.) Young has the confident self-regard of a true villain, one who draws his energy from crowds who hate him, who seems to love nothing more than silencing 15,000 people who have been screaming at him for three hours. He plays the emotions of Crowd like a wrestling hype man, forever maximizing every moment of cheap heat. He’s great with the home crowd too: I saw his ritualistic destruction of my Knicks in Atlanta last week, and when the (loud, and underrated) State Farm Arena began chanting “Fuck the Knicks,” in response to Madison Square Garden’s “Fuck Trae Young,” his eyes got big and his mouth got wide and he clapped along and cheered them on and looked for all the world like a guy having the absolute time of his life.
NBA villains tend to come and go: We all loved LeBron, then hated him, then loved him again; same thing happened to Kevin Durant, and Kyrie Irving, and all those Nets, really. None of them actually wanted to be hated. But Trae has the true talent of the heel, feeding off all your negative energy and throwing it back at you. The Reggie Miller comparisons are apt. He’s so good you want to throw him off a cliff.
He is far beyond Reggie Miller at this point, though. The third year of Miller’s career, his team barely finished above .500 and was swept out of the playoffs in the first round. (He wouldn’t win a playoff series until his fifth year.) Young is plainly taking these playoffs by storm. After easily waving aside the best Knicks team in nearly a decade, Young went into Philadelphia, another East Coast fanbase that loves to fire every expletive it has at opposing stars, and wiped out the East’s No. 1 seed, scoring 25 points and dishing seven assists in the first half en route to a 74-54 halftime lead. The 76ers made a run late, but it fell short, and now Young and the Hawks have home court advantage and a whole new set of people in the Northeast Corridor who hate him.
What’s most impressive about Young’s explosion is that defenses are focused specifically on him. The primary goal of any game plan against the Hawks is slow down Trae. After the game Sunday, 76ers coach Doc Rivers, who has quietly sneaked into the top 10 leaderboard of coaching victories and has an outside chance of being No. 1 someday, basically just shrugged in response to a question about how his team is supposed to guard Trae. When asked if he had any thoughts of putting his star guard Ben Simmons on Trae, Rivers laughed and said, “We had a lot of thoughts. We probably thought of all of them."
Young has been good all year, but his game really unlocked when the Hawks fired former coach Lloyd Pierce and hired Nate McMillan. (The Hawks won their first eight games after McMillan took over.) He has become unguardable, a puzzle that two of the top five defenses in the NBA haven’t been able to figure out. But watching him, it’s clear he really came alive when arenas opened to full or mostly-full capacity again. He’s truly loving every horrible thing fans rain down upon him. Disliking Trae Young is playing into his hands: Your hate only makes him stronger. Even his career is starting to feel like a troll. All that mockery the Hawks got for passing on Luka Doncic and trading down to choose Young? The Hawks are still playing in these playoffs. After yesterday, Luka and the Mavericks are not.
He is quickly becoming the story of this NBA postseason. He is suddenly everywhere. I cannot stand it, and I would not want it any other way.
For all the talk of fans being out of control in the NBA playoffs, Sunday night was also a good reminder that soccer will always ask other sports to hold its beer in this regard.
In the finals of the CONCACAF Nations League—a new tournament that doesn’t really mean anything but is a grand excuse for the United States and Mexico to have more crazy emotional games—the crowd in Denver was wildly out of control in a way that makes NBA crowds look downright sedate. There were multiple people running onto the pitch, loud homophobic chants from the primarily pro-Mexico crowd (leading to penalties and stoppage of play) and all sorts of projectiles being thrown onto the pitch, including one that hit a USMNT player right in the face.
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It is a good reminder that for all the talk about NBA fans being uniquely out of control, it’s everyone that’s a little dialed up right now. As I wrote last week, we’re all getting out for the first time in a long time these days, and it’s increasingly clear that we’re not all that great at it yet. People are a bit much right now. It’s worth keeping that in mind as the playoffs progress, and the league whose fans are closer to the action than any others takes over a larger portion of the national attention. We’ve had a lot of ugly incidents, but nothing that has gotten truly out of control the way that the Nations League Final did. If something does, it will become the only NBA story from this season that may end up mattering.
Not that LeBron James, alas, will be a part of it. Not anymore.
Will Leitch is a contributing editor at New York Magazine, national columnist for MLB, a writer for Medium and the founder of Deadspin. Subscribe to his free weekly newsletter and buy his novel “How Lucky,” out from Harper Books now.