Suns Squared: How Trae Young would make the Suns backcourt #1

Trae Young is lighting up college basketball. Could he combine with Devin Booker and create the best backcourt in the NBA?

Trae Young remains the lead story of college basketball this season as he lights up the scoreboard while doing his best Steph Curry/Russell Westbrook/Allen Iverson impression. Young’s stats are mentioned and awed over often, and deservedly so. As a freshman he is averaging 30.3 points, 9.6 assists and 2 steals per game. He is shooting 51% from 2, 40% from 3 (on 10 attempts per game!) and 84% from the Free Throw line (9.6 attempts per game!). Young has been an unstoppable offensive force and might be the living embodiment of the “you cannot stop him, you can only hope to contain him” maxim

Phoenix Suns

Young’s advanced stats are just as insane as his box score numbers. His PER (Player Efficiency Rating) is 33.8, with a 61.7% TS% (true shooting percentage) and he already has 613 points produced on the season (through January 26).

His assist rate is 54%, meaning he is assisting on over half of his teammates’ field goals while he is on the floor. Young’s usage is 39% and is also putting up a .528 3-point attempt rate and a .483 free throw rate. To put those in perspective, James Harden, the ultimate “get to the line and shoot 3’s” NBA player is currently putting up .504 and .473 in 3-point and free throw rate respectively during an MVP season. In college, Young is outpacing him in both categories.

Trae Young is also leading the NCAA with an OPA of 175.6 which is nearly 60 points more than the next closest player. OPA stands for Offensive Points Added which is a statistic used by nbamath.com to rate a player’s impact, explained in depth here https://nbamath.com/tpa-model/.

Young’s numbers and play style have drawn consistent comparisons to Steph Curry and he is being touted as the type of guard we will see more and more of with the rise in popularity of Steph Curry. Therefore with that in mind I wanted to compare Young stats this season, as a freshman, with Curry’s stats from his senior  season in college.

TS%

3PAr

FTr

AST%

TOV%

WS

3P%

3PA/game

Young

39.0%

61.7%

0.528

0.483

54.0%

17.7%

4.5

40.0%

10.5

Curry

38.3%

60.4%

0.489

0.365

40.2%

13.5%

9.9

38.7%

9.9

Young beats out Curry in just about every category, the main category that Curry beats out Young is in turnovers where Young is at his weakest. Young is averaging 5.3 TOs per game and has had five games with 7 or more TOs including 12 against Kansas State. Young will have to reign in his recklessness with the ball and bring down the TOs in the NBA, although if on a good team where he will not need to be the only focal point, turnovers will come down as a natural occurrence.

Young’s fit with the Suns would rest entirely on his ability to jell with Devin Booker.

Booker is also a high-usage (31.3%), ball dominant scorer. Booker too has trouble with TOs. Both Young and Booker play lackluster defense as well. The key to the pair finding a way to play together will likely come by studying the ways of Bradley Beal and John Wall, as well as Damien Lillard and C.J. McCollum, each who have figured out how to play together.

Those pairings have found a way to strike equilibrium despite significant head-butting at times.

Booker and Young would have to work on their own off-ball game in order to work well. Beal and McCollum are the less ball dominant of their respective duos and are adept at using screens and cuts to get open while Wall or Lillard goes to work with the ball. The key difference is Booker has an off-ball prowess already embedded in his game from his time at Kentucky where Calipari limited his chance to play on ball.

Young would need to adjust to not having the ball 100% of the time and work on his selfishness which is apparently an issue at Oklahoma. It will take work but because of Booker’s roots as an off-ball guy I think the fit would work quite easily if the Suns chose to go that route. Not to mention that Young’s passing ability would enhance Warren and Josh Jackson’s play making abilities as cutters and transition players.

Next: Suns Squared: How Marvin Bagley III would work in Phoenix

While Young has some work to do when it comes to protecting the ball, his offensive numbers speak for themselves and his game is tailor made to make those around him better and would jell with the abilities and play style of Devin Booker. As a combo those two would be immediately in the conversation for best backcourt in the league and would only be within only a handful of years of taking the top spot.