While the comparisons between Trae Young and Luka Doncic may live on throughout their careers, Hawks general manager Travis Schlenk had reason to be pleased with the rookie's performance Monday in Atlanta's 119-111 loss at Houston.
Young finished with a career-high 36 points and a personal-best eight 3-pointers against the Rockets. And he's enjoying the best scoring month of his young career right now, having averaged 22.2 points per game during February, with one game left to be played (Wednesday vs. Minnesota).
As he was preparing to head to Lexington for Tuesday's Kentucky-Arkansas SEC game, Schlenk talked with 92-9's Morning Show personalities John Fricke and Hugh Douglas about Young's progress, and how there's still room for improvement.
“He shot the ball well. He could have finished a little better in the lane, but he shot the ball well," the Hawks GM said. "He’s obviously had a great rookie season. [We’re] extremely excited about his future, we just gotta keep building around him.”
Talking to the guys while sitting in Houston's Hobby Airport, John wanted to know if Schlenk had a favorite or two of the atmosphere at college facilities, basis on his weekly visits. In a bit of a surprise, Kentucky's Rupp Arena, where he'll be Tuesday night, and holds 23,500 and sellouts frequently, didn't make his top three.
“I'm, obviously, a little partial to Kansas; they have a great atmosphere,” the home of the Jayhawks was the first school he mentioned. But Schlenk also singled out Assembly Hall in Indiana and Duke’s Cameron Indoor Stadium as three places he considers most appealing. "Those to me are the top three."
As the college game has seen a great deal of conversation after the injury to Duke’s Zion Williamson and with plenty of talk that the NBA should eliminate the one-and-done rule, Schlenk sounded a little perplexed about possibility of a rule change.
“They’re obviously going to change the rule, ..." he said. "That's something that’s been talked about now for well over a year, year and a half. It really didn’t have anything to do with the Zion injury. From my perspective, as someone whose job and responsibility it is to go out see all these kids, and try to project where these kids are going to be, it’s gonna make my job harder, there's no question. It’s going to split all the time that I spend going to all these college games, I have to be mixing in more high school games.
"What's going to happen is it's gonna cause teams in the lottery to make more mistakes. ... There's going to be kids that get really bad advice, who think they're good enough to be pros and they're going to put their name in and they're not gonna get drafted. So, I hope they, at least, change the rule so if a kid makes a mistake like that, at least they allow them to go back to school. No one wants to see a kid get bad advice, make a bad decision and then not have the oportunity to go to college and play college basketball.
"When they do change the rule, I hope that they allow kids to put their name in, if they don't get drafted - kind of like baseball does - [they will be able to go back to college]. They need to do that for the kids.”
