The Atlanta Hawks have been slammed by injuries early in the early portions of their 2024-25 NBA campaign and several younger players are being expected to step into elevated roles. Front-line guys like DeAndre Hunter, Bogdan Bogdanovic, Vit Krejci, Trae Young, and others have forced head coach Quin Snyder to elevate players he may not have expected to ahead of the season.
Dyson Daniels, Jalen Johnson, and Zaccharie Risacher have taken center stage for the Hawks. The results have, understandably, been up and down.
Quin Snyder joined The Steakhouse on Thursday morning to discuss where the team is right now and how he's challenging Trae Young to step into that leadership role to elevate the younger players on the roster.
"If we can come out of this as a better team, that's [our] goal," Snyder said about the challenges the team is facing right now, but also how they're trying to make the most of their situation. "Had we not been in the situation we were in going into that game, maybe we don't see these young guys have an opportunity to have that kind of pressure on them in a game."
Sometimes, these players are going to struggle -- like they did over the weekend in a two-game sweep against the lowly Bulls and Pistons. But sometimes they can shine as they did in Tuesday's win over the reigning NBA Champion Boston Celtics.
"That's going to be the ebb and flow of this team," Snyder said. "If you look around the league, and you don't see a lot of teams literally starting 19-, 20-, and 21-year-old guys. I looked at Jaylen Brown and tried to remember what he was like at 19, and we're literally talking about a five or six year difference and that's who these guys are playing against. It gets me excited about some of our young guys."
The development is going to take some time, but the core of the roster feels like it is starting to come together.
Now, it comes down to how Trae Young embraces this growth. Snyder told The Steakhouse that he's challenging his star point guard to continue elevating his younger teammates.
"This has been the challenge that I have posed to Trae," he said. "For Trae, success for him right now is lifting those guys around him. You'll see in a game where he hits Zacc, and Zacc misses, [Trae] reassures him that it's a good shot and that he'll come to him again. We can do things internally to help these guys accelerate that growth process and I think that's part of what we're trying to do right now."