Does It Even Matter If Trae Young Is Better Than 22-Year-Old Steph Curry?
As Trae Young has ascended into All-Star territory with a flurry of 30-point efforts and 30-foot shots, comparisons between the 21-year-old and two-time MVP Steph Curry have been rekindled. After the damage Young inflicted on the Denver Nuggets, some have posited that Young is a better player now than Curry was in his second NBA season.
Let’s explore the statement a bit more fully, through three different lenses, to determine whether it’s true and if it even matters.
Young isn't Steph Curry
It was Kendrick Perkins who most recently re-juxtaposed the two point guards, so the argument was bound to be a frustrating and flawed one from the start. He first tweeted that “it’s not even a debate” over which of Curry and Young had the better start to his career, which is always a great way to start a nuanced and substantive conversation between opposing viewpoints.
Perkins then went on The Jump to elaborate on his take:
"He's averaging eight assists. That's the thing that separates him from Steph, in my opinion, is that Trae Young actually makes people better," Perkins says. “I wouldn't be surprised that in a year or two he leads the league in assists with averaging 25 points. … Give Trae Young KD [Kevin Durant] and Klay Thompson and Draymond Green and see what he can do with them.”
People have compared Young to Curry since the former burst onto the scene in college, but it's an apples-to-oranges comparison. Evaluating the two on the basis of their assists per game is no more useful than judging Draymond Green and Rudy Gobert by blocks per game. It might seem to give one player a conclusive edge, but leaves out a central component of the other's value. Perkins seems to indicate that because Curry doesn't accumulate as many assists, he isn't actually making his teammates better. Curry, in fact, does make his teammates better – perhaps to an even greater degree than Young does – just in different ways.
That difference underscores the fact that, despite their similar shooting ranges and captivating styles, Young and Curry aren’t all that similar to one another. Fortunately, the venerable Jackie MacMullan intervened on The Jump to throw some water on the flames emanating from Perkins’ take: “To me, it’s too early to really talk about this,” MacMullan says. “I think he’s going to be a great player, he’s going to be an All Star forever. And you’re right, Steph’s never [averaged more than 8.5 assists per game]. But let’s not forget that Steph Curry revolutionized the game with the way he shot the ball.”
(To be fair, Perkins then said he doesn’t believe Young is or will be a better player than Curry – though he did seem to hint that the dynastic Warriors could have been better with Young in his place?)
Perhaps a more apt comparison for Young would be to Steve Nash – Young's favorite player growing up – only with a quicker trigger. Both are visionary passers who can create open looks from nothing and absolutely cripple defenses in the pick-and-roll. Still, Nash was also an elite shooter, even if he didn't take many 3s. There's something to be said for the impact a deep range and willingness to let it fly have on bending defenses out of shape. But Young doesn't quite have the accuracy yet. Nash was a late bloomer, but in his prime racked up more assists and fewer turnovers than Young does now (there’s still plenty of time for Young to become a better caretaker of the ball).
Purely as a shooter, the closest active analogue for Young is probably Damian Lillard, who doesn't shoot an elite percentage from 3, but takes deep and difficult attempts that raw percentages don't capture. Young may never be a 40 percent 3-point shooter, but his ability to pull up and hit from anywhere gives him the gravity and impact of one. What makes Curry singular is his combination of distance, difficulty, volume, and accuracy. No player has ever meshed the four so well, which makes comparing any player to Steph a flawed juxtaposition.
What Young is doing is possible because of Curry
Young, in just his second NBA season, is averaging 28 points and 8.7 assists per game – all greater marks than Curry posted in his second year. But it’s important to distinguish how different the NBA looked in Curry's rookie year. The average pace hovered around 93 possessions per 48 minutes in 2010; that figure has risen over nine possessions in the last 10 seasons. Danny Granger led the NBA in 3-point attempts that season with 7.1 per game. This season, 16 players are shooting at least that many. Pulling up for jumpers and launching preposterously deep 3s wasn't commonplace until Curry made it so.
Trae is an evolutionary version of a common NBA archetype: a pick-and-roll maestro with a nice stroke and preternatural feel for the game. Steph twisted that archetype into something entirely unprecedented and still unmatched. He shot a combined 43.9 percent from 3 over his first two seasons – around his career average – while Young is currently sitting at 33.5 percent for his career with most of his second year still to play. Atlanta’s point guard has a career true shooting percentage of 54.7; Steph’s has never slipped below 56.8 (his rookie year) for a full season.
Young shoulders a heavier responsibility at a younger age, but that’s due in part to the fact that NBA coaches now better understand how to use dynamic point guards. Curry was an important part of Golden State's offense as a rookie, but not the focal point he should have been. Lloyd Pierce didn’t need to figure out that Young should have the ball in his hands as often as possible; it was evident from the moment he entered the league because other point guards had already taken care of that learning process.
Tom Ziller of SB Nation smartly analyzed how Curry and James Harden paved the way for players like Young, who entered the league with license to shoot from anywhere. He notes that Young has streaks of both Curry and Harden's games in him, and that they made Young's nuclear production possible in the first place.
"In the grand scheme of NBA evolution, Curry and Harden are more similar than they are different: they have together (and with some other modern stars like Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson) brought the three-pointer to the level of equal or even superior to shots at the rim. They have reoriented the basketball court – stretched it out, created more breathing room on it for offenses and far less for defenses. Young is a son of that, not of either superstar exclusively.
Young plays in a vastly different NBA than Curry did at the start of his career. Any argument that ignores that context doesn't do justice to Curry's impact on the game or the new wave of players working in the landscape he helped create.
It doesn't really matter if Young is better than Curry was at this age
What makes Curry and Nash special isn't how good they were early in their first two seasons; it's how much they improved in the subsequent years to become two-time MVP winners. They are massive outliers who took exponential leaps forward relatively late in their careers. Virtually no one saw a single MVP-caliber season as a possible outcome for Nash or Curry. Each posted at least three, because they developed in ways that couldn’t be anticipated. Even players with the physical tools to ascend to stardom rarely realize their best-case scenarios. It's the reason not every young, reticent wing drafted midway through the first round is the next Kawhi Leonard, or the next gangly, foreign-born forward will become Giannis Antetokounmpo or Pascal Siakam.
There's a good argument to be made that Trae Young is better now than Curry was in his second year and ample evidence suggesting he could be a perennial All Star. He may well take the same sort of leap that Curry made possible. But players who do – especially small guards – are anomalies, not trend-setters. Debating which player is better at 21 just misses the point.
