Trae Young plans to work on his midrange game with Kobe Bryant this summer.
Young, 20, has made the midrange a focus of his offseason training.
Trae says he’s determined to “speed up the process” of turning the Atlanta Hawks into a winning team.
Per The Athletic:
“I think for (the Hawks), we heard a lot about the rebuilding and all about (how) it’s going to take a while for us to get back to winning and doing big things, but we just want to speed up the process,” Young said. “Obviously, we want to be in the playoffs. I think for us, watching the playoffs this year — especially for me — it hurt. Like, I wanted to play; I wanted to keep playing. So for me, that’s what I’ve been focusing on this summer, is how I can help my team, how I can build that camaraderie with this young team to help us get there and speed up the process that everybody is talking about.”
A typical workout for Young with [personal on-court trainer Alex] Bazzell consists of a lot of ball-screen work, isolation looks and touch finishes (runners and floaters) around the rim. The biggest addition Young has been adding to his repertoire this offseason has been a midrange game. Young and Bazzell have taken parts of what make Chris Paul, Kyrie Irving and Young’s favorite player, Steve Nash, so successful and have applied elements of their midrange game to his.
“We have talked a lot about keeping the defense honest,” Bazzell said. “Him being able to stretch the floor from 30 to 35 feet obviously makes it tough for defenses, and his quickness to get to the rim adds another element, but now we need to prepare for when teams try to take things away. The goal is for the Hawks to make the playoffs and in the next two to three years to make a run in the playoffs. I told him that the level of intensity on defense in the playoffs isn’t going to allow him to get to the rim or shoot 3s with ease. It’s just not how it works, so he has to add to his game.”
The plan is for Young, after he’s finished with his Team USA training camp obligations at the start of August, to travel to Newport Beach, Calif., before he has to report back to Atlanta on Aug. 19 and work on his midrange game with Kobe Bryant. Last summer, Bryant worked with Boston’s Jayson Tatum before the start of his sophomore season. Twenty-two percent of Tatum’s shot attempts this past season were considered long 2-point shots, ranking him in the 95th percentile.
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