Hawks fans have said “Trae isn’t a bad defender anymore” for the last 4 years 😭😭

Isn’t this a pretty consistent trend throughout his career? He’s defensively terrible. It’s basically just a question of if it’s historic levels of awful or just one of the worst defenders in the league terrible.

Yeah. The OP stat is insane cherry picking with a small sample size. They’re comparing Trae’s 8 games to the team’s rest of the season. If you look at the individual games he has played, he does not have an outlier bad drtg in any of them compared to the rest of the team.

He is not a good defender, but this stat is just ridiculous. He is not the sole reason they just gave up 152 points to Chicago.

I still like him on the Spurs

I stand by the fact he’d be the perfect player for the magic. Look at what Desmond Bane is doing, imagine if they had Trae’s playmaking too

Dude is tiny and has added zero muscle. He needs that Bane diet

He’s like 140 lbs and 6’0

his effort is actually kind of decent, he picked tre jones up full court last game iirc

he just sucks at defense unfortunately 

I would guess both.

Mostly lack of effort

It’s the 8 game sample size

your fault for almost being convinced by shitty biased reddit takes

It would help if ppl actually watched the games instead of just basing it on reddit takes.

This team struggled defensively when he wasn’t even on the court

Same argument given when it comes to Jokic. 

I wanted the Spurs to trade for Trae with the ATL picks. I was down voted to hell by the Hawks sub. I’m glad they didn’t because we got the equivalent in Fox for far, far less.

It’s hilariously sad

It’s possible that multiple things can be true

For reference Luka’s is 117.5 this year

Man does what he can, tries to get steals at least to compensate a bit, but the size disadvantage just gets to him.

Reed Sheppard suffers a lot from this as well, you see him getting those stocks sometimes but usually when the teams get the switch on him it’s just drives to the rim on a whim.

Luka is more like Harden, he has some good strength so he’s a decent post defender and he usually doesn’t get beat in the initial action. Once you make him work on defense though the speedy guards just blitz by him on a consistent basis.

You need elite rim protectors for these guys, they need to at least funnel players to the rim protectors. Luka did that quite nicely when he had Gafford and Lively behind him.

There’s a thing that happens where some players get tagged as bad defenders and then all bad defenders are considered equally bad.

But that’d be like looking at, I dunno, Luka and Jamal Murray and saying they’re both good offensive players, so they’re equally good on that end of the floor. Which we all completely understand is ludicrous.

That’s how it always is on here lmao. People who don’t watch any games or do any research and just take these posts at face value

It can work if you have length and effort around him and if he’s good enough on offense to be worth it. Neither are true at the moment.

He’s played 8 games and 6 of those have been Bulls x3, Nets, Hornets, and Pacers.

There’s no hiding behind that schedule.

Kyrie is not an exception though. Cavs were terrible the first several seasons and only got good once LeBron came back

allen iverson is typing

Kyrie wasn’t no defense when he was younger. Was still probably below average, but he was quicker, put in more effort and was great at reading pass lanes

The worst thing is his lack of effort rubs off on everyone else. 

The question is who would trade for him

He needs to be paid and he’s a guy who has to have high usage to have value, while not doing enough with that usage to push you over the edge. I’m sure there’s more than a few Texas that straight view him as a negative asset

Would need to be a team with length for days around him. Magic maybe? But Suggs is so valuable there I don’t know how you take minutes away from him

Trade to whom? And for what? Potato maybe. His value is like Lavine’s, no one trading for them, even Hornets and Wizards learned their lessons.