Trae Young vs. Grayson Allen: The NBA Summer League Dust-Up We Absolutely Needed

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Last night in Salt Lake, the Utah Jazz hosted the Atlanta Hawks in an NBA Summer League game.  That fact, in and of itself, is not headline-worthy in any sense.  What is headline-worthy, however, is what happened around the 8:35 mark in the 3rd quarter.

Trae Young, the fifth overall draft pick out of Oklahoma and frequent shooter of the basketball, came off a screen at the top of the key and looked to be gathering himself to fire off a likely errant three point attempt before he came face-to-face with the goon squad viceroy himself: Duke product Grayson Allen.

What happened next will likely surpass every sequence and every play to come during the 2018-19 NBA regular season.  Young pump faked and tried to move left and, in the middle of trying to create space, became tangled with Allen.  As the two mangled their bodies together in awkward fashion, Allen continued to fall, spectacularly, up and into Young resulting Young becoming incensed and throwing almost-blows towards Allen.  The whole series of events lasted for no more than five or six seconds before officials and teammates intervened.

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Here’s why this is significant: Trae Young and Grayson Allen, albeit for entirely different reasons, are nigh impossible to root for.  Young was anointed the next great scoring threat after one year at Oklahoma where he averaged 27.4 points per game as a freshman.  For the first half of the 2017-18 season, Young was a scoring firestorm.  His three point attempts came from seemingly every angle and from every conceivable distance on the floor and seemed to fall, more often than not.  The coverage grew.  And grew.  And grew to such an extent that you wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if ESPN cut into one of Daenerys’ monologues on Game of Thrones to break the news that yes, in fact, Trae Young had brushed his teeth and was now laying in bed.  Then Oklahoma collapsed, Young ran out of gas trying to score 1,000 points a night and the media powers that be continued to force-feed us Trae Young coverage in every form and fashion.  There was no escape, no refuge.  You could hear cries of desperation from every family room from Boston to Boise.

Further East, Grayson Allen was starting for a Duke squad that, unlike the Sooners, got better and better as the season went on.  Allen, for his part, was a big contributor to the Blue Devils over the course of four years which saw Duke make four straight tournament appearances and win a national title in 2015.  But what most people will remember about Grayson Allen was the way he managed to trip, fall, tangle and lampoon his way into ESPN highlight reels.  Duke was must-watch basketball because, beyond Marvin Bagley being awesome, you just knew that Grayson Allen was just moments away from doing something.  There were pressers, there were op-eds trying to ascertain what exactly Grayson Allen was doing and what coach K was doing to psychologically mine and extract the frantic energy from his star forward’s body.  Ultimately, most of us grasped for answers that weren’t there.  To be fair to Allen, he played for Duke.  When you’re a vassal to the evil empire, you aren’t gifted many sympathy points to start with.

So, last night, the culmination of the Trae Young hype machine and the Grayson Allen cabal of WTF collided in epic fashion and TV never gets that good, if ever.  After the most unwatchable NBA finals series in history and an even more face/palm-esque offseason that saw the Warriors add another stone to their already replete Infinity Gauntlet, it’s plays like this that actually make me want to turn my attention back to the NBA.

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Trae Young very well could turn into a star.  Conversely, he could also prove to be an utter bust.  Both Young and Allen are merely two games into their NBA careers so the sample size is small, to say the least.  But in age where everyone from Skip Bayless to Bob from accounting is musing that the NBA is soft, is stale, lacks the aggression and virility of golden ages past, it’s refreshing to see two rookies get into it and, god willing, form the makings of a legitimate rivalry.  It further sweetens the deal that this particular dust-up featured two of the more openly divisive and hotly debated new additions to the league.

Trae Young better steel his mind as Grayson Allen knows every eight button combination in the psyche-out play book.  My hope is that Adam Silver and NBA ownership amend the schedule to have the Hawks and the Jazz play 16 times a year.  In the event of overtime, Allen and Young would meet at center court in full combat padding and proceed to beat the holy hell out of each other with melee weapons until one of them throws in the towel.  I would watch every single second of those games.  Lebron and his ongoing quest to unseat the Warriors be damned, that’s for the birds.  This is the kind of basketball I want and need to see.

 

CATEGORY: NBA