Trae Young Should Be Permanently Banished From The NBA For This Move
I would say this is weakest, ticky-tack shit I have ever seen, but it's a nightly occurrence at this point. And it would be one thing if this was the first time it happened but Trae Young has built an NBA career on this garbage. This isnt a basketball play. He is not trying to shoot a regular shot. All he is doing is trying to leech a foul off the refs and drive me to the point of madness.
I mean just look at the freeze frame of his shooting motion. He stops, hangs in the air until the defender is close, and then kicks back his feet and leans backwards and to the left. TOTALLY naturally motion indeed...
And then this is Young's normal shooting motion…
Notice a difference? Yeah well the dog shit refs didn't and gave him the free throws.
Trae is 7th in the NBA in free throws attempted and I would estimate 75% of them are from bullshit like this. The other guys ahead of him - Embiid, Giannis, Luka, SGA - all actually get to the bucket and earn their free throws. The league HAS to stop rewarding this nonsense.
I thought earlier this season they were actually going to stop this stuff. Remember this?
And for a while it actually worked. The game flowed better and there was way less bullshit fouls that make you want to smash your TV with frying pan. Hell, it even got James Harden, the Godfather of drawing trash fouls, to adjust his game somewhat.
Harden is averaging just 6.5 free throws a game which is his lowest since 2011 and 2.5 less than he was shooting last season. Sure, Harden ceding the focus of the offense to Embiid has something to do with that too, but the early rule enforcement helped grease the skids on that change.
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And now we have young players openly admitting they are emulating these thieves of basketball viewing joy.
Banish Trae Young. Exile him, publicly humiliate him, and never let him back in the association. NBA basketball teeters on unwatchable for lots of folks and assholes like him doing garbage like this is a big part of the reason why.
It's bad enough we have to look at Trae Young's "family who took in a stray dog only to find out later it was actually a rat" hair every game, we shouldn't have to look at his ugly ass play too.