ATLANTA — “RBC” is what Quin Snyder keeps telling Jalen Johnson. “Read before catch.”
It’s a simple reminder to help Johnson make quick decisions when he catches the ball, and one the Atlanta Hawks’ rising star forward has used in what is increasingly a co-starring role next to Trae Young in the Atlanta offense. Together, they’ve made the Hawks a quick-passing, fast-breaking team that has papered over other deficiencies to great effect.
Let’s start with the key scene. It’s one that’s played out over and over in Atlanta this season: Young draws two defenders above the 3-point line, moves the ball to a rolling Johnson in the lane, then watches Johnson make a quick decision that ends in a basket for him or a teammate.
Here, for instance, Clint Capela ends up with a dunk.
“It’s simple,” Johnson said of his work after getting pocket passes from Young. “You gotta think RBC, that’s all [Snyder] tells me, ‘0.5’, quick decisions.
“Turn, face the basket, read the spot in the corner and then look opposite. It’s kind of like (how) quarterbacks have progressions with receivers. I have progressions in the pocket, and I read those.”
Snyder is in his third season at the helm of the Hawks, counting the quarter of a season in 2022-23 after the Hawks lured him from the beach in Costa Rica. But this is the first in which it feels like something actually changed with his team.
Johnson’s development into Young’s offensive co-pilot also was born of necessity a bit, and we’ll talk more about that in a minute. But first, the big picture: After two seasons of watching Young and Dejounte Murray play your-turn, my-turn with the offense — while nobody took turns on defense — Hawks games look very different this year. Atlanta (18-15) is in the midst of perhaps its most enjoyable stretch of basketball since the 2021 run to the Eastern Conference finals, having won four straight and 11 of 15.
The Hawks woke up Tuesday in sole possession of fifth place in the East, a position few expected them to be in before the season. They won consecutive games against the Cleveland Cavaliers, beat the Celtics in Boston and the Knicks in New York. They unexpectedly made the semifinals of the NBA Cup before falling to the Milwaukee Bucks (another team they’ve beaten). They’re gaining steam after a bumpy 7-11 start that included two defeats to the lowly Washington Wizards.
The proof of concept for Atlanta’s change was the Hawks’ 50-point fourth-quarter eruption Dec. 26 against the Chicago Bulls, the first time in three decades a team dropped 50 in the fourth. And the biggest basket came on a play where Johnson was the ballhandler and Young the screener, setting up another Capela lob dunk.
You might have thought trading Murray for ball-thieving defensive ace Dyson Daniels would have made the Hawks a deeply heliocentric team around Young, especially as the next most frequent possession user from last season, Bogdan Bogdanović, has been hurt most of the year and ineffective when he does play.
Instead, the opposite has happened. Young, Johnson and ace sixth man De’Andre Hunter have operated more as an ensemble cast, riffing off one another and magnifying their strengths — a previously foreign concept in the Murray-Young backcourt.
Hunter is having by far the best season of his career and leads the team in points per minute by a wide margin; he’s just two missed free throws away from a 50-40-90 stat line. But with two-thirds of his buckets being assisted, he’s had plenty of help.
That’s where the Young-Johnson partnership comes back into play. Again, this was partly by necessity. Put simply, Young can’t do it all by himself these days. His scoring and shooting marks had declined the previous two seasons from his career highs in 2021-22, but this year has been a more noticeable dip. He’s leading the league in assists with 12.1 per game, but his 55.7 true shooting percentage and 18.0 PER are his lowest since his rookie year, and his turnover rate is a career high.
You can blame that partly on the league steadily legislating away some of Young’s favorite foul-grifting tricks, but he’s also had a harder time getting downhill than he did three years ago His 45.8 percent mark on 2s is a career low, and his average shot distance of 17.4 feet this season and 17.6 a season earlier is a marked increase from earlier in his career (it was 15.3 in the conference finals season of 2020-21, for instance). For the first time, more of Young’s shots are 3s than 2s.
To some extent, that’s a justifiable reaction by defenses to Young’s prowess and the Hawks’ still-iffy perimeter shooting around him. Teams are blitzing the crap out of Young any time he gets a ball screen, as in the clip above, but that’s not the entire story.
According to Synergy Sports, Young is producing 0.853 points per play on isolations this season, compared to 0.967 and 0.951 the previous two seasons. Certain moments from the season stand out in this regard, where gaining separation hasn’t been quite as easy. Against the Miami Heat on Saturday, for instance, Young had two different chances to blow past Haywood Highsmith with an open lane to the rim but couldn’t quite turn the corner on either:
Here’s the flip side, though: Even as Young struggles through his worst season in some aspects, he’s having his best in other, less measurable ways. Not exactly a Teammate of the Year candidate earlier in his career, Young has made strides to be more of a leader — walking into news conferences calling out Hunter and Johnson for their play and pushing them for postseason awards, for instance.
He’s also made notably more effort at the defensive end, something that he began to ramp up last season but has been more consistent with in 2024-25. Young will always be small and vulnerable, especially when he’s the low man on the opposite side, but his effort is worlds different from four years ago. In a related story, the Hawks are 16th in defense — by far the best mark of the Young era — and for the first time, he leads the team in net rating.
That, in turn, has helped some of the vibes up and down the roster. Winning helps, obviously, but with the ball pinging, multiple players contributing and Young adjusting, the Hawks feel more cohesive than at just about any point since the conference finals run.
Watch here, for instance, as the Atlanta bench lost it when reserve guard Garrison Mathews dunked in a game for the first time since late in the 2022-23 season.
“They’ll probably never see it again, “ Mathews said. “They were probably just as surprised as I was.”
Having the right veterans around has helped, too. Mathews and Larry Nance Jr. have made big recent contributions after hardly playing for long stretches, while Nance in particular has been cited by team sources as a plus behind the scenes.
“My career has been up and down, so I’m used to it,” Mathews said. “Being ready is important because, at some point, you’re gonna get minutes. It’s just what you do with it.”
But let’s swing this back to the main part of our story. Young is, in some ways, doing more by doing less. He’s driving just as often as he did a year ago per NBA tracking data but passing much more frequently.
His willingness to get off the ball early has allowed the Hawks to amp up the pace to the league’s third-fastest and led to numerous quick strikes after opponent makes. Perhaps Young’s best one, a full-speed lefty dime to Johnson seconds after a Heat make on Saturday, was lost to history, as the camera operator didn’t recover until Johnson was laying the ball in.
Young is also up to fourth in the NBA in passes made per game. The more amazing part is the player directly ahead of him in third place is … Johnson.
Yes, some of those are inbound passes, but Johnson’s 39.7 frontcourt touches per game is eighth among non-centers. With no real backup point guard on the roster (might want to make a few calls on that between now and Feb. 6, guys), Johnson is the biggest part of a committee that runs the offense in the non-Young minutes.
Between them, the Hawks lead the NBA in potential assists, according to NBA tracking data, and only two teams have a higher percentage of passes turn into dimes. It’s made up for some other clear deficiencies — no post game, Young’s struggles, a paucity of 3-point threats and periodic rashes of turnovers — to surprisingly keep the Hawks in the thick of the playoff race.
The next test is to see how well this travels. Atlanta began a 13-day slog of a road trip on Sunday night with a rout of the spiraling Toronto Raptors, but the opposition gets much tougher from here, with the Denver Nuggets, the two L.A. teams and Phoenix over the next five games. Only seven of the Hawks’ 22 games between now and the All-Star break are at home.
Things also won’t get any easier on the injury front after Nance broke his right hand in the Miami game. He’ll likely be out a month or so based on the history of other players with his injury.
Can the Hawks stay in the East’s top six all year, ahead of the likes of the Bucks, Heat and Sixers? It will be a major challenge. But with Atlanta’s newfound identity, it no longer feels silly to ask the question out loud.
(Photo of Trae Young and Jalen Johnson: Elsa / Getty Images)
