The Trae Young Era Is Over, and Jalen Johnson Is Already Making Atlanta Forget

The most consequential week of the Atlanta Hawks' season didn't start with a win or a loss. It started with a phone call.

On Wednesday, January 8, the Hawks officially ended seven and a half seasons of Trae Young basketball, sending their four-time All-Star point guard to the Washington Wizards for CJ McCollum and Corey Kispert. No draft picks changed hands. A player who was averaging 19.3 points and 8.9 assists for Atlanta this season, who was the runner-up for Rookie of the Year and the face of the franchise since 2018, netted a veteran scorer and a sharpshooter. That's the deal.

The return will be debated for years. What matters more for the rest of this season is what happened next.

Two nights after the trade was completed, with McCollum and Kispert still in transit and only nine bodies available, the Hawks walked into Ball Arena and dismantled the Denver Nuggets 110-87. Then on Sunday they went to Chase Center and beat the Golden State Warriors 124-111, a game in which McCollum and Kispert both made their Atlanta debuts and the Hawks placed six players in double figures, three of them with 20 or more.

This is now the Jalen Johnson era. It was declared as much in Atlanta's own coverage after the Denver win, and the numbers back it up. In the 2025 season, Johnson averaged 22.5 points, 10.3 rebounds and 7.9 assists across 72 games while shooting nearly 49% from the field. That's not a complementary piece. That's a primary option, and one who is being asked to run the offense without the league's most demanding ball-handler sharing the floor.

The stylistic shift is real. Young's game was built on pull-up threes, foul drawing and pick-and-roll gravity. Without him, Atlanta's offense becomes more balanced and more democratic — Nickeil Alexander-Walker led the Warriors game with 24 points, Johnson added 23 and 11 boards, and Luke Kennard poured in 22. Alexander-Walker's length and athleticism was the exact thing Golden State's own beat writers credited for the loss. That's not a fluke of one hot night; it's what the roster now is.

What it means for the season is a team in transition, and the standings reflect that. Atlanta entered the Warriors game at 19-21, a team hovering just below .500 in the East. The Hawks have been a genuinely good Western Conference opponent this season — 19-11 against the West, with a +3.6 point differential and a .633 win percentage — while struggling to a 29-29 mark against their own conference. If a post-trade identity built on length, defense and balanced scoring travels, that split becomes a real weapon in a road-heavy stretch.

The risk is obvious too. Trading away a 27-year-old All-Star in his prime for two veterans without a single draft pick attached is a bet that Johnson's leap is permanent and that the locker room is better without the old hierarchy. It's also a bet that a nine-man roster can survive until reinforcements arrive. Early returns are encouraging, but two games is two games.

The Hawks chose a direction this week. For the first time in years, it doesn't run through Trae Young — and so far, that's looked less like a rebuild and more like a re-set.