The Hawks Don't Miss Trae Young. Daniels' 28 Just Made It Impossible to Pretend Otherwise.

I'm 89% sure the Hawks are better without Trae Young and the rest of you are just now catching up.

Simone wrote a beautiful piece this morning about Daniels playing like he had something to prove. She's right. But she's also doing the thing this city always does with the Hawks — hedging. "Might." "Cautious hope." "Whether it's enough."

Stop.

The Hawks are 37-24 without Trae Young this season. On pace for 44 wins. With Trae? They were 2-8. The math isn't complicated. The feelings are.

Dyson Daniels dropped 28 on Saturday night. His season average is 11.5. That's not a fluke — that's a ceiling revealing itself. Last year he won MIP and led the league in steals, and that wasn't even the important part. The important part was the revelation: Daniels became a triple-threat. Score, create, defend — all of it at a level nobody saw coming out of New Orleans. This year the three-ball hasn't fallen, but everything else has expanded. He's averaging 11.5, 6.6, and 6.0 with the kind of efficiency and defensive impact that doesn't fit in a highlight reel but shows up in wins. The Hawks lead the league in assists and rank 2nd in steals. That's not one player being brilliant. That's five players being connected.

Here's the part nobody wants to say out loud: the Hawks traded a franchise icon and got better immediately. Not eventually. Not "in the long run." Now. The Daniels-Johnson-Kuminga core doesn't need a ball-dominant guard creating everything. It needs what it has — a defensive engine who can also put up 28 when the system unlocks it.

Simone called it "progress, even if it doesn't feel like a parade."

I'm calling it what it is: the Hawks found their identity and it's scarier than anything Trae gave them in the last four years of play-in purgatory.

Tell me I'm wrong. Bookmark this. Come back in May.

I'll be right.