Trae Young: Five reasons the ex-Sooner superstar will make it in NBA

He works very hard at his game, and the game has rewarded him

Trae Young’s 2017-18 college season was hardly a fluke. You don’t score 20-plus points in nearly 80 percent of your games out of luck.

Some experts believe Young is undersized, both in height limitation at 6-foot-1 and in strength, which could disadvantage him at the next level. No one, including his father, Rayford Young, who was a pretty good ball player in his own right at the college level, thought Trae would have as outstanding a season as he did in his very first season of Division I basketball and in perhaps the best conference in college basketball.

Even though Rayford was considered one of the better guards in the Big 12 when he played at Texas Tech in the late 1990s, he fell short of his NBA dreams, settling instead for a beneficial career overseas.

Rayford vowed to do everything he could to help Trae overcome the limitations that he faced as a player with dreams of playing in the NBA.

Instead of having Trae work almost exclusively on his shooting skills as a youth, Rayford had his son doing a lot of passing and ball-handling drills. They also worked on speed and agility drills. Rayford reached out to people he knew in the NBA and had them send videos of some of the better players in the NBA, breaking down their games, so Trae could see and learn from their technique and execution.

Trae and his dad watched the videos together on many a night while he was growing up and into high school.

All the hard work has definitely paid off, as evidenced by Trae’s outstanding numbers and earning All-American status as a first-year college player. Difficult to imagine that he won’t be able to transfer those superlative shooting, ball handling and distribution skills into a productive NBA career.

One thing is for sure. You know that dad is going to be right there in Trae’s corner, just as he always has, pushing him and spurring him on to greatness.