A few weeks before this past June's NBA draft, I was talking with a couple scouts about last year's class. With their rookie seasons in the bag, who fell short of expectations? Who surpassed them? Both scouts spotlighted Trae Young as the headline choice for the latter group. Not that they didn't expect Young to be good. They did. Almost everyone did. Clearly the Hawks did. They traded Luka Doncic for him for crying out loud. 

But few people expected Young to average 19 points and eight assists out of the gate, which is something only two other rookies in NBA history -- Oscar Robertson and Damon Stoudamire -- have accomplished. One scout thought Young's defense would be too bad for his offense to overcome. He was right about Young's defense. It was terrible. But the offense was SO good, and that was with Young, a long-range sniper all his life, shooting just 32 percent from three and 41 percent overall. 

You could only imagine how good he was going to be once those shots started falling. 

Fast forward to the first two games of this season, and suffice it to say, Young's shots are falling. After a 39-point, nine-assist, seven-rebound showing in a win over the Magic on Saturday, Young is shooting 55 percent from beyond the arc. He's firing from everywhere. Off the dribble. Off the catch. He's getting to the rim in various fashions -- with a first-step burst, with nifty ball-handling and creative finishes, with a veteran's feel for space and how not just to create it, but to close it as he gets into defenders' bodies and eliminates any shot-blocking leverage they might have. Just check the numbers:

Yes, it's only two games. But it's two games nobody else in the history of the sport has strung together to start a season, and all of a sudden we almost have no choice but to start getting ahead of ourselves. Is Young already on track to become an All-Star this year? Are the Hawks, who won just 29 games last season, a legitimate playoff threat? 

Based on what we've seen so far, you'd have to answer yes to both these questions, but obviously we'll have a clearer picture in six weeks. Maybe a few months. Indeed, if we jumped to conclusions based on what we've seen through the first five days of the season, the Suns, at 2-1 fresh off a win over the Clippers, might be a playoff team, while the Warriors might be the worst team in the league. Neither of those things is likely to end up being true. 

But this Hawks thing isn't coming out of nowhere. Trae Young certainly isn't coming out of nowhere. If anything, both the Hawks' and Young's early season success feel like reasonable progressions. Travis Schlenk has put together a team full of versatile, smart guys who can all shoot, dribble and pass, and who are collectively suited to complement the emerging brilliance of Young. A playoff berth this season would certainly reflect an expedited timeline, but you won't find anyone around the league who doesn't think Atlanta will be in the playoffs sooner rather than later. 

As for Young, the time is now. He arguably outplayed Doncic over the second half of last season. His confidence is through the roof. Given his skillset and the no-touch rules of the day, he's a bomb waiting to explode. His video-game ball-handling and passing and his parking-lot shooting range are tools of inevitability. But what's setting him apart perhaps earlier than people thought is his feel for everything that's being thrown at him. 

It took years before Stephen Curry and Damian Lillard had to deal with the blitzing, trapping defenses Young is already seeing on a nightly basis. Both those guys had to go through visible growing pains, and surely Young isn't immune to the occasional hiccup. He has 11 turnovers through the first two games. That said, the poise and counter-attacking instincts he's shown bely his inexperience. 

He knows when to make the simple pass out of double teams and let his gravity do the work. Look how discombobulated Orlando's defense is on this possession, which starts with two guys having to rush Young 30 feet from the hoop, and everything systematically breaks down from there as they're too late to scramble back into recovery.

There's also a flip side to this doubling coin. You can give the ball up TOO easily, TOO early, but Young also knows when to keep his dribble alive when help defenders show but don't commit the double. These are split-second decisions. Young feels when defenders are leaning, anticipating the ball screen, and he quickly rejects it and crosses over the other way. 

He's moving better without the ball than he did last season, though this part of his game still needs work, and it's something Lloyd Pierce and Schlenk have been drilling into him from the moment the Hawks drafted him. Young isn't settling for long bombs as he did too often last season. He's taking them off creation, in rhythm, rather than when he's simply failed to even try creating something else. He's barely 21 years old and already he's in pretty much complete control of his game. 

Will it lead to an All-Star nod this season? Will the Hawks make the playoffs? 

Let revisit this in six weeks. 

But so far, things are looking pretty good.