Trae Young's frustration boils over late, gets ejected in Atlanta's play-in loss to Orlando

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Trae Young's frustration boils over late, gets ejected in Atlanta's play-in loss to Orlando

2025-04-16 11:24 Last Updated At：11:51

Atlanta star guard Trae Young threw a hard pass and showed off a little fancy ballhandling. Ordinarily, those are good things.

Doing it against referees was frowned upon, however — and the NBA said he was “making a mockery of the game."

Young's frustration with how the Hawks' play-in game at Orlando was going finally boiled over with 4:47 left Tuesday night, when he earned a pair of technical fouls — one for rifling a chest pass at referee James Williams, then the second moments later when he deflected the ball with his foot and then wouldn't give it up promptly to referee Pat Fraher.

“Trae Young received his first unsportsmanlike technical foul for throwing the ball at a game official," Williams told a pool reporter after the game.

Williams was then asked why Young got the second technical.

“He received his second unsportsmanlike technical foul for kicking the ball away and making a mockery of the game as we were attempting to shoot the free throw for the first technical foul and by rule when the player receives two unsportsmanlike fouls he’s ejected from the game,” Williams said.

The Hawks were down by 22 at the time and went on to lose 120-95. And postgame, Young said he did what he did to make a statement on behalf of his teammates like Dyson Daniels in a game where the Hawks thought it wasn't an even whistle.

“Sometimes when I take my frustration out on the refs it's not just for me,” Young said. “It's for my teammates. I see Dyson Daniels going; he may not be a household name yet, but he deserves the same amount of respect as some of these other guys. If you see a foul, you should call a foul. That's pretty much all it was for me.”

Orlando was whistled for 25 personal fouls to Atlanta's 18 in the game, and the Hawks took 34 free throws while the Magic took 27.

“They’re a physical team. I’ve had two teammates hurt this year in one game against them," Young said. "I’m not going to call them dirty players or anything like that. I think they have a lot of talented players. But a lot of the plays and the moments ... it's not even necessarily basketball at that point. I think that's where the frustration got."

The Hawks will play host to either Chicago or Miami on Friday to decide the No. 8 seed in the Eastern Conference and who'll play No. 1 Cleveland in Round 1 of the playoffs. The Bulls and Heat play an elimination game in Chicago on Wednesday.

“I’m not going to let the refs frustrate me like that in our next game,” Young said. "I know we've got to win or go home next game, and I’m going to be ready.”

Orlando, with the win, earned the No. 7 seed and a Round 1 matchup with No. 2 seed Boston, the defending NBA champion.

“The importance of him keeping his cool, he addressed that already with our team," Hawks coach Quin Snyder said. "He's quick to own that. But the game was out of hand at that point anyway.”

Young led all scorers with 28 points.

AP NBA: https://apnews.com/NBA

US Rep. Haley Stevens enters race to represent Michigan in US Senate

2025-04-22 18:20 Last Updated At：18:30

LANSING, Mich. (AP) — Fourth-term U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens has launched her run for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat on Tuesday with a video focused on the economic crisis caused by President Donald Trump’s volatile tariffs policies.

Walking through a lot full of pickup trucks and SUVs to make the case that she’s the candidate who will protect the state's critical auto industry, she says “His chaos and reckless tariffs are putting tens of thousands of Michigan jobs at risk.”

“We absolutely need to put an end to the chaos agenda,” Stevens said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Stevens, a Democrat, is the fourth well-known candidate to join what is quickly becoming one of the nation’s most-watched Senate races, with the Republicans' 53-47 majority at stake in a battleground state Trump won in November.

Quickly a top possible contender after Democratic Sen. Gary Peters chose not to seek reelection, Stevens will oppose State Sen. Mallory McMorrow and former gubernatorial candidate and public health official Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic primary.

On the Republican side, former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers is trying again after losing to Democrat Elissa Slotkin in the state’s 2024 U.S. Senate race by just 19,000 votes.

Stevens will seek to defend her tenure in Congress in the Democratic primary as McMorrow and El-Sayed establish themselves as outsiders. McMorrow is known nationally for her viral moments and El-Sayed has the backing of Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Before Congress, Stevens served on the U.S. Treasury's auto task force following the 2008 financial crisis as President Barack Obama's administration bailed out General Motors and Chrysler. She said Trump's taxes on imports are creating another crisis for the Michigan economy, which rides or stalls based on the auto industry's condition.

“People are very much at a boiling point around the uncertainty of tariffs,” she said.

Stevens has been an ardent voice from Michigan against Trump’s tariffs, particularly those leveraged against Canada. She said they are disruptive to the auto industry and are having a “dizzying” effect on companies of all sizes whose leaders cannot make plans as Trump repeatedly changes positions.

However, Stevens is among the Democrats who have sought to clarify they are not inherently anti-tariff. Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer recently gave a speech in Washington calling for tariffs to be used like a “scalpel.” Shawn Fain, president of the nation’s top autoworker union based in Michigan, endorsed Trump’s auto tariffs as leverage aimed at bringing back domestic manufacturing jobs.

Stevens, who sits on the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, said she too would support tariffs that are strategically designed to make America competitive with China's manufacturing, but said Trump’s approach is too chaotic to be effective.

“What I do not support are shoot-by-the-hip, erratic tariffs that give us no rules of the road or path to understand how we can succeed,” Stevens said.

Stevens sailed to victory in her last election representing Oakland County, a key voting block in the battleground state. After flipping what had been a reliably Republican seat in 2018 and narrowly defeating her opponent in 2020, she cruised to reelection in 2022 and 2024 after her district was redrawn and became more favorable to Democrats.