If you’ve ever watched professional soccer with a hardcore fan, you’ve likely experienced that odd moment when your viewing partner applauds a play that, to the casual eye, seems completely innocuous. It happens once or twice each match, often when a player dwells on the ball and draws in a defender or two before delivering a simple pass to a teammate.

“Que clase”—“what class”—a stunned commentator whispered after watching Barcelona legend Andres Iniesta release the ball. This moment is called la pausa—“the pause.” Spanish footballing culture, in particular, reveres the skill as one of the rarest and most valuable in the sport.

A good player can read the game and find the next pass. A great player waits until the exact moment when the defense is static and the recipient reaches the ideal position.

We don’t have a word for la pausa in basketball. Players can learn hesitation moves, hang dribbles and how to snake around a pick-and-roll. But we don’t have a term to describe those slight pauses that turn an open pass into a perfect one. We just know it when we see it, and we’ve been seeing it quite a lot in Atlanta Hawks games this season.

The Hawks are 27-49, fifth-worst in the NBA, with six meaningless games remaining. But tune into any of them, and you may spot that rare athletic intelligence that soccer fans can identify in an instant.

Atlanta has Trae Young, and Trae Young has la pausa.

Young is having a spectacular rookie season, averaging 19 points and catalyzing Atlanta’s offense. He’s also recovered the blistering shooting form that made him such a star at Oklahoma, canning 38.8 percent of his threes—many of them pull-up bombs—since the All-Star Break.

But his passing has impressed most of all. He’s averaging 7.9 dimes and has assisted a whopping 40.1 percent of Atlanta’s buckets when he’s on the floor. Only 24 rookies in NBA history have posted an assist rate above 35 percent (min. 1,000 minutes). Young ranks fourth on that list, above basketball sages like Chris Paul, Tim Hardaway, Andre Miller and Mark Jackson.

As Nekias Duncan detailed last week for SB Nation, the rookie can already make nearly any pass. He can even fling darts to the opposite corner—a rare tool for such a small guard. But when he sees fit, he augments those feeds with a distinctive pre-pass pause to manipulate defenses.

Sometimes it’ll happen on broken plays when he needs to usher an impromptu cutter into position.

Watch Young’s eyes during that first possession. He sees Vince Carter squaring up DeMarre Carroll and, recognizing the need to create an angle for the cut, holds up and backpedals, almost shepherding his teammate into the lane.

Salvaging awkward possessions has been one of the rookie’s main strengths this season, but la pausa has been most evident in the flow of standard pick-and-roll sets.

The Texas native is a puppeteer when opposing defenses are in drop coverage and he gets isolated against a big man. Lanky centers think they have him swallowed up––they often do, to be fair––so he’ll use their rim-protecting instincts against them.

He holds the ball out on a platter here, practically begging Mo Bamba to grab it out of his hands. The big fella, confused, mistimes his swipe at the rock. His momentum carries him back down as the ball goes up and hovers over his head for a simple catch and finish.

Look familiar?

But Young’s shooting will also frequently suck the screener’s defender out of the paint. He’ll work that gravity to his advantage, taking an extra dribble and hesitating for a half-second, which allows his roll man to reach the exact zone under the hoop the opposing big has just vacated.

Christian Wood (No. 35) is absolutely baffled in that clip. His job is to tag Dedmon and then retreat to the three-point line. But because of la pausa, the action is still alive after he completes the first task. Wood loiters in the paint for a moment, but he decides—just as coaches have likely always taught him—to rush back to the perimeter. Big mistake.

La pausa doesn’t freeze defenders like Wood. It revs defenders’ brains into overdrive. Where do I go? Who’s my man? In which direction should I lean?

In the time it takes them to answer one of those questions, let alone all three, the pause is over with the ball halfway down the hoop.

Young can also spray passes out to the perimeter when defenders make the opposite decision and clog the paint. But he’ll sometimes choose not to immediately hit the open shooter. He’ll hang in the air or dawdle with the ball to disrupt the timing of the helper’s tag-and-recover action.

Young draws Myles Turner all the way to the other side of the court here:

In the next clip, taken from a March 21 thriller against the Utah Jazz, he makes Joe Ingles take an extra step toward the hoop by hanging in the air and throwing the pass a beat late:

Young’s chess match with Rudy Gobert in that game was fascinating.

Gobert may be the NBA’s best at simultaneously guarding two people in the pick-and-roll. But a rampaging Young never let the reigning Defensive Player of the Year get comfortable. He toyed with the big man all game and dished out 11 assists, including this beauty:

He has the pocket pass right here:

But Gobert snuffs out those looks in his sleep. So the rook hesitates with a quick dribble and a head fake, careens all the way around his defender and creates an easy layup while the Frenchman is stuck in quicksand.  

Gobert looked skittish by the fourth quarter. He was so preoccupied with shutting off passing lanes that he let Young waltz into the paint during crunch time and take an unimpeded floater from three feet away. A scrawny, baby-faced 20-year-old had visibly frightened a hulking grown man with a 7’9” wingspan. The basket gave the Hawks the lead, and they never looked back.

Young’s mind-over-matter triumph was reminiscent of Barcelona’s dynastic heyday when Iniesta and Xavi Hernández dominated the midfield. Both players were graying, small and not particularly quick but tore through bigger teams with surgical passes, balletic footwork and a preternatural understanding of how X’s & O’s interact in real time. They not only found the open pass; they also had the patience to reject it in order to create an even better one, just like Young did against the Jazz.

La pausa is an advanced form of playmaking in soccer—and, indeed, basketball. Point guards often enter the league told they need to become more patient in the pick-and-roll. You can see them internalize that feedback. They’ll sluggishly amble around a screen and stop at the elbow, unaware of their next move. Boston Celtics point guard Terry Rozier has struggled through years of stalled dribbles at the free-throw line, resetting the same plays he just interrupted.

Some of those guys will start making the correct reads. They may even couple those reads with advanced pocket passes and crosscourt dimes. Only a select few––the Nashes, the Pauls, the Youngs––will make the final leap, dishing passes not in rhythm but mischievously out of it, when the defense is most exposed. Young has that talent at age 20.

On the hardwood, the importance of la pausa remains an open question. Many all-time greats never had it. Most of Young’s assists are more conventional fare, and he struggles with turnovers like so many other first-year playmakers. In the bigger picture, Atlanta’s core is several years and several ace defenders away from playoff contention.

But the kid is an itty bitty guard without the nuclear athleticism to compensate for his size. He relies on intelligence and elite skill to make Atlanta’s offense hum. His innate sense of timing is integral to his game.

I’d bet that in the waning moments of some crucial playoff matchup a long way down the road, Young will probe into the lane and set up a clutch John Collins alley-oop with a pinpoint lob. It will look routine. The commentators may even groan at the defense for missing a simple coverage in such a high-leverage moment.

It won’t be a missed coverage. It will come because Young dribbled in place, head up, icing the game for that crucial half-second before sending the ball skyward.

It will be la pausa.