{"id":393620,"date":"2026-01-05T18:05:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-05T18:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/393620\/"},"modified":"2026-01-05T18:05:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-05T18:05:10","slug":"does-jaylen-brown-have-a-real-case-for-nbas-best-two-way-player-nbc-sports-boston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/393620\/","title":{"rendered":"Does Jaylen Brown have a real case for NBA\u2019s best two-way player? \u2013 NBC Sports Boston"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fresh off matching his career high in scoring with a 50-point outburst against the Los Angeles Clippers<\/a> on Saturday night, Jaylen Brown boldly declared his belief that he is the best two-way player in the world.<\/p>\n

Brown is now averaging 30.1 points per game for the Boston Celtics this season, ranking fourth in the NBA in scoring. Few would quibble with any suggestion that he’s among the very elite at scoring the basketball.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And with all due respect to the 500 NBA players lingering down the list of the league\u2019s leading scorers (and to all the recreational hoopers worldwide still waiting for their call-ups), it seems fair to suggest that Brown simply needs to be the best defender among the NBA\u2019s other top bucket-getters to lay claim to the “best two-way player in the world” championship belt.<\/p>\n

For the purposes of this exercise, we\u2019re narrowing our field to Brown\u2019s chief competition for another lofty NBA honor: Most Valuable Player. We\u2019re crunching his defensive metrics compared to Oklahoma City\u2019s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the Los Angeles Lakers\u2019 Luka Doncic, Detroit\u2019s Cade Cunningham, New York\u2019s Jalen Brunson, and Philadelphia\u2019s Tyrese Maxey.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Squeezed out here are Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic, and Victor Wembanyama, who are all uncertain to reach the NBA\u2019s 65-game threshold for award voting due to injuries. All three could make strong cases as the best two-way players in the world based on their overall impacts, but the top two-way player has to hit 65 games for this debate.<\/p>\n

The case for Brown centers on the caliber of opponent he frequently defends. His declaration came Saturday night after he logged a game-high in matchup time against a previously white-hot Kawhi Leonard, and limited him to nine points on 3-of-7 shooting over seven minutes of matchup time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Over at the stat-crunching site BBall Index, they group players into six tiers based on usage to monitor how much time players spend defending various tiers of talent. A high usage rate doesn\u2019t immediately confirm superstar talent, but if you look at this year\u2019s usage leaders<\/a>, there are very few outliers among the stars who dominate the top of the list.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Brown not only logs the highest percentage of Tier 1 matchups compared to our field, but nearly 57 percent of his total defensive time is spent against players in Tiers 1-3. By comparison, that number sits just south of 36 percent for someone like Brunson (the worst among our candidates). <\/p>\n

The closest player to Brown in terms of defending Tiers 1-3 is Cunningham, with 44.7 percent of his assignments there.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The folks at BBall Index also have a metric tracking the percentage of defensive possessions that players specifically match up against the opponent’s star player. <\/p>\n

Yet again, Brown is decidedly ahead of the field:\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Simply logging a bunch of time against elite players doesn\u2019t necessarily confirm defensive ability. But it does show some level of trust. In attempt to gauge how our MVP candidates are faring as defenders, we decided to examine how these players are faring with their defensive assignments compared to expected output.<\/p>\n

Here’s a look at how the MVP candidates are impacting shot efficiency this season, with defensive field goal percentage (DFG%), expected output by the defended player (xFG%), and the resulting differential. Also listed is where the player ranks in differential among the 127 qualified players who have defended an average of 10+ shots per game with 25+ games played this season.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Defensive data is noisy, and how the NBA assigns \u201cclosest defender\u201d can often be maddening. ESPN\u2019s Bobby Marks noted in a social media post Sunday<\/a> that, based on GeniusIQ tracking, Brown is holding opponents to 39.37 percent shooting as the closest defender, ranking second among the 111 players who have defended at least 300 field goal attempts this year. Brown ranked behind only Oklahoma City\u2019s Cason Wallace, but one spot ahead of Wembanyama.<\/p>\n

Given his willingness to defend top opposing talent and the individual success he\u2019s enjoyed this season, it doesn\u2019t seem far-fetched for Brown to declare himself the best two-way player in the world. Given the difficulty in quantifying defensive impact, it\u2019s a very subjective claim.<\/p>\n

The bigger question to us is whether Brown\u2019s impact on both ends of the court this season might vault him further into the MVP conversation. For most of the year, he\u2019s lived on the periphery. But the injury woes for Jokic and Wembanyama have opened the door a bit for Brown\u2019s contention.<\/p>\n

The Celtics are outkicking most preseason expectations, and Brown is spearheading their play at both ends of the floor. Saturday\u2019s outburst put him on the MVP radar for anyone who was sleeping on his impact this season.<\/p>\n

The challenge for him is to keep it up for another 50 games and see if voters will consider him for the season\u2019s loftiest award, because he is in fact one of the best two-way players in the game.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fresh off matching his career high in scoring with a 50-point outburst against the Los Angeles Clippers on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":393621,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[557],"tags":[64,63,1664,210476,15610,590,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-393620","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nba","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-boston-celtics","11":"tag-chris-forsberg","12":"tag-jaylen-brown","13":"tag-nba","14":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/393621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}