There\u2019s a discomfiting undercurrent to all this Jaylen Brown discourse.<\/p>\n
Brown has always forced people into opposing camps. He was drafted by the Boston Celtics in 2016, a year before they drafted Jayson Tatum, and the two of them have kept Boston relevant over the last decade. However, both stars have had to constantly refute rumors that they don\u2019t get along and don\u2019t play well together \u2014 up to the moment that Brown claimed the 2024 finals MVP after the Celtics won Banner 18<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cYeah, the doubters, they may be quiet now, but they will be back,\u201d Brown said that night. He was right.<\/p>\n Today, just a couple of months after Brown, with Tatum rehabbing a torn Achilles tendon for most of the regular season, led the Celtics to a 56-win regular season, the discourse is about whether the Celtics will trade him. Even more disconcerting, a debate rages \u2014 online and on ESPN, the two-pot cauldron upon which all hot takes must, today, seemingly boil \u2014 about whether Brown is valuable at all.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not \u201cJaylen Brown is a really good player who has some flaws.\u201d It\u2019s \u201cJaylen Brown ain\u2019t (bleep), and here\u2019s why no one in the league likes or wants him.\u201d<\/p>\n Let\u2019s get this out of the way. Whether it\u2019s just following the data, or holding fast to the notion that Brown takes too many tough shots and turns the ball over too much, or being upset at Brown\u2019s statement that this past year was \u201cthe most fun season\u201d<\/a> of his career even though Boston blew a 3-1 lead to the Philadelphia 76ers in the first round, or a critique of a player who is not bashful about expressing strong opinions on off-court topics<\/a> and putting his actions behind his words, it\u2019s wrong \u2014 loud wrong \u2014 to suggest that Jaylen Brown isn\u2019t a great player and a winner.<\/p>\n Is Jaylen Brown ready to leave Boston?<\/p>\n Zenab Keita and Esfandiar Baraheni<\/p>\n Players don\u2019t produce in a vacuum. Brown\u2019s individual numbers can be interpreted however one likes, but he\u2019s on the floor with four other players who benefit from the gravity he creates and the open shots and driving lanes that he and Tatum provide. Brown\u2019s defensive ability means he rarely needs help guarding opposing teams\u2019 best players, even in the highest-leverage moments. Brown held Luka Don\u010di\u0107 to 41 percent shooting as <\/a>Don\u010di\u0107<\/a>\u2018s primary defender in the 2024 NBA Finals<\/a>. What was that worth to the Celtics during their five-game series victory?<\/p>\n Some of this noise is just brinksmanship. Brown, in the wake of being shopped by Boston in its unsuccessful effort to trade for Giannis Antetokounmpo, has grown weary of hearing he\u2019s on the trade block. Thus, many teams would now love to trade for Brown, just not at the price the Celtics are reportedly asking<\/a> \u2014 multiple first-round picks, along with matching salaries. It is not a coincidence, I don\u2019t think, that unnamed front-office staffers have conveniently chosen this moment to pull out their advanced statistics that \u201cprove\u201d Brown is less valuable on the court than most neutral observers believe.<\/p>\n One brave soul, hiding behind ESPN\u2019s front-office expert Bobby Marks, who did a radio interview over the weekend with SiriusXM,<\/a> told Marks that his stats showed Brown was \u201cthe seventh-best player on a team<\/a>.\u201d Marks did not specify if the analytics guy meant the Celtics or a generic team. (In fairness to Marks, he followed that up by saying, \u201cI was like, that\u2019s a little bit of a stretch there.\u201d He was not alone in asking folks to slow their rolls.)<\/a><\/p>\n But some of this falls once again to our never-ending national dive into toxicity. It is not enough to prove myself right; I must prove you wrong, and make you look foolish in so doing.<\/p>\n The latest salvo making the rounds: Brown is one of just two All-NBA players in the last two years with a career negative on-off net rating in the regular season and playoffs<\/a>. The inference: Boston has won in spite of Brown\u2019s, rather than because of him. Or, if you want the most charitable interpretation: In recent years, the Celtics have been much better than you think without Brown.<\/p>\n What these folks never seem to acknowledge is that the Celtics, being a pretty sharp organization, are surely aware of the same advanced numbers.<\/p>\n If Brown has been such a drag on the franchise, then why have they kept him around for a decade? Why did they give him a supermax extension worth $304 million<\/a> in 2023 \u2014 which, at the time, was the biggest contract in NBA history? Why didn\u2019t they trade him years ago to build around Tatum, when they could have saved money and gotten a more significant return for a then-younger Brown than they can get now?<\/p>\n Former players such as David West, who scored more than 14,000 points in a 15-year NBA career, have jumped to Brown\u2019s defense, with a familiar argument: Analytics has made the NBA into a homogeneous vat of basketball<\/a>, where every team hunts 3-pointers and layups, eschews mid-range jumpers and post play, and removes much of the creativity and individual nuance from the game. Many around the league have pushed back on this hypothesis, pointing out that the NBA\u2019s top teams play differently from one another. (The bad teams, though, may prove West\u2019s point.<\/a>)<\/p>\n It\u2019s not difficult to posit what most concerns West and other former players.<\/p>\n Erasure.<\/p>\n It hits different when it\u2019s your career and life\u2019s work that are being disparaged and dismissed.<\/p>\n Of course, the NBA was less skilled, top to bottom, in the 1960s. But the league\u2019s best players of that era were still great. Bill Russell<\/a> and Wilt Chamberlain<\/a> and Bob Pettit<\/a> and Sam Jones, followed soon afterward by Elgin Baylor<\/a> and Jerry West<\/a> and Oscar Robertson<\/a>, would have been legendary at any point in history. Recency bias makes it hard enough to fairly judge the quality of play when many of today\u2019s fans never saw or competed against players from previous decades. That\u2019s why it\u2019s important to listen to those who did.<\/p>\n