If Jaylen Brown is looking for more bulletin board material from around the NBA, he is getting no shortage of it.
As trade negotiations demonstrated, Brown’s stature around the league is lower than public perception. One NBA general manager anonymously told Jay King and Sam Amick of The Athletic that, in his view, Brown is not even a top-50 player in the NBA.
That is a pretty bold statement to make about someone who finished sixth in MVP voting last season and won Finals MVP two years ago. Plus, Brown averaged 28.7 points per game last season for the Celtics, covering for Jayson Tatum’s absence for most of the season. Most outsiders would feel pretty strongly that those numbers would cement him in the upper echelon of stars.
Brown’s underlying numbers are not as overwhelming, and the Celtics feel there is not much of a dropoff between when he is on and off the floor. Those contribute to a negative perception of him in the analytics community, a narrative that he has taken a shot at.
Ultimately, the Philadelphia 76ers are betting on Brown being a worthwhile investment. If they are right, the rest of the league is going to wind up looking quite silly.
