Okay, so this is finally sinking in and I really like Jaylen Brown, but I finally asked myself this question. I don?t see many people asking it, I keep hearing analytics, which I guess is inferring it.
But, the bottom line is, Brad did not feel JB made the players around him better? I have heard my whole life, I true star makes the players around him better. Bird is the first person who comes to mind, he could score, but he made everyone on the his team look good when they played together.
So, maybe, we are looking at this all wrong, maybe yes his contract was big, but maybe Brad felt, I want players that make each other better, plain and simple.
I certainly saw glimpses of JB doing that with Porzingas!! Maybe Jru rubbed off on him that year, but he definitely goes into the one man band way too much in the last couple years.
Just a take on this the maybe was much bigger than we realized.
Well that's where stats come in, because sometimes your eyes can deceive you, or you might apply a subjective filter (oh he actually made a pass for a change, I thought he was going to iso again) when someone does something on the court. All statistical analysis really, is a way to try and objectively measure a player's contribution on the court, using data that is collected for every player, into a metric that should be able to be equally applied to everyone. Like points - you measure it by physically counting how many points a player scored. Points per game is how many points they scored, divided by how many games they played. In theory this means you can measure and rank players based on how many points they scored. Same with rebounds, or blocks, or assists.
But points scored doesn't always answer some of the more complicated questions, like: did a player make his teammates better? Did he make his team better? How good is he at making his team better in relation to other players, who may not play the same position as him and be required to do the same things, or play the same minutes, or have to carry the same scoring load? What about defensive impact? Like someone can score 40ppg but his teammates each score 10ppg and his team loses 75% of games, does that mean he's better than someone who scored 20ppg but dished out assists to his teammates and his presence on the court meant they won more games? That's where stats start to get complicated.
If you look at the simplest metric for that, the on/off, that's a metric that measures if a team point differential or net rating per 100 possessions when a player is on the court vs off. And applying that metric to Jaylen shows that the team's point differential was worse when he was on the court this season than when he was on shows that he was in the 24th %ile, meaning the bottom 24% of all players in the NBA, behind Luka Garza 26 %ile) and ahead of Josh Minott (23rd %ile).
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Now that's one season, maybe it's an outlier. Maybe he was unlucky. Maybe he shared the court with scrubs and was facing the best players on the other team the whole season. So let's go back and look over his whole career:
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The data shows that for 10 seasons, he has had an on-off %ile that is below the median, which is 50%. So his on-off differential is worse than half the players in the NBA for 7 of the 10 seasons he played.
This doesn't specifically answer the question: did he make the players around him better? But you can infer from the data that the team's point differental was worse when he was on the court than off, that they they were outscored whenever he was on the court, over the majority of the seasons he played for the Celtics. This is probably the single biggest metric that teams used against him when determining his value.
Incidentally, I've been trying to find similar ranked players in on-off and one that I found was Deandre Ayton, who was in the 23rd %ile in plus minus, playing a similar number of minutes. He's interesting because it's easy to apply a subjective filter when viewing him - he's a big guy, he was a No1 pick, big guys are good in the NBA, he averaged 10pts 10 rebounds, surely he's good? But when you apply that same metric to him, he's in the bottom 23% of players in the NBA in terms of his team's point differential when he is on vs off. Maybe this is why the Fakers didn't offer him a new contract.
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There's other stats you can look at, like obviously assists (though that's skewed by if the player you passed the ball to made the shot or not), secondary assists (where you pass the ball to someone who passes it to someone who makes the shot, like a hockey assist), or a potential assist (where you make a pass to a player who makes a shot attempt, whether it goes in or not).
I won't post them all here, but you can find them all on
the NBA.com stats page.
