Did JB make the players around him better?

[Kernewek]

I thought Jaylen made the players around him better last season because it was a less talented team but on a stronger team he does a lot less to help his teammates.

The reason why he helped his teammates last year was because he allowed them to play roles within their skill-level. By taking a high usage high volume scoring role, he allowed those more limited guys to stay within role player roles where they could still be effective.

Without Jaylen doing that, those role players would have had to extend their games beyond what they were able to do. Their offense (particularly their efficiencies) would have gradually declined / collapsed and the team would have been much worse off.

There was statistical study Kevin Pelton did years ago (maybe 15 years ago now) on Allen Iverson that argued AI had this effect when he played with less talent AI made them more efficient by taking on more responsibility offensively even thought AI himself was an inefficient scorer. That he managed to boost the efficiency of guys around them.

The study also looked at Vernon Maxwell on the 1994 Rockets and noted the same thing. Mad Max was streaky shooter with an itchy trigger finger but HOU's other role players were more spot up shooters who could not create their own offense. Max allowed them to stay within their shooting profile by taking more difficult shots himself. It allowed his teammates to stay efficient but made him look worse because he was more inefficient individually. Yet, it was still an overall positive. Just not easily picked up by looking at individual player's TS% / scoring efficiency.

Jaylen accomplished this for the Celtics last season when he was paired with so many limited offensive teammates (the young wings, Hauser, Queta, Garza). And to a lesser extent D White & Pritchard (good but not great offensive players).

Sure, but the difference is that the game is very, very different from the 90's and early 00's - not least of the differences come from the perceived value of inefficient shooting.

In other words, Brown can be both of these things:

so individually talented that he can carry the team"s deadweight to the point where we barely noticed the loss of Tatum, Jrue, KP, Horford and Kornet.

Brown is an inefficient chucker that is a turnover machine, poor passer, mediocre rebounder and foul generator.

(The Celtics also have very good W/L when Tatum sits, so I don't hold the team record against Brown or Tatum).

[Csfan1984]

I don't think there are many players in the league in general who actually make guys better on the court. Not even Tatum does it  Guys like LeBron and Jokic do that. They direct guys on the court. Old school PGs used to do this all the time. JB is a scorer pretty much. He has some playmaking but it's at White level. PP and Tatum are better playmakers but not elite at it.

[lbgreen33]

I think both things can be true, JB can be a great 2 way player, but not make others better. I always found JB always found a way to get his own!! Then he would seem to say, look at what I can do!! I am the best 2 way player in the league. All I am saying is, he was quick to build himself up, but true champions build up the players around them! They also did that because losing was just unacceptable to them!! like MJ, no one hated to lose more than he did, at everything!! But, JB said this was his favorite season, that can be perceived as a major flaw. I am just trying to explain what I think some felt.

[jambr380]

I don't think there are many players in the league in general who actually make guys better on the court. Not even Tatum does it  Guys like LeBron and Jokic do that. They direct guys on the court. Old school PGs used to do this all the time. JB is a scorer pretty much. He has some playmaking but it's at White level. PP and Tatum are better playmakers but not elite at it.

Tatum definitely has it. The attention he draws, the advanced passing reads. Maybe he's not CP3 or Nash, but for a big wing, he's in the upper echelon.

Also, White is a really underrated playmaker. He doesn't control the ball nearly as much as Tatum or Brown, but his quick reads and smart decisions lead to easier and open shots for teammates. White's incredible advanced stats aren't because of his supreme scoring ability.

[Goldstar88]

I don't think there are many players in the league in general who actually make guys better on the court. Not even Tatum does it  Guys like LeBron and Jokic do that. They direct guys on the court. Old school PGs used to do this all the time. JB is a scorer pretty much. He has some playmaking but it's at White level. PP and Tatum are better playmakers but not elite at it.

Tatum definitely has it. The attention he draws, the advanced passing reads. Maybe he's not CP3 or Nash, but for a big wing, he's in the upper echelon.

Also, White is a really underrated playmaker. He doesn't control the ball nearly as much as Tatum or Brown, but his quick reads and smart decisions lead to easier and open shots for teammates. White's incredible advanced stats aren't because of his supreme scoring ability.

Thing with JB is his passes are not good a lot of the time. He will hit a wide open shooter, but the ball is thrown to their knees or over their shoulders. He doesn?t get them the ball where they can just go right into their shot.

[byennie]

I thought Jaylen made the players around him better last season because it was a less talented team but on a stronger team he does a lot less to help his teammates.

The reason why he helped his teammates last year was because he allowed them to play roles within their skill-level. By taking a high usage high volume scoring role, he allowed those more limited guys to stay within role player roles where they could still be effective.

Without Jaylen doing that, those role players would have had to extend their games beyond what they were able to do. Their offense (particularly their efficiencies) would have gradually declined / collapsed and the team would have been much worse off.

There was statistical study Kevin Pelton did years ago (maybe 15 years ago now) on Allen Iverson that argued AI had this effect when he played with less talent AI made them more efficient by taking on more responsibility offensively even thought AI himself was an inefficient scorer. That he managed to boost the efficiency of guys around them.

The study also looked at Vernon Maxwell on the 1994 Rockets and noted the same thing. Mad Max was streaky shooter with an itchy trigger finger but HOU's other role players were more spot up shooters who could not create their own offense. Max allowed them to stay within their shooting profile by taking more difficult shots himself. It allowed his teammates to stay efficient but made him look worse because he was more inefficient individually. Yet, it was still an overall positive. Just not easily picked up by looking at individual player's TS% / scoring efficiency.

Jaylen accomplished this for the Celtics last season when he was paired with so many limited offensive teammates (the young wings, Hauser, Queta, Garza). And to a lesser extent D White & Pritchard (good but not great offensive players).

I think what's interesting about this, is it may suggest Jaylen is more valuable as a #1 than as a #2. If he's surrounded by lower usage guys, he can carry a heavy load, put up nearly 30 a night, plays heavy minutes and games... everything he did that resulted in 56 wins this year.

Now, if he's your #2 you don't actually need that buffer and he's reducing the overall efficiency of your team (while soaking up 30% of the payroll).

Notably, Brunson isn't an analytics darling, but clearly shouldered the load as the #1 option in New York, and that worked out pretty well for them this year. The rest of the roster was more efficient at scoring than him.

[ozgod]

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).

(click to enlarge)


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:

(click to enlarge)


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.

(click to enlarge)


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.

[Roy H.]

A more relevant question:  did Paul George make his teammates better in the 49 games per season he's played in the past seven seasons?

Does it tell us anything that a proven winner like Kawai couldn't win with Paul George?  Is it relevant that Paul George has never made the NBA Finals?  Or that he's a 42.5% shooter (.505 eFG%) in the playoffs, both vastly inferior to Brown (48.0 / .544)?

I hope he was hooking his teammates up with his dealer off the court, because he sure wasn't helping them in a basketball sense.

[ozgod]

A more relevant question:  did Paul George make his teammates better in the 49 games per season he's played in the past seven seasons?

Does it tell us anything that a proven winner like Kawai couldn't win with Paul George?  Is it relevant that Paul George has never made the NBA Finals?  Or that he's a 42.5% shooter (.505 eFG%) in the playoffs, both vastly inferior to Brown (48.0 / .544)?

I hope he was hooking his teammates up with his dealer off the court, because he sure wasn't helping them in a basketball sense.

Again, the data doesn't directly answer that question...what it does say is that in terms of point differential, the Sixers had a +6.2 and +4.6 point differential in the 2400+ minutes that PG0 (I mean PG13, I call him PG0 to irritate my Sixers friend) played for Philly. Here is the team last season, and PG13's career:

(click to enlarge)



Like I said before, stats aren't the be-all end-all, they're just a way to try and objectively measure a player's output in a standardized way, so you can compare across different players. I'm sure we could come up with all kinds of stats that support a pre-existing point of view (ideally someone would do it the other way around, look at stats and arrive at a conclusion). But with this particular stat, on-off, which happens to be one of the main ones that front offices apparently use, PG0, in his limited minutes, caused the Sixers to have a better point differential when he was on the court vs off.

And yes it's also a fact that PG0 has never won a championship, whether with Kawhi or anyone else, and Jaylen has played nearly 50% more games - 337 vs 239 - than PG0. That's a fact too, along with the fact that Jaylen's never been bounced for drugs either 

[lbgreen33]

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).

(click to enlarge)


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:

(click to enlarge)


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.

(click to enlarge)


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.

Thanks, that was a great post! Also, truly interesting. I am sure JB hated hearing what they were saying the analytics said, but they certainly did not justify his price tag. Not saying I agree or disagree, just saying the league looks at that.

[Celtics4ever]

The league is full of great players who did not make their team mates better.  Jordan was a scorer, Kobe was a scorer., Paul Pierce was more of a scorer.  These  guys were winners but they did not always make their team mates better.  They produced and you can lump Brown in that kind of player.

Analytics are useful, they are not the end all.   I would point the most analytic team in football as a prime example.   The Browns were so into it, that they hired the money ball guy, Depodesta.  It did work, time and again the analytical data did not work.

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.

Yet, he has won more regular and post season games than anyone else in that era.   Some of that is who he played for, but the dude played a major roll in all those teams.

Who are the guys on our team that make people better.  Tatum is one, Schierman is one, White maybe, but  I think Pritchard is more a scorer than passer but did pass more last year.   A lot of the guys are wannabe 3D guys like Hauser, and D guys like Walsh.  Garza is an effort guy.  Queta is there for rebounds and defense.  Brown was third in assists, better than anyone not named Pritchard or Tatum.  My point is we have three guys who are good passers who create shots/ good looks for team mates.

The on/off is interesting but isn't that dependent on lineups to a degree.   On/off is not perfect because:

Backup and Roster Quality: A star player on a deep, well-rounded team might have a lower on/off rating than a less-impactful player on a bad team with a disastrous bench.

Lack of Individual Isolation: Plus-minus metrics like Net Rating do not separate what a player does by themselves from the collective unit's success.

Multi-Collinearity: Players rarely play alone; their success is tied to the teammates they share minutes with, meaning a good or bad on/off stat might simply reflect a specific coach's lineup decisions rather than individual

Brown was almost always playing against the best players.  Management knows this stuff but has to justify the move, I think it is a lowball excuse for dealing Brown but it may be a correct, albeit flawed decision.

[Celtics2021]

Another way to look at it is not whether JB made his teammates better.  He may have.  But rather, did he make his teammates better as much as Jayson Tatum does, or Derrick White does?  I think the answer is pretty obviously no for those two.  And you can then go down a list of other Celtics.  Was Queta with his screening, offensive rebounding, and interior help defense better able to elevate his teammates by helping them get open and cleaning up mistakes than JB was?  Was Peyton Pritchard, with his ability to stretch far behind the 3-point arc and comfortably take late shot clocks grenades able to give his teammates more room to operate, combined with his superior ball distribution ability and sneaky offensive rebounding more likely to elevate his teammates?

JB is a terrific player.  His gravity on offense can absolutely make it easier for his teammates.  His willingness to take on the toughest defensive assignments or try to make something out of nothing on offense could, at times, absolutely make it easier for his teammates.  But that same strength could sometimes be detrimental.  He would sometimes draw 2-3 defenders and not recognize it quickly enough to get the ball to his teammates to take advantage of the gravity, resulting in a turnover or a scrambled possession.  He would get so locked in on his one-on-one matchup that he would lose awareness on the court and miss opportunities to help on defense.

So, at times, yes, he made his teammates better.  Unquestionably. But there were plenty of times he did not.  And the question is whether all those times he did not added up enough to offset his positive individual contributions.  I think the analytics are split on that, but I think they are in agreement that it reduced his value substantially, and lower than other players on his own team. 

And as to why did Celtics suddenly decide this year was enough?  I think the absence of Tatum removed any doubt they had about their analytics.  There was no Tatum, the team continued to win, and the team did better when all the guys the analytics liked were playing instead of Jaylen.  The internal debate was settled, and it was time to move on.  The only problem was that the rest of the league also noticed the same thing, and had come to a similar conclusion about JB.

He is a positive player.  He does good things.  Sometimes he does great and amazing things.  Sometimes that lifts his teammates as well, but enough times it does not, and it makes him not worth $180 million over three years.  And for the Sixers, who knows, it might work.  The physical nature of JB might absorb a lot of blows that normally go to Embiid, which might keep Embiid fresher and healthier.  JB might not be able to elevate the Celtics best player in Tatum, but perhaps he is a terrific complement for the Sixers best player in Embiid.