A Fringe Top 5 Ja(y)len

There are 1230 NBA regular season games every year. A decade ago when I was playing NBA DFS every night, I might have watched a quarter of them. But probably more like a tenth. And these days, it’s less than half that. Short of a combination of living in your parents’ basement and that device that holds your eye open from the movie SAW [1], there would be no way to watch them all.

When an old school basketball player suggests that they use “the eye test” to tell you that someone is good, what they’re really saying isn’t that they’ve watched more basketball than you, or that stats are dumb (trust me, they love points per game!), it’s that they are better than you at watching basketball [2]. And they might even be, but that’ll never be a substitution for being mediocre at watching basketball and understanding how to scale that mediocrity to the entire season. 

I know, I’m in the third paragraph and I haven’t even started telling you why Jaylen Brown is the worst “MVP Candidate” in my lifetime. Patience you must learn.

With Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Nikola Jokic, and Victor Wembanyama teetering on the (stupid) threshold of necessary games played to win MVP, it feels like there’s been more talk than ever about MVP ballots (also, you know, anything to talk about the fact that a third of the league is actively trying to lose games). And there is a certain dialogue around getting votes for MVP that is useful and important to the NBA record books. There’s a 5 person ballot and the results will appear on basketball-reference forever. There’s All-NBA teams that mean something to tell us about the story of the season (still true no matter how many times Julius Randle erroneously makes the second team). I’d love for the history books to have at least some accuracy! 

Which is why, for the love of god, can we please stop talking about Jaylen Brown as an MVP Candidate. Or if we do talk about him as that, can we talk about him as by far the worst MVP Candidate we’ve ever had. 

In a team sport, the simplest way to figure out who is good is to see whose team performs well with them on the floor. If you have a large enough sample, you can juxtapose it with how that same team performs with them off the floor. This is, of course, some caveman logic, but its simplicity doesn’t make it wrong. It is the basis of all respectable advanced stats. The further details of said advanced stats are not the foundation of this blog because I’m not going to reference any advanced stats. I’m just going to ask you to peel your eyes open and look at this list of the top 10 MVP candidates on/off stats per NBA.com’s MVP ladder. 

I know that on/off stuff is an extremely noisy and only a few thousand minutes of sample this season. I know Jaylen Brown isn't a 4th percentile NBA player. I admit that his skillset of being a shooting wing that doesn't get hunted on defense is valuable. I didn't even argue that Jayson Tatum should have been Finals MVP in 2024 even though it cost me money. I think Brown was a hair better than Tatum, and I certainly don't think it was a black mark on the history books.

...but please look at how much worse he is than everyone else on the list. If you wanted to look at a dozen stats and start excluding people from the MVP conversation, I'd hope that this would be your first stop.

One of the cruxes of the pro Jaylen Brown argument is that the Celtics are overachieving. That's very true, but not to the degree that people are making it out to be. I had them as a 45.3 win team, Vegas had them at 41.5 [3]. Though buoyed by extremely good health, the fact they are playing at a 59 win pace is shocking and a testament to the front office and coaching staff. I'm not saying they've solved shot selection, but I will say that they solved shot selection with their roster.

Jaylen Brown creates difficult shots at a reasonable clip. He has improved his efficiency while scaling up his usage [4]. He's a less bad passer than he used to be. I think I even saw him use his left hand once this season. He does important things for a very good Boston Celtics team. But it's extremely lazy to pick the best player on the team that's overachieved the most put them on the MVP ballot. It belittles the accomplishments of Derrick White, Payton Pritchard, and Neemias Queta. Be better.

You think Jaylen Brown is worth his contract because of position scarcity? I might not agree, but I'll humor you. You want to sneak Jaylen Brown on your third All-NBA team because he played a lot of games this season? Hell, I like availability! But I can't have people I respect talking about how he might make their MVP ballot, there are too many levels to this game.

Instead of talking about Jaylen Brown as a fringe top 5 MVP candidate, can we instead talk about him as a fringe top 5 Jalen? [5]

[1]

[2] I had someone tell me this a long time ago and I can never unhear it.

[3] I'd have never bet the over here because of roster construction issues and the chance that a bad or injury riddled start would have led to a gap year.

[4] Though he did keep scaling up his turnovers!

[5] 1. Brunson 2. Duren 3. Williams 4. Johnson 5. Suggs 99. Green

Unprotected Rep: Fixing Tanking in the Modern NBA

I am an expert at games. Poker in my 20s, DFS in my 30s, and along the way a top 10 player in the world at a bunch of obscure games you’ve probably never heard of. The word “game” can be misleading, as game theory can be applied to markets and all sorts of adult sounding things, like optimal tanking strategy in the NBA.

From a macro POV, I’ve thought for years that there weren’t enough tankers, that ¼ of the league should be tanking instead of ⅙ of it. I certainly wasn’t expecting it to get to ⅓ of it, but this appears to be a very strong draft, and as Ricky Bobby once said, “If you ain't first, you’re last.”

There's nothing you can do to truly eradicate tanking short of some extremely serious reforms that I don’t see coming. Those reforms, like letting draft eligible players go where they want [1], or the Papal Conclave idea where decision makers vote on who should get top picks, seem to be unrealistic in my lifetime. Instead of a defeatist attitude, I'd rather focus on practical things that can be done (some of which you've definitely seen before, some of which perhaps you haven't). 

Limit, or do away with, pick protections. I’d argue the most ‘necessary’ pick protection is lottery protected. If a team trades for a player and it causes them to make the playoffs, yay! Now the other team gets a bad pick. Top 4 protected? Sure, just to stop the embarrassment of giving away something extremely valuable. But anything else is unnecessary. Though there are still some outstanding obligations, I don’t see why changing this going forward would have any adverse effects. In fact, in the future I think it would actually help teams get more deals done because there’s an understanding that it’s something you can’t even haggle over. 

Randomize every draft slot. It’s madness that the NBA realized that they should flatten the top 4 odds but didn’t realize that they should also “flatten” the odds for each subsequent pick. With the current format there is still a massive benefit to having a worse record (the worst record can’t get worse than the fifth pick, the third worst record can get as bad at the seventh pick). Who the hell is on the competition committee anyway?!

Make the rookie scale salary more accurately reflect pick value. This is extremely low hanging fruit. To get data to visualize my cause I took a look at some sample “NBA draft pick value" posts. I picked this one by Duncan Taylor because it used EPM as a baseline (a favorite all in one metric of this blog). If you put it alongside the current NBA rookie scale contracts, you can see the value of current rookie scale contracts is too flat (with $11.5m for the #1 overall pick and 2.3m for the #30 overall pick).

Just make the top pick earn $20m, the second pick $15m, the third pick 10m, and keep 4-30 the same. It more accurately represents the value of those picks and the pressure that should be on the teams making them.

See? Much better! In some years people wouldn’t even want the top pick if it meant having to pay Zachary Risacher way more than he’ll ever be worth (yes I know, the current system does that just fine 🙃). An added benefit: teams would have to be much more decisive about picking up third and fourth year options on rookie contracts for early picks, potentially allowing players who get off to slow starts to move somewhere they might have a better chance to develop. 

Now, of course the NBAPA would always be against this because the olds run the league in the same way the olds run the country! Call me ageist, but we gotta stop letting the oldest people make decisions in all facets of life. I'm not a hypocrite, you can send me out to pasture when I'm past my prime. The NBAPA head should be someone in their prime who understands that player value should mimic how much they make, not have it tail so aggressively such that teams get stuck with albatross contracts paying guys like Anthony Davis way more than they’re worth [2].

And finally, the most important solution: For lottery equity, have losses count at the beginning of the season, wins count at the end of the season [3], and randomize the day this takes place. I could figure out a more objective way to do this, but for now let’s assume the first half of the season we count losses, the last quarter of the season we count wins, and at some point between the 41 and 60 game mark we randomize where the schedule flips (don’t worry, we can overpay some suits from Ernst & Young to do it) and no one knows until the season is over. 

This would be extremely hard to game given the uncertainty of when the schedule flips, it would make it so that bad teams may even be incentivized to make mid season win now trades (as they actually did already this deadline– except this time they’d actually play the players they traded for).

The argument against is that teams would just tank even earlier. That’s fair and likely to happen, but to me it’s both harder to execute (every team, even the Pelicans and the Kings, has some hope in October), and even if teams do successfully execute it, they have to be much more honest about it. Giving away Colin Sexton and John Collins before the season was a realistic assessment of where the Jazz wanted to be this season (they knew they had to keep their top 8 protected pick). Make those teams that are clearly rebuilding show their cards early, instead of being able to late season tank after injuries (another positive effect– it would make it harder to do the one year drop downs when players get injured mid or early season, like the '97 Spurs or '20 Warriors).

And even if this does happen, and it plays out exactly how a naysayer would say, you’d still get quality games down the stretch while all teams are fighting for something in the silly season of March. This would help teams going forward into next season with more sober assessments of where they are. So instead of letting Jalen Green have a few big months against tanking teams and sign an extension that he’s not worth [4], you’d have real conversations about how an up and coming team was winning games against playoff teams. To me that’s just a better time of year for the games to be good anyway. 

None of these are drastic changes, just some low hanging fruit. Someone tell Adam Silver that he can hire aejones, inc. as a consultant and I’ll ask the best poker players in the world how they’d game the system, that’ll improve the incentive structure real fast. 

[1] This idea, with the worst teams getting higher salary for rookies, seems pretty good. I think the opportunity, and the money, would spread the talent around somewhat equally. It would actually reward competence too egregiously, and there's just no chance that the small market teams would ever agree to it. Alas, this would take an entire blog post to actually consider the pros and cons.

[2] An easy fix here: <5 years of service 27.5% max, 5-10 years of service 32.5% max, 10+ years of service 30% max (currently goes 25%->30%->35%, with award escalators)

[3] Perhaps wins should count as half as much as the losses, I haven’t really thought that through yet. I’ll give it a more thorough examination when the competition committee hires me. 

[4] Jalen Green catching strays, sorry bud, at least I didn't bring up the 40 year old girlfriend!

2026 Win Projections

Last year my win delta was 7.7 and Vegas’ was 8.4, which sounds impressive and seems like a pretty big win for the best publicly available wins™… except that I was off by 10+ wins on 9 teams.

So yea, it was a wild year, with lots of teams trying to capture the Flagg.

	Aaron	Vegas [1]
2024-25	7.7	8.4
2023-24	7.1	6.4
2022-23	5.9	6.3

This year is a disaster, and though I’ll still technically call these the best publicly available win projections™, I'd rather not bet on it. The structure of so many of these rosters is so haphazard that I’m less confident than I’ve been in years past. The Pacers, Celtics, and Hornets have decent rosters, but they've decided to employ exclusively third string centers. Might it work? Sure! There’s no evidence any of them are bad, but there’s just so little sample size of any of them playing against good players that I have no idea. When making full season minute projections, how do I even account for lots of talent on the perimeter and not so much talent on the interior? Should I just assume Derrick White will play some center? Will those lineups be able to make up for 50% defensive rebounding by scoring a zillion points on offense? Who knows!

I suppose there are at least a few things I have some confidence in.

The Pelicans are bad. The front office is bad. They don't have their pick. Their bench is especially bad. I don't expect the reality of any of this to change just because Zion is on Ozempic.

The Bucks are mediocre. Yes I know they have a top 5 player, but the third best player on the Bucks in my projections is Ryan Rollins. And yes I have heard of him, and I do think he’s a little underrated, but he’s the third best player on a .500 NBA team?! It’s a bad roster, and whatever spacing they gain on O, I’m pretty sure that Giannis and Myles Turner no longer have the defensive chops to make up for on D. This is an under .500 team.

The Timberwolves, Nuggets, Rockets, and Clippers are all good, but high Vegas projections and various questions about guys being too young, positional balance, or guys being too old have me a little lower than market (the West is awesome, but I never mind taking an under on a 50+ win total, as the base rate is chaos).

I'm not a pessimist! There are some teams I'm high on!

The Warriors are good. Admittedly, they're relying on their geriatric players more than I’d like to admit, and most likely one of those four will wind up falling off a cliff... but in the meantime they should have enough young guys to stem the tide. As long as Steph and Jimmy are still All-NBA level players (asking a lot, but they’re HOFers with skillsets that should age, and they take care of their bodies) that can play 60+ games, this is a 50 win team. 

This was going to be an entire paragraph about how the Grizzlies are mediocre, but they're impressively mediocre, making their mediocrity a bit of a super power! But that paragraph has been nuked by the news that Scotty Pippen Jr. (actually pretty good) will miss 3 months and Ty Jerome has a calf injury that'll cause him to miss a month (also pretty good). The good news is Ja Morant will play in the season opener (pretty good, but not as good as you think he is!), but that depth is looking much shakier now when you consider all the front court injuries to start the season. Could be a bit of a gap year in Memphis. Luckily they've fattened up the coffers a bit with the Bane trade, which was great value, even if you love the player.

With less tankers than in previous years and a compelling upcoming draft class, more teams should be considering a gap year if they aren’t already [2]. The Blazers and Pelicans have extremely difficult schedules in 2025 and are teams that might be candidates to use those slow starts to trade some guys– though the Pelicans, in management malpractice, famously don’t control their own pick! And when I sort schedule by month, the Kings play 16 games against teams projected to win an average of 46 games in November. Might something like a 6-15 start cause them to get religion? [3]

Anecdotally, the number of offseason surgeries and preseason injuries seems high. There are very few tanking teams, creating a vacuum that might suck a few organizations into a gap year. Game to game variance is at an all time high with 3 point shooting and pace trending upward. And a bunch of teams have rosters that don’t make sense [4].

The upshot is that this uncertainty has me unusually excited to see the product on the floor for a number of teams (Spurs, Raptors, Blazers, Magic, Hawks, Hornets?!), which means I’m very ready to NBA.

Atlantic		Central		Southeast
Knicks	50.9	Cavaliers	54.2	Magic	51.3
Celtics	45.3	Pistons	44.5	Hawks	47.9
76ers	39.5	Bucks	38.6	Heat	36.3
Raptors	37.4	Bulls	36.5	Hornets	30.1
Nets	23.2	Pacers	35.4	Wizards	22.7
Northwest		Pacific		Southwest
Thunder	64.4	Warriors	52.4	Rockets	48
Nuggets	50.2	Lakers	45.3	Spurs	46.4
Twolves	45	Clippers	44.4	Mavericks	45.2
Trailblazers	30.5	Suns	34.6	Grizzlies	42.8
Jazz	22.3	Kings	38.5	Pelicans	27.9

Bonus content, if you made it this far. I'm not a data viz guy, so this is pretty basic, but I made a chart in excel of the average age, weighted by minutes, for every team in the NBA this year. Quick commentary: Holy shit the Clippers are old! Rough look for the Kings, who are sneaky old with no real prospects. And the Pelicans stink, but they're so young! Zion is somehow only 25 and Kevon Looney is (go ahead and guess, I'll bury the answer at the end of the notes). [5]

[1] I'm doing my best to take an accurate snapshot a week or two before the season from the lowest vig numbers, but ultimately these lines are not incredible accurate, the limits are low, and I'm expecting to beat them.

[2] Pacers and Celtics are the obvious candidates here with major injuries to their All-NBA players.

[3] No fucking way!

[4] Shoutout Phoenix Suns: compiling a roster of exclusively shooting guards and centers is a good idea, I mean it’s not like they’re the two most overrated positions in the league!

[5] 29. There's no fucking way you guessed anything that didn't start with a 3, don't lie to me.