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