Jaylen Brown is in Russell Westbrook territory. Advanced stats show Celtics have a consistently better net rating with him off the court. Basically all the intangibles that don’t show up in the boxscore are his negatives: off-ball defense, off-ball offense, basketball IQ, playmaking, creating shots for others…then you add in his absurdly high turnover rate, anemic assist rate, and relatively average shooting efficiency.
Spoelstra still doubled/tripled Tatum despite Tatum’s ankle injury. And Tatum is still infinitely better than Brown, despite the injury.
You can’t really run a smart, decisive, passing based offense like the Warriors or Heat when you have a guy like Brown. He’s a black hole. Has no vision and can’t create. Look at the ball movement by the Heat. Imagine if they had an isolation guy on the court who shot 20-25 per game like a mid 2000s Melo/Kobe and what that does to the flow. Which is why I think the Cs are actually a better team without Brown, but they need to find guys to replace the volume.
There’s a lot of debate about these metrics (hence why Westbrook is so controversial) but I really hope they don’t pay $300M to this type of player. This is the type of contract that sentences teams to 5 years of non-contending frustration, like the Westbrook OKC Thunder or the Carmelo Knicks. The new CBA is going to make the cap more difficult to navigate with max players, and if they pay Brown, and Tatum, it will be those two guys and six scrubs.
Not sure why people criticize Tatum. Am I watching the same games? Tatum makes everyone around him better.
