Jaylen Brown: More than enough in Year 8.
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The dribbled between the legs actually hit the back of his left leg, then the side of his right leg, but he still managed to maintain control and hit White lol. Nesmith's unnecessary help there gave Jaylen an out.
Actually, that help from Nesmith is exactly the kind of issue Jaylen himself has had in the past that he's cleaned up this season. Nesmith actually turned off his area to guard Jaylen from shooting at, I guess, the Indy bench?
I think I mentioned this upthread but JB said previously that there's a lot of things he worked on last summer that he doesn't get a chance to show because this year's team is so good.
FWIW.
And not to derail the thread, maybe DW will make ESPN's top-50 list.
Not sure what you mean by "past 2 years" but even according to DARKO, 2022-23 was his best season and this year everyone on the Cs watched their numbers go down because everyone was so good.
Digging in a little, it looks like one reason why DARKO is down on JB is because of his defense - it has him as a minus in D-DPM this year which probably reflects his box score stats but doesn't really reflect how he's played on defense.
Yeah if you look at the dots on the graph and not just the line, you'll see the 50ish games where he dropped a lot and then a return to his normal presence. It happens. And it matches the eye test from the beginning of this year.
There will absolutely be a box store dampening effect from the construction of this team as well, as you accurately call out.
This is one of those cases where if DARKO says that Jaylen was worse this year, DARKO is wrong.
It's not just an eyetest thing: he drastically improved the team's ability to function in non-Tatum lineups. People don't talk enough about how big a deal it is to have Jaylen-on/Tatum-off lineups be as good as they were.
Is that partly a function of replacing Smart with Jrue, and White improving further? Yes, but being able to accentuate that talent as the lead guy is a premium, premium NBA skill.
It's not just an eyetest thing: he drastically improved the team's ability to function in non-Tatum lineups. People don't talk enough about how big a deal it is to have Jaylen-on/Tatum-off lineups be as good as they were.
Is that partly a function of replacing Smart with Jrue, and White improving further? Yes, but being able to accentuate that talent as the lead guy is a premium, premium NBA skill.
As WBCD noted, DARKO likely struggled with this year's Celtics because they were so good at the top end it made it hard for each individual to share as much of the 'credit'
I fully agree with the subjective input that Jaylen grew a bunch this year, and we saw some of that on display in the ECF
I fully agree with the subjective input that Jaylen grew a bunch this year, and we saw some of that on display in the ECF
I wish I could give a better answer, but to me the more standard stats and eye test had Jaylen, before this season, peaking in 2021 or so, and then really leveling off with worse 3p shooting and turnover rates the next couple seasons. It's not like he regressed noticeably, it just didn't appear he was improving as he had been up to age 24 or so. I also think Jaylen has had by far his best year defensively this season, and obviously DARKO disagrees, so again I can't really provide a counter other than to say it's based off of admittedly more standardized stats and observation. I think this has been his overall best season.
Yeah, it's worth emphasizing that DARKO tries to measure impact, not talent, so it's not like a given player's progression curve is context independent.
"Have Tatum space and give the ball to Jaylen with a closeout game on the line" is not something that was happening prior to this season. That's his growth in a nutshell: he used to be an athletic play finisher, and now he's inching closer to being an NBA star.
Good and fair point, and especially relevant in the context of a team trying to win a title: you want maximum talent, even to the point where it's overkill.
That’s why Tatum finishing tied for second with Giannis was funny.
Advanced stats just don’t love Jaylen, so I take them with a grain of salt when it comes to him.
To borrow an example I remember it's creator giving to illustrate, take a guess as when Al started and stopped playing alongside Joel Embiid:
The "regression for teammates" is a problem with every stat, but I think that "DARKO says that Jaylen was worse this year" is not what I'm taking from what DARKO says. When I look at the chart, I see a stretch when Jaylen performed poorly at the very end of last year carrying through the first couple of months of this season. Then everything seems to have clicked for him, and he returned to being Jaylen.
Edit: love the Al Horford chart also. Not great fit, new teammates, etc., can affect your impact as well.
Here's another one that's fascinating, and I believe, tells a story:
JT and KP kept doing what they do, when the team was brought together. No real material spikes or dips, except for gradual improvement from JT and very small initial spike for KP when he was settling in.
Both JB and DW took turns figuring things out as they went along and both now at or near normal levels, and Jrue seems to have sublimated his game for the good of the team.
JT and KP kept doing what they do, when the team was brought together. No real material spikes or dips, except for gradual improvement from JT and very small initial spike for KP when he was settling in.
Both JB and DW took turns figuring things out as they went along and both now at or near normal levels, and Jrue seems to have sublimated his game for the good of the team.
For clarification, you hate Isaiah Thomas as in IT3 of recent Celtics lore or Isiah Thomas, the point guard from the Pistons?
As far as Stephen A. Smith, that guy used to be a great print journalist in the day, but now he is just another talking (yelling) head. So annoying.
His handle seems to have gotten dramatically better which is what I see is his major improvement. I don’t remember one bad instance of him dribbling off his foot or driving and losing it where the last couple years it seemed fairly common.
Yes, I found myself not worrying about it at end of game situations.
Interesting that JH steadily declined. I wonder if that shoulder stinger he had mid-season is only now resolved.
Yeah. It's awesome that he in particular just takes what is given. Want to load up on the Jays, fine, I'll burn you. When he was taking Siakam into the post and getting an and-1, I'm like "who the fuck does that?" He did it twice in final minutes in this series, just putting his head down and getting a basket, nevermind the huge defensive plays.
I don't think that he did. He let the others pass him and saved some gas in the tank for when it was needed, like this series.
Thomas, the guard from the Pistons. He's had some sexual harassment issues from his time in the Knicks front office. Seems like he's kind of a sleazebag
One other thing is that it seems to me that impact on the ball defense is hard to measure. I doubt DARKO is taking into account FG% against but other than that there's really no stat to measure JB's i,pact when he is (for example) chasing Steph around the court.
I am recollecting that during the latter half of the regular season JH had a fair share of brain-fartish miscues near the rim, and his 3pt shooting declined.
In the last 2 series, that's gone away. Hence my conjecture about injury.
I've obviously been a Jaylen stan since he put on the green jersey for the first time, but I don't buy that he's improved as dramatically as others say he has. I think the results have simply been better because he's not playing with Marcus Smart anymore.
If instead of White standing out there in the corner, it was Smart, one of two things were likely to happen. JB wouldn't have passed it and either got stripped or tried to make a ridiculous shot or he would have passed to Marcus who probably would have bricked it. The result is the same, a loss and only the narrative changes, JB can't dribble/his handle sucks or Oh well, Marcus missed or the C's simply can't win close games and are chokers.
Last year in game 7 against Miami, where JB played arguably his worst game with the 8 turnovers, he was forced into a role he should never be in because of the ankle roll by Tatum. But we also need to remember in that game, besides JB's struggles, White was 2-9 from deep, Smart was 1-6 and Tatum, although playing 41+ minutes, was basically a decoy on offense, only taking 13 shots. Jaylen was forcing everything, trying to beat traps with a dribble and when he did get the ball out, guys just bricked everything. But because that happened, it's easy to forget that JB went for 24.6ppg in the first two series on 54% from the floor and 47% from deep over 13 games and was a +76 in his time on the floor.
This is the JB we've had for a long time, IMO, and for me, Marcus Smart (who I loved and he brought it on defense) was the absolute worst possible mix with a guy like JB and JT and when you added TL to that mix, you basically had 3 offensive players that defenses had to worry about and all of the focus went to the Jays. If the C's had Holiday over the last 5-6 years instead of Smart, I truly believe we're looking for banner #20 right now instead of #18.
This seems like a bit of a slippery slope, as essentially the entire point of advanced stats is to prevent an over-reliance on traditional stats and our own personal eye test. It should be a pretty high threshold to decide all advanced stats don't like player X as much as they should and the advanced stats must be wrong.
Certainly they are not perfect, and there are a bunch of team factors that can affect things. But there are probably some warts in Jaylens overall really good game that I think these stats are picking up on.
As far as players declining because a team is really good and there is only so much goodness to go around.... Murray, KCP, Porter Jr, and Gordon are all improving on DARKO and it seems like Jokic improvement/dominance is only helping them.
This is where I'm at generally as well.
JB is a really good player, pretty similar to what he has been over the past few years. New teammates have helped him out a bit some in some ways this year, though he has also dipped a bit in other ways (FT shooting!...egh).
I think the DARKO dip was real but he's also righted the ship, settling in as a fringe 3rd team all NBA type guy. Great guy to have as long as he's not expected to be your best player game after game.
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My issue here is the assumption that "advanced stats" are good enough to prevent this over-reliance. I get that the circularity of having to fall back on other modes of analysis in order to validate "advanced" stats sucks, but it's pretty unavoidable, given the alternative.
All of my "begging the question" warning lights get triggered when something is called "advanced", and then used as a yardstick in and of itself.
DARKO puts Jaylen at 3.1 DPM this season, right around James Harden and De’Aaron Fox. If you go +/- 0.5 DPM you have a band of guys including Brunson, Curry, Towns, Edwards, Porzingis, and Van Vleet.
I don’t know, that sounds actually right to me.
I don’t know, that sounds actually right to me.
Well, now we know for sure DARKO sucks, because everyone on my twitter feed has been yelling at me that Ant is better than Tatum.
Most anti-advanced stat arguments are going to heavily rely on someone's own personal eye test.
I'd be cautious blinding believing ones own assessment is the gold standard of accuracy, regardless how much it "feels" true.
Agree in the sense that this Jaylen isn't materially different than "just got voted all-NBA" Jaylen from last year. However, there was a dip from the Miami series last year through the beginning of this year a bit. I don't think that he's that much better than the guy who finished last year's regular season and started the playoffs. He might be the exact same guy every day since, who was struggling to perform due to changing conditions around him.
From a sanity check POV, that scans.
FWIW, I think that the newer metrics (avoiding the A word), never tell a complete picture either, which is where some folks are coming from. It's another tool, part of a collection of data points. As long as we're not using tragically bad ones like PER, they're useful and informative tools, but they should never be considered as gospel either. Folks who disregard them altogether as junk are missing a ton of the picture though. Feels like just yesterday when we had to explain FIP (before that BABIP) for folks who just refused to accept it and chose to project guys by stats that were being collected when we had 38 states.
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Any scoring of "Talent" or "Value" suffers from Heisenberg-esque uncertainty: you can look at it from every angle, but by the time you have enough of a bead on it, by whatever means you might choose, it has already shifted. It's always a moving target, and in fact it can never be known except within a margin of error that is sometimes too broad to be satisfying.
But that triangulation is where the closest approximation to truth lies, imo. Take a couple different angles on it, including Your Lyin' Eyes, traditional stats, advanced stats, throw it all in a pile. What was that Bill James quote - the test of a good metric is, 80% of the time it should confirm what you already know, and 20% of the time it should surprise you. Something like that. But no stat is going to agree with the others all the time. At best, DARKO will be "wrong" (to some definition of wrong) 20% of the time, and LEBRON will be wrong 20% of the time, and The Eye Test will be wrong 20% of the time, and so on. You can't get truth, but you can get consensus, usually.
And we keep inventing a better mousetrap, too. With the player-tracking data that exists now, I'm confident with enough time and effort, someone could make a metric that quantifies where a player is on a play, how they move, what actions you'd expect from the opponent and how much better above/below expectation the player did on that play, given what we can infer about their role, etc. There's gotta be some approach that can get there. Perhaps you'd find it less circular, or more reliable if it were constructed in a way that's informed about the particulars of basketball tactics. For all I know, teams are using such evaluation today, and we just don't have something publicly available. Just glimpses of it through stuff like Second Spectrum. But even that would have its own flaws through mis-reading play intent, or instinctual responses to small actions a defender took, or even just quantifying responsibility (the decisive Jrue steal on Nembhard in Game 3 - was that 80% Jrue's anticipation and execution, and 20% Nembhard's error in exposing the ball and going to his right in a predictable way? Different ratios?). So nothing will ever be perfect, which is good in a way because that's what keeps the sport exciting and interesting to discuss. But each new signal we get will just be another log on the fire, and over time some of the older stuff (PER!) will get burned out and weighted less in our own personal ensemble of metrics.
So I don't think of it as begging-the-question, so much as a fundamental uncertainty that we have to be (or get) emotionally comfortable with.
2-man pairings last season, Smart/Brown had the worst Net Rtg (+3.6) amongst the TOP15 in minutes played (1502 mins)
In the 554 minutes they played together in the playoffs they were a bit better +3.9
https://www.nba.com/stats/team/1610612738/lineups-advanced?GroupQuantity=2&Season=2022-23&SeasonType=Regular Season&dir=D&sort=MIN
FWIW Brown/Brogdon in 883 minutes were a +1.5 and Malcolm was lights out from 3
2022-23 (ranked by minutes):
Brown/Tatum: +6.3 (1629 minutes)
Brown/Horford: +6.0 (1534)
Brown/Smart: +3.6 (1502)
Brown/White: +11.0 (1415 minutes)
Brown/Grant: +3.7 (down to 1050 minutes)
Brown/Brogdon: +3.9
2023-24:
Brown/White: +10.3 (2nd most on team with 1847 minutes)
Brown/Tatum: +8.0 (1577)
Brown/Holiday: +6.5 (1478)
Brown/KP: +11.0 (1355)
Brown/Horford: +8.4 (1061)
Brown/Hauser: +7.2 (682) [Was +7.7 over 382 minutes last season]
I realize that the other 3 guys on the floor influence this stat as well. But I don't think the argument that Brown has improved this season is necessarily incorrect.
Yes, Jaylen was better this season IMHO
His left-hand handle + lefty finish were an actual weapon.
Much better off-ball defense along with excellent on-ball D.
Fewer brain freezes (except for the weird FT yips)
I just posted the Brown+Smart #s since DotB was speculating that Marcus along with TL were contributors to JB getting more defensive attention. Teams did sag off Smart + TimeLord was never a threat to shoot outside the paint.
Yes, but you see, those are not official Advanced Stats with an acronym named after an NBA player, so they are not authoritative. You even have to use some judgement in determining what they mean, as opposed to just having an unbiased all-in-one number to compare against other numbers. Extremely dangerous to have laymen interpreting the scriptures in this way.
I thought there was a definite step up in playmaking and seeing the game from JB this year.
Lol. I do think DARKO, like any other analytic tool, can be both informative and useful. But assessing the actual impact of a particular player in the NBA is always going to be an imprecise task given the context-dependent nature of the data that underlies these so-called advanced metrics.
Jaylen Brown had a huge upgrade in teammates in 2 critical roles, and it's certainly possible that DARKO perhaps underweights that impact, especially when looking at a single season, which can yet be small enough to be noisy. The Nuggets were brought up as a counter example to the teammate impact, but Denver did not add two players anywhere near as impactful as KP and Jrue Holiday to their starting rotation.
Still, I don't have any real problem with where Jaylen Brown is ranked using DPM (#24). In any given season, there are usually 10 eligible players that are obvious All-NBA winners. And there are about 10-20 additional players that could make an argument for the final 5 spots. DARKO puts Jaylen Brown right in the mix of those 10-20, which seems about right.
I also have no problem with ignoring any metric that doesn't have Jaylen Brown in the top 40 this past season.
Just for kicks, looking at this season's All-NBA teams and their respective DARKO rankings:
Jokic (#1)
Tatum (2)
Giannis (3)
Luka (8)
SGA (11)
---
Kawhi (5)
Durant (9)
Anthony Davis (15)
Brunson (17)
Anthony Edwards (20)
---
LeBron (12)
Booker (14)
Curry (18)
Haliburton (33)
Sabonis (93)
Top 20 DARKO players missing from the All-NBA list include:
Embiid (4) - Ineligible
Donovan Mitchell (6) - Ineligible
Wemby (7) - Rookie, but that will obviously change real soon
Paul George (10) - See below
Kyrie (13) - Ineligible
Butler (16) - Ineligible
KAT (19)- Ineligible
Paul George was probably overlooked by voters despite having a really good season. Kawhi being on the team hurts his chances considerably, IMO, as does his injury history in recent seasons.
I also think he took a step forward. I don't remember his finishing being this good the last few years. He's been using his body a lot more and just muscling guys to the rim. I maybe didn't watch as many Celtics games the past few years, but I feel like he was playing at a faster, more out of control pace before. This year he's seemed to have slowed it down a bit and just methodically brought people to the rim and scored on them. He still has the explosive dunks and layups too, but a lot more of his game is like White or Holiday where they are in total control going to the rim.
Biggest callouts from this: Voters aren't aligned with but aren't completely different from DARKO, Wemby is a joke omission by the voters, Paul George isn't popular. Also Haliburton got some "bag helium", and Sabonis is the token "counting stats" guy.
FWIW, he has also been going through guys, not just around them. In control mostly (although he gets an outsized share of offensive fouls). But he gets half a step past a guy now, and instead of accelerating to top speed to lose the guy, he keeps him there and finishes through him at the hoop. Both he and Tatum have pulled a little Giannis into their offensive game (the good part of Giannis).
Yeah.. that's what I mean by muscling guys to the rim... he's getting defenders on their back foot and keeping them back peddling by using his strength... but not in an out of control way so that it isn't a foul, most of the time.
I don't consider the Wemby omission a joke. He averaged less than 30 minutes per game as Pop and the Spurs managed his minutes carefully. And the Spurs finished with the same 22-60 record as they did the prior season. Just like the MVP in MLB shouldn't necessarily go to the player who put up the biggest bWAR or fWAR, I don't think voters necessarily need to follow DARKO rankings either.
Also, very few rookies have made All-NBA team their first season since 1980: Larry Bird (first), Michael Jordan (2nd), David Robinson (made 3rd team first season of 3rd team voting), and Tim Duncan (1st). Neither Shaq nor LeBron made All-NBA their rookie seasons.
If we are just talking eye test here, the offensive improvements that stand out to me are:
1. He's a better and more consistent creator of midrange shots for himself. He has some of this before, but whether by pulling up or posting up for the turnaround, he's just creating and taking higher quality midrange shots than ever before. This season he was almost 50% from between 3 and 16 feet, and I think a lot of the improvement was his own shot creation skills (some was the team focus on posting up more).
2. As others have said, he's using his strength more on drives. His ability to body guys out of the way/maintain his path is pretty impressive and, from him, new this year as far as I can tell. He had one drive this year where he slowly, for him, split two defenders to go in for a layup. Not the sort of thing one sees in the NBa all that often from anyone.
3. Jaylen's regular season usage took a bit of a dip this year, to 28.9, his lowest usage since 2019-20's 24.7. Over the past 3 years he was at 29.7, 30.5, and 31.4. But he also posted his lowest turnover percentage since Kyrie was here. In the playoffs thus far, Jaylen has his highest career playoff usage (29.2, after 26.9 and 27.9 the past 2 years) while cutting down on turnovers considerably (11.4 this year, after 13.4 and 14.2 over the past 2 years). This is his lowest career playoff turnover percantage since his uncharacteristic and never repeated again 7.4% during 2017-2018.
Fair, though as a metric which uses plus-minus both quality of bench and rotation approach mean it can be true that some players in good teams are harmed “artificially” while others are not. Celtics bench was better than Denver’s this year—so this will impact Celtics with lower ratio of bench-player minutes I’d imagine
have not studied the specific case here enough to be sure!
A good portion of his step "up" during the season was having a 7'3" guy who can shoot and roll to the basket playing next to him.
But he's been great during these playoffs without KP. He benefits from teams paying a lot of attention to JT but he's been great.
For offense, there could be a stat like "points produced". It would include their own points scored (obviously), points scored directly off their own passes (so an assist on a three counts as three points produced, and a pass that leads directly to a free throw made - say the guy gets fouled and makes 1 out of 2 FTs - counts as one point produced), and then also half points produced for "hockey assists" and screens that directly lead to baskets. A really good screen that frees up a guy for a basket is a hugely important thing in basketball - especially at the NBA level. Guys who do that well should get some credit for it. As in, say a shooter is using your excellent screen to get open, and I pass the shooter the ball and he drains the three. Right now, the shooter is credited with three points, I would be credited with an assist (which has the same value as if the shooter curled and I passed to him for a layup, even though in one case it's three points and in the other it's two points), but you would be credited with nothing, even though it was your screen that made the entire play work in the first place.
So again: Points produced = points scored + points scored from direct passes + 1/2 points scored from either hockey assists or screens that directly lead to baskets
And of course you could do total points produced, points produced per game, points produced per 36 minutes, and points produced per possession. You could even do points produced per touch to see a rate stat based on how much he handles the ball.
I think that would give us a much better sense of how impactful guys are on offense, statistically speaking anyway.
So again: Points produced = points scored + points scored from direct passes + 1/2 points scored from either hockey assists or screens that directly lead to baskets
And of course you could do total points produced, points produced per game, points produced per 36 minutes, and points produced per possession. You could even do points produced per touch to see a rate stat based on how much he handles the ball.
I think that would give us a much better sense of how impactful guys are on offense, statistically speaking anyway.
I don't think that voters should follow anything in particular, DARKO rating, or whether Lebron made All-NBA in his rookie year. Wemby finished 82nd in minutes. It's not MVP, it's all NBA. Guy deserved to be on there somewhere.
Agreed. I wasn't a fan of Brown initiating the offense from the top at the beginning of the season, but I was very wrong.
When JB gets matched up with guys like Haliburton, Herro, Strus, or Luka - getting Jaylen going downhill from the top, with his improved handle has led to layups or the entire defense collapsing/kickouts. It's a high % action.
Building an offense around skilled WINGs has come to fruition. The JAYs mismatch will only increase over the next half-decade.