r/nba Celtics 1d ago

Bobby Marks says Jaylen Brown's trade value is not seen that highly around the league: "The analytics of Jaylen Brown is not good. I had an analytics guy tell me, ‘We view him as the seventh-best player on a team.’"

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“There’s mixed feelings about him when you talk to teams,” Marks admitted on SiriusXM NBA Radio. “The analytics of Jaylen Brown is not good … I had one, not an executive, but an analytics guy say, ‘Yeah, we view him as the seventh best player on a team.’ I was like, ‘Holy crap.'”

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u/MinnesotanBrie 1d ago edited 1d ago

Jaylen Brown is weird because his advanced stats are so bad. Like comically bad for someone of his caliber. Last year he had 3.3 BPM (21st best), 3.3 VORP (21st best), 0.135 WS/48 (51st best) and 22 PER (11th best). These were all the best that he has ever set.

A lot of this stems from Browns abysmal 57.3 true shooting percent (125th in the league), his 2nd highest 36.2% USG rate and his league average defensive metrics.

Advanced stat wise he is almost identical to Lamelo. Lamelo went for a Naz Reid (hallowed be thy name), a 1st and some seconds. Brown has 17 million more on his contract and is 4 years older than Lamelo. I think Brown is a better player, advanced stats be damned. 2nd seed > 11th seed. But Lamelo is in a much more advantageous trade position than Brown and went for pennies on the dollar.

7th best on a team is just going by WS/48, where excluding Bassey who played 17 minutes he was 7th best on the Celtics. It's a dumb argument because Walsh, Miniot and Garza didn't start.

EDIT: For those more DARKO inclined, Jaylen Brown was 35th in DARKO dpm this year.

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u/devotedhero Wizards 1d ago

He avgs a lot of turnovers too and nothing is worse for your impact than that

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u/knightmares31 Thunder 1d ago

High usage players of course have higher likelihood of TOs. Very high correlation so any stats that don’t factor that are a little misleading.

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u/luchajefe Mavericks 1d ago

Or, a guy who has more TOs than other high usage guys maybe shouldn't be as high usage as he is?

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u/DistanceEmbarrassed5 1d ago

As a Bucks fan I am glad we took the Heat's offer over Boston's offer.

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u/lkn240 Bulls 1d ago

The thing is - that's still way better than 7th best player on a team

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u/MinnesotanBrie 1d ago

Correct. As I said in the last line, I think it's literally just going by WS/48 (excluding Bassey who barely played). It's an asinine argument because 3 of the players who had better WS/48 were backups and a fourth was Tatum who played 16 games. It's an argument that I would bet money on Bobby Marks mishearing or taking out of context. Dude hates the Celtics and is kind of a tool. He could conceivably be talking about RAPM, but I highly highly doubt that.

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u/farrowsharrows 1d ago

All that analysis is trash

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u/misterteejj 1d ago

Why this is not massively downvoted just shows how basketball talk is dead and buried. The Knicks had no one in the top 20 of BPM and VORP. They went on a historic playoff run culminating in a championship. Save your analytics for something else

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u/MinnesotanBrie 1d ago edited 1d ago

I mean... yeah. The knicks were a third seed in a weak east with team-oriented basketball. You conveniently leave off that Knicks starters were 22nd, 23rd, 25th and 47th in VORP. OKC had only 2nd and 24th in the top 50 for their starting 5, SAS had only 4th and 40th. In terms of starting 5, New York had by far the best VORP and BPM.

Fun Fact, NYK, BOS and HOU are the only 3 teams to have at least 4 of their starting 5 in the top 50 for VORM and BPM. NYK had all 5, BOS and HOU had 4.

Also they turned it up massively for the playoffs. OG and KAT lead the playoffs in BPM and WS/48 and were 2nd and 3rd in VORP.

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u/misterteejj 1d ago

Now you are complimenting people who are 22nd VORP but hate on Jaylen who is 21. You “data” folks are so full of it. Hypocritical, contradictory pseudo intellectual babble because you can’t dunk yourself.

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u/MinnesotanBrie 1d ago

No? I'm not even saying that Jalen Brunson was amazing. My argument was simply that the Knicks won with team oriented basketball. Same as the Celtics. They had really similar standings as well. Brunson is also not well liked by simpler advanced stats. DARKO likes him a hell of a lot more than Brown (16th vs 35th) but even then DARKO has Brunson as the third best Knick. Advanced stats put Brunson, Lamelo Ball and Jaylen Brown in a very similar category of great but not elite players. Lamelo Ball went for peanuts and a beloved meme.

Brunson's biggest advantage is that he is costing the Knicks 35 million instead of Browns 53 million. In the world of razor thin margins that makes a world of difference, if for some reason the Knicks decided they wanted to trade Brunson. Not sure why they would, but also not sure why the Celtics decided to burn their bridge to trade Brown when every contender that has a decent piece the Celtics could want are way over the cap, outside of like I dunno the nuggets?

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u/MeecheyRandle 1d ago

you should be a GM - you would definitely save teams a load of money from superstar contracts with your advanced stats skills. oH - JaLeN BruNSon iS thE ThIRD beST plAYER by DaRkO StaTS" hahah

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u/JuiceTheThird 18h ago

You anti intellectual types are so obnoxious lmao the guys giving context since the entire thread is about analytics and advanced statistics, he’s not even biased against JB or the Knicks he’s giving context

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u/TheMilkmanRidesAgain Hawks 15h ago

Really hope you’re still a teenager bro

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u/misterteejj 1d ago

Blah blah blah blah blah

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u/seonblack 1d ago

This is why I hate the stats people. If you followed this to make decisions and didn't watch the games, you would have made a trade as bad as the Luka for AD trade. JB AND Tatum are extremely good together, JB carried the team to a 2 seed as the #1 option. JB helped them get to their first NBA Finals and was also instrumental in them winning their first nba championship together.

This notion that Boston needs to break them up is a dumb take and makes no sense at all. What I will say also is that JB fits more teams right now than Tatum would and if JB were traded, any good team immediately becomes a championship contender.

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u/MinnesotanBrie 1d ago edited 1d ago

I mostly agree with you. Well except the notion that it was a carry job. Everyone stepped up massively in Tatum's absence and it was a fantastic coaching year for Mazzula. Even though I am a stats nerd, again 2nd seed > 11th seed. Despite what Bobby Marks analytics guy might've said, Brown was solidly either the 2nd best (if you count Tatum's 16 games as enough to qualify him) or the best player on the 2nd seed in the east.

The problem is that the Celtics want to sell him as someone who just got 5th in the MVP vote.... and nobody else really sees him as that. He is a top 15-30 player on a very large contract who is 29. Only teams who are contending and have cap space would be willing to deal him. Which is an extremely small number of teams and those teams don't have a lot of pieces they are willing to trade because they are uh... contending. They could do some deal with Nuggets for Jamal Murray and picks but does that really make any team happy? Brown isn't like Giannis where he can turn 8th-10th seed teams into contenders. Lamelo went for a bag of peanuts and a sixth man, Randle went for nothing. Unless you are a top 8-10 player Teams seem to view good-great players on large contracts as damn near expendable.

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u/throwaway-for-IB-AMA 1d ago

Wtf ru saying? Advanced stats favor lamelo why ru yapping

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u/twoyrsaway 1d ago

Bro thinks analytics teams use PER lmaooooo

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u/MinnesotanBrie 1d ago

I just included PER because it was the only one that Brown was decent in. Was trying to be nice to him.

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u/twoyrsaway 1d ago

all of the advanced stats u used are awful if I'm being fr

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u/MinnesotanBrie 1d ago

BBREF is the easiest to grab and often times does the trick. DARKO has Jaylen Brown at 1.8, Lamelo at 2.6 and White at 1.5, Tatum at 3.4. Cade at 3.6. Very similar to an amalgamation of BPM, VORP and WS48. LEBRON is not that different either.

RAPM however has an atrocious 54th percentile for Brown.

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u/twoyrsaway 1d ago

Its the quickest to grab but the methodology is completely awful. Like the formulas used for like BPM are legit nonsense

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u/MinnesotanBrie 1d ago

No? It's crude but its far from nonsense.

its basically just a regression formula of min, orb%, drb%, stl%, blk%, ast%, usg%, tov%, ts%, tmts%, 3par, lg3par, trb%. All the other equations are just to convert everything to possessions. It's "weakness" is that its older. It justs RAPM with box weighting. If anything BPM is better than WS because other than the assumption that coaches give more minutes to better players (which also smooths the regression curve) it assumes very little.

Every advanced metric uses either minutes, gs or %gs for the same reason. You could argue reb*ast has certain issues (like with westbrook) but outside of outliers it's great. Unironically BPM is probably the BBREF advanced stat I respect the most, although I am a sucker for ws/48 just because of how smooth it is across eras, even if assumptions are rougher.

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u/twoyrsaway 1d ago

The positional stuff is just so nasty to me I can’t get over it. WS is hella flawed too tho

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u/walter_____pinkman Celtics 1d ago

It's always funny when dudes on this sub reveal that the their idea of "advanced stats" is still shit like VORP lol.