The Boston Celtics’ decision to trade Jaylen Brown to the Philadelphia 76ers for what initially felt like a paltry return was so shocking in the moment that a lot of people felt compelled to lie to rationalize it. The prevailing wisdom was that Boston had to trade their All-NBA wing because they already offered him to the Milwaukee Bucks for Giannis Antetokounmpo, and in doing so broke the trust between the two parties. I’m not buying that, because Shams Charania maintained Brown never requested a trade even after the Bucks chose Miami’s (much better) offer. Long-time talking head Collin Cowherd reported that Brown has a “disease” where he thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room. That quote just scans as racist, and also doesn’t get the real reason Boston traded Brown.
It’s easy to understand why the average NBA fan or analyst thinks Jaylen Brown is an elite player. He helped power the Celtics to 56 wins last season while Jayson Tatum was recovering from a torn Achilles, finishing No. 6 in MVP voting in the process. He helped the Celtics win the 2024 championship, and was named NBA Finals MVP for his efforts.
How could the Celtics possibly trade a guy like that for two first-round picks and an even worse contract in Paul George? Well, it’s because Boston’s front office thinks Brown is massively overrated by fans and media. Apparently the rest of the NBA agrees, considering the Celtics reportedly shopped him to the entire league, and this was the best offer they could get.
The sticker shock was real when the deal was announced. That’s all the Celtics could get!? The trade grades industrial complex was not kind to Boston. ESPN gave the Celtics a D+ and the Sixers an A-. CBS Sports gave Boston a D- and Philly an A+. The Sporting News gave the Celtics a C- for the deal. I gave the Celtics a C+ and the Sixers an A- in my instant grades, which somehow made me one of the highest media members on the deal. Other smart basketball writers were immediately calling me out, asking if I was okay and touting this as the most “lopsided trade since Luka.”
By the next morning, I wish I had been a lot higher on the deal for Boston. I would give both sides a B now if I regraded it. I think there’s a strong chance the Celtics actually won the trade.
The simple version for why the Celtics traded Brown is because he’s a good player, but a bad asset. He’s owed $180 million over the next three years, and the Celtics decided their team wasn’t good enough right now with him on that deal to win a championship. In this version of the CBA, it’s hard for teams to have massive contracts like that on their cap sheet if the player isn’t elite. By Steph Noh’s salary model, Brown is worth $41 million while making $57 million, bleeding $16 million per year in value. The Celtics opted for more long-term flexibility with the draft picks and George, whose contract is a year shorter.
Who’s to say Brown isn’t elite? He averaged 29-7-5! He won NBA Finals MVP! Well, if you’re reading this article, you already know this is a conversation about “analytics.” Brown simply doesn’t grade out very well in the advanced metrics that have now overtaken NBA front offices. This trade feels like a watershed moment for the analytics movement, and if Boston is still very good next season (which they should be) and if Philly falls short of an NBA Finals berth (which is likely to happen), this trade will be remembered as the moment when basketball analytics went fully mainstream.
Why did the Celtics trade Brown? I don’t think it’s because he believes he’s the smartest guy in the room, or because they couldn’t repair the relationship. It’s more because Brown finished with a -1.6 RAPM last season. By time decay RAPM, Brown ranks No. 270 in the league. What’s RAPM? It stands for “regularized adjusted plus-minus,” and it’s a metric that doesn’t consider traditional box score numbers like points and rebounds, instead measuring a player’s individual impact on their team’s scoring margin per 100 possessions. It’s adjusted for the strength of teammates and opponents, and features “ridge regression” to filter out statistical noise.
What this essentially comes down to is that the Celtics are better with Brown off the court. If it happened in one or two years, that might be a fluke. Instead, Boston is better with Brown on the bench when accounting for his entire 10-year career.
Why have the Celtics been better with Brown off the floor? It’s because Brown negatively impacts Boston’s turnover rate and second chance points on offense, while also negatively impacting their opponent’s true shooting percentage, takeaway rate, and second-chance points given up on defense. Through this lens, the advanced metrics are easier to understand: it’s bad to turn the ball over and give up offensive rebounds. There are simply a lot of holes in Brown’s game that are covered up by this scoring.
The turnovers are a major issue. Brown’s “scoring turnover percentage” was 10.3 percent last season, which ranked in the 1st percentile of the league. His “creation adjusted turnover percentage” was 9.6 percent, which ranked in the 36th percentile . Brown isn’t a good playmaker for his teammates, either. He averaged 1.9 potential assists per minute, which ranked in the 15th percentile of the league. His assist-to-turnover ratio of +0.92 was ninth-best on the Celtics and No. 150 league-wide.
That’s just offense. Brown is even worse on defense, where his spacey off-ball defense leads to tons of breakdowns. People have been noticing Brown’s bad off-ball defense for years, but they can usually point to his strong on-ball defense to show his value. If you think about defense on a team level, defending off the ball is a lot more important than defending on the ball, because every player spends a lot more time doing it. At its core, defense is a team accomplishment. Being able to guard at the point of attack is obviously a valuable skill, but over a long sample, breakdowns off the ball hurt the team a lot more than staying strong on-ball when teams go at you.
The other important point about Brown’s departure is that the Celtics are simply redistributing his touches to other players. People have laughed at the idea that Payton Pritchard can be the Celtics’ Jalen Brunson, but one similarity they both have is elite turnover suppression. Pritchard’s assist-to-turnover ratio was +7.2, which was No. 1 in the entire NBA. By replacing Brown’s time on ball with more Pritchard, the Celtics are immediately gaining a turnover advantage they didn’t previously enjoy. It will also be interesting to see if Derrick White can shoot the ball better now, assuming he gets to play in better rhythm without such a high-usage teammate. Brown’s impact on his teammates sure wasn’t great.
It’s understandable if you think this all sounds like bullshit. The thing is, the Celtics are widely considered to have a top-2 front office in the NBA alongside the Thunder, and they apparently believe in it. In ripping Boston for the trade, there’s a lot of people who believe they’re smarter than Brad Stevens, Mike Zarren, and Dave Lewin. I respect having conviction in your takes, but chances are those guys are going to beat the NBA consensus more times than not, because they’ve already proven to be really, really good at this whole team-building thing.
The Celtics are probably going to be damn good next season. In fact, in early July, I think they have a pretty good chance to be the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference. They’re essentially replacing Brown with a full season of Tatum while adding Mitchell Robinson and Paul George, and maybe even getting some additional growth from their young players like Hugo Gonzalez, Jordan Walsh, and Baylor Scheierman. With the Brown trade, the Celtics are leaning even further into their identity of chucking threes and crashing the offensive glass. George is a better spot-up three-point shooter than Brown. Robinson is one of the game’s best offensive rebounders. Eliminating all of Brown’s mid-range jumpers — he ranked in the 98th percentile of midrange frequency, per Cleaning the Glass — is one way to help the Celtics address another problem that has constantly plagued them: the need to get to the rim more.
You win basketball games by getting more scoring chances than your opponent, and by being more efficient with your scoring chances than your opponent. Through that lens, the idea of the Celtics improving without Brown really isn’t that hard to believe.
A good front office makes a trade a year early rather than a year late. That’s what the Celtics did here. In the process, they’ve saddled one of their biggest rivals with another bad contract while gaining more future draft picks from them. My quick list of the “least team friendly” contracts in the NBA right now would include Joel Embiid, De’Aaron Fox, and Brown. The Sixers have two of those guys. This better work for Philly quickly, because if it doesn’t, the bill is going to come due really quick.
If basketball is played on spreadsheets now, why even watch? The thing about analytics is they’re designed to capture truth over a long, large sample. In the NBA, championships are determined over a much shorter sample called the playoffs. Anything can happen in the playoffs, when the old axiom of “it’s a make or miss league” takes on greater importance. The Celtics might math-ball their way to a lot of regular season success, but they will have different issues come playoff time. I’d be shocked if they make the 2027 NBA Finals even if I think they may end up as the No. 1 seed.
When the Celtics lose in the playoffs, the people who bashed the Brown trade will take a victory lap. I’m not sure that will be deserved considering the Celtics just lost in the first-round as a favorite with Brown as their best player this past season. When the Sixers lose in the playoffs, the analytics crowd will say they were right, and that taking on Brown wasn’t worth it. This is how most things end, with both sides declaring victory and no true winners having been decided.
On a broader level, I think the Jaylen Brown trade will mark the moment when more fans and analysts fully embrace analytics. The end game here is probably the league office deciding to make some rule changes to make the game more watchable as teams continue to buy into what the numbers are telling them. Baseball has already done this to great effect.
I understand the hesitancy to embrace some of this stuff for fans and media. Listen, I think I have a pretty good eye test too after covering high school, college, NBA, and WNBA basketball for this site since 2012. I’m not smart enough to build one of these fancy data models, but I’m also not stupid enough to discount them. Basketball has been slowly building toward embracing analytics for the last 10 or 15 years. Something tells me the Brown trade will accelerate the movement.
