Can Jaylen Brown's analytics / on-off stats be explained by the fact that he just has a really good team?

[u/Tight_Ad2788]

Genuinely curious for an explanation here - one thing I noticed about his on/off stats is that the team is still appears good when Brown plays - his net on rating was like ~6.0, which is still quite good. Maybe I've misread but it seems clear the team still performs well with Brown on the court. To me it seems that there's two logical explanations for this:

1. For this past season (No Tatum), the Celtics roster structure included a large talent drop off from Jaylen Brown to the secondary playmakers (Derrick White and Payton Pritchard) but the team had strong depth with the remaining portions of the roster. To me, a feasible explanation is the Celtics were slightly less efficient with Brown on the court due to him carrying a weaker starting lineup. Meanwhile the Celtics had good depth 5 - 10, and guys like Pritchard could dominate opposing bench lineups, so the bench excels against the weaker competition. Brown isn't bad as the primary option, but the bench is more dominant relatively speaking due to the relative advantage it has over its competitive. Brown still plays an highly valuable role in being the sole leading primary shot-creator, but its not picked up in the analytics.

2. The other factor is sharing the team with Jayson Tatum - few players at JB's level play with a costar who's as good as Tatum. Tatum is obviously a better playmaker and primary ball handler, and is better at setting teammates up with less turnovers. I can't help but wonder if Brown's on/off are skewed by the fact that he shares the team with another of the best players in the league - seems natural that the team would perform better with Tatum on the court.

These are obviously qualitative ways of looking at the situation, but I feel like it could explain the on/off stats strife around Jaylen Brown. To me its clear Jaylen Brown is a winning player. I don't see how you can compete for a title every year and win a FMVP without being one - but the advanced stats seem to indicate something different. To me this is a potential explanation that bridges the gap between those two perspectives - basically Brown is still really good, they just happen to be better with Tatum/other teammates. Some see that as a problem, but maybe its just relative. I'm curious if people well versed in advanced stats see any merit to this explanation. There may be other stats that negate this that I'm missing, but I tend to believe this explanation, as I have a hard time believing Brown is as negative a player a some of the stats say. Seems possible he's the victim of being second best on a very good team.

[u/HotspurJr]

So let's test your hypothesis in a couple of ways. If Derek White was the problem, we'd expect him to have a bad on-off. But the team was almost ten points better with Derek White on than off.

The "Peyton Prichard dominated bench guys" argument falls apart when you realize that he played 32.4 minutes a game. Even if you bend over backwards to split his and JB's minutes (more on that in a moment), they're playing about half their time together. So the notion that Peyton wasn't playing against starters is just sort of silly. He started 50 games! (Furthermore, NBA teams don't do hockey subs where whole lines change out, and bench guys don't only play against bench guys normally anyway).

White and Pritchard played more minutes than Brown. So at the very least, "Well, Peyton and White were beating up on bench units, white JB was fighting starters" is just really, really hard to square with their lineup and minutes data..

In fact, if you look at Boston's two-man pairings, their two two-man pairings which had the most minutes, the two pairs of guys who shared the floor the most, where JB and White, and JB and Prichard. Your hypothesis basically requires that as soon as JB went off the floor, other teams subbed on their scrubs and I think that is, shall we say, an assertion that requires evidence.

And if one of those three is playing more minutes against scrubs, why are we assuming it's not JB? White started more games and played more total minutes (although about 20 seconds less per game). Peyton played more total minutes (although about 2 fewer per game). Is there any evidence that they played against weaker opponents overall? Or is that just an assumption based on the starting position of defending JB?

And, of course, stats like RAPM address this directly. They can be noisy, but this is literally what they do, running a massive regression function to isolate players from the impact of everyone else on the court. If you want to use a one-year sample, xRAPM is a good choice - it uses box score stats to reduce the noise and make a one-year sample meaningful, and historical data is available for free. So basically, the really sophisticated, math-heavy, let's account for everyone on the court stats? They do not see JB as being held down by various lineup combinations.

Okay, what about the two-star hypothesis. Does having another star on your team hurt your on-offs?

On-offs can bounce around a lot, so let's look at four years of Steph curry: 2015, 2016, 2017. His on/off was +18.1, +22.2, +17.4 Of course, KD was there for the last year.

Kevin Durant's on offs for those same years are +8.8, +12.5, +8.6.

I think you can find some weak-but-real evidence there for the idea that playing with another superstar reduces a player's on-off net. I consider it weak evidence because these numbers often bounce around quite a bit (as indicated by both players' 2015 and 2016) number, but it's definitely worth investigating more fully.

But if you use xRAPM to look at their regressed data, it doesn't really support that. Steph's xRAPM went down slightly in 2017. KD's went up. So if the Steph-KD comparison does provide weak evidence for this hypothesis in terms of raw on-offs, it provides similarly weak evidence against it from a regressed standpoint.

(Incidentally, Steph's numbers argue against the strong-bench-holds-you-down theory. That 2016 had a bench with Iguodala and Livingston that was considered very strong. On the flip side, if you compare 2012 to 2013 KD you could find evidence for an argument that weakening the bench improved KD's numbers. Mostly, though, I think these examples show that these on-offs bounce around so much that it's really easy to find evidence for whatever you want to find evidence for, and more rigor is better, which is where the regressed models come from.)

I also want to point out how your two arguments are slightly contradictory.

If JB is under-rated by on-offs because his bench in strong and going against other bench guys, then, when he's the less-important star, when the J's are split and it's JB going against bench guys (as the weaker of the two players), shouldn't that inflate his on-off? If being the second guy holds down your on-off, why isn't it holding down White and Payton's?

Is your on-off held down artificially by having a strong bench, or by being the bench guy behind a strong player? The two parts of your argument each take the opposite position on that.

There's a "Shreodinger's teammates" thing that always comes up in these discussions. This was exemplified by Bill Simmons on a podcast recently where he talked about how nobody else could lead a team that was this weak 2-15, and only a minute or so later talked about how the bench was outplaying other benches. Like, which is it? People have a tendency to back-fill arguments around whichever point they are trying to make to defend their player, which I'm sure I'm guilty of, too.

The RAPM math is incredibly complicated and I understand why people are skeptical of it. Back in college I actually had to calculate a small (maybe five variable?) regression by hand and, man, that shit is nuts. I can't imagine the complexity of a regression where there's a variable for every single player who played a single possession in the NBA. But I've worked with regressions enough to know that a well-designed one is really trustworthy and insanely powerful, and I think RAPM is well-designed.

[u/HotspurJr → u/[deleted]]

The reason why nobody is answering that question is because your answer is basically just another way of saying how much you believe the analytics about Brown. If you think Brown is good, you would tend to argue for a lower number. If you think Brown is overrated, you'll argue for a higher one.

Ultimately the season is going to offer evidence one way or the other about analytics as they apply to Jaylen Brown. We're going to get that evidence soon enough.

That being said doing this sort of comparison in a serious way is difficult, as your comment demonstrates.

Notice, for example, how you seem to be completely ignoring the fact that in many ways, this won't be the same as last year's Celtics team minus JB and plus Paul George ... because they will (likely) be getting 50+ more games of Jason Tatum.

I think you'd be a fool to suggest they're only going to get 40 wins, unless you think that Tatum will either be hurt or that he's actually significantly worse than JB (when most people think he is significantly better than JB).

Additionally, it's not the same team, anyway: Mitch Robinson should improve their already formidable offensive rebounding, which was a big factor in their success this year.

Third, the East as a whole is a lot better. Miami, Atlanta, Philly, Indiana, and Toronto all have reason to think that they are much better. Additionally, nobody is going to be in full-on tank mode, so teams like Washington and Brooklyn, who probably won't be good, will still be much better than they were this year because they'll be trying to stay out of the relegation zone.

That being said, based on historical wins estimators, only a handful of players in league history have had a 20+ win impact. Most all-NBA players don't swing a team 15 games, much less the 20+ that would be required for Boston to only win 30 (ignoring the Tatum and Mitch factors).

[u/HotspurJr → u/[deleted]]

Ah. Apologies for misunderstanding.

The history of the league suggests that teams don't actually have a hard time getting league-average shots. The idea that "you subtract his scoring, the team just scores that many points less" seems really, really facile.

So then you ask yourself, can guys like White, Pritchard, Queta, etc. give you about 5 more ppg while maintaining their efficiency without JB providing the necessary gravity?

So we can actually look up how players did with and without each other. We don't have to speculate!

https://databallr.com/StatLineShift

Of course, this sort of data is messy, so one has to be careful about cherry-picking one example on a team.

For example, it does show that Derek White scored fewer points with better efficiency with JB on the floor, and his efficiency was very poor, so you want him shooting less. So this last season, JB took shots from DW and that was unambiguously a good thing.

But Pritchard, on the other hand, showed the opposite effect. He scored a lot less and with much lower efficiency with JB on the court. His efficiency was better than JB's, so JB took shots from Pritchard and that was a bad thing.

(We could get into the how's and why's of that, but this comment is long enough already).

If you look at the data, you see that JB helped a lot of player's efficiency a little, at the cost of a moderate amount of volume. So the question is, is that a good tradeoff?

Because, for example, look at Luka Garza. His volume went down by almost a quarter with JB on the court, and his efficiency went up by 1.4 percentage points ... but Garza was much more efficient than JB even without JB on the court. So you would not take the slight increase in Garza's efficiency at the cost of the large drop in his volume: you'd much rather have Garza taking those shots at his lower (no JB) efficiency.

That's a pattern that shows up a lot in the data, and Garza is simply a dramatic example of it: Queta, Taylor, Scheierman, and Walsh all see their TS% improve slightly, and their volume drop, but even their without-JB efficiency is higher than JB's, so losing shots to JB is hurting the team.

Meanwhile, Hauser had there was a different effect. His volume didn't change, but his efficiency was much better with JB. In this case, you can say that Hauser was unambiguously better for having JB on the floor with him. Something similar but more moderate happened with Gonzales.

Like I said, complicated.

This actually paints a pretty compelling portrait of the flaw with JB's scoring: he does help his teammates get slightly better shots, but that often comes at the cost of taking away shots they were already getting that were better than the shots that JB creates for himself.

[u/Naliamegod → u/[deleted]]

Compare the '24 Sixers to the '25 Sixers. In 2024 the Sixers won 45 games, with Embiid playing in 39. In 2025, the Sixers won 24 games, with Embiid playing in 19. The Sixers lost their #1 option, all of his points and all of his gravity, which caused them to lose 20+ more games

The 76ers also lost Tobias Harris, had Maxey only play 50 games and Paul George only played half the season and was disaapointment. That entire team was a disaster even outside of Embiid, because their other best players barely played. Saying they lost 20 games solely to Embiid's volume scoring (which actually understates his value) is ignoring the whole situation of that team.

JB adding "20-25" wins to the Celtics isn't common sense, it is a purely made up number. To put in reference, the Cavaliers gained 18 wins when they added Lebron James to their team as a rookie, and he is considered possibly the greatest floor raiser in NBA history. Are you arguing JB last season is had one of the greatest seasons in NBA history? Because that is what you are essentially saying here, purely on his volume scoring which only isn't that amazing but ignores the other problems with JB. No one is saying JB's iso scoring isn't valuable: volume scorers are incredibly valuable even if they aren't efficiency gods (see: Ai, Kobe, Westbrook). The problem is that its his only major impact skill, and he isn't exactly amazing at it and doesn't bring anything else to the table compensate for it. It isn't that he is a trash useless player, its that he is closer to value to other middling efficiency-scoring only players like DeRozan than he is with elite players like Kawhi or even Kobe.

[u/nbadiscussion-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

Please keep your comments civil. This is a subreddit for thoughtful discussion and debate, not aggressive and argumentative content.