Jaylen Brown has been unbelievable this season. He has the gap-year Boston Celtics looking like legitimate NBA title contenders, and he has high-profile peers presenting his MVP case for him.
This has been a ceiling-raising kind of campaign for the five-time All-Star, but Max Kellerman opined this might go even beyond that. Because in his mind, Brown has managed to leapfrog no other than perennial MVP candidate Luka Doncic on the hoops world's hierarchy. For Kellerman, it's not a matter of talent, but rather it boils down to a superior approach.
"Because Jaylen Brown is not as talented as Luka, he is forced, if he wants to be a great player, to the play the right way," Kellerman said on the Game Over podcast. "... Because he's not as good, he has become better. ... The pressure to become a great player forced him to be a better player than Luka."
There are ways to understand what Kellerman is saying, but his ultimate point falls flat. Brown is awesome, but he's not better than Luka.
The eye test and the stat sheet all give Luka Doncic the edge over Jaylen Brown.
As with anyone greasing the gears for a wild take, Kellerman took a winding road to get there. He compared Doncic to "a scrambling quarterback who hasn't developed pocket awareness" and then offered the typical critiques about Doncic's pestering of the officials and defensive deficiencies.
As for Brown, Kellerman praised him for playing "the right way." There were comments on his hustle, willingness to play within the offense, defensive effort, and passing. All valid points.
What this really was, though, was a criticism of Doncic's approach packaged as the ultimate high praise for Brown. Sort of a "wow, it'd be awesome if Luka played like that" kind of talking-head rant, which...sure, it would be, but it doesn't actually put him behind Brown on the pecking order.
This is tough, because you don't want to take anything away from what Brown is doing. It's just that there isn't a rational argument to be made on his behalf.
By traditional metrics, Doncic has the edge in points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, three-pointers, and free throws. By advanced analytics, Doncic holds the advantage in...well, similarly everything. By quantified impact, Doncic makes the Lakers 2.2 points better per 100 possessions when he's on the court, while Brown's floor presence pulls the Celtics' net rating down by 7.9 points, per NBA.com.
It'll get people talking at least—I'm talking about it as we speak—and if it brings Brown some extra attention, he's earned it. That doesn't make the take remotely reasonable, though. And even diehard Celtics fans should reluctantly admit that.