Jaylen Brown and moving goal posts
Jaylen Brown has spent a fair bit of time this season talking about the rules of the game, or more specifically, the enforcement of them.
I think he’s got a point.
But I also think that getting yourself tossed from a game because you lose your cool in a major way is a bad way of going about it. At the same time, let’s take a look at why Jaylen was tossed…
The pool report from the officials after the game in San Antonio says that he was ejected for using profanity, being aggressive, and pointing.
This is sort of the problem with NBA rules in general.
In the NBA you are permitted incidental contact with opponents.
But what is incidental contact? Sure, it’s defined in the rule book, but what about the application of that definition?
That varies from official to official.
According to the rules, contact stops being ‘incidental’ when it interferes with an offensive player’s “speed, quickness, balance and/or rhythm”—a definition that seems to perfectly match the play that set Brown off—yet it wasn’t called. And why wasn’t it called? Not because the contact was incidental, but because the official thought it was. There’s a judgment call there, and that judgment call varies from official to official, and even from moment to moment.
In the same context, players swear at officials all the time. They point when addressing officials all the time, and sometimes they get aggressive when expressing their grievances.
So what is the definition of ‘too much’ profanity, or aggression, or pointing? When do these things stop being ‘incidental’, so to speak?
That also varies from official to official.
All Brown is asking for, and it seems perfectly reasonable to me, is for more consistency among officials.
In doing this, Jaylen is doing what he’s always done. He’s making his own path, and he’s being clear about what he wants to see and what he thinks about the games that are played around the game itself. He’s not afraid, as Bill Sy put it, to say the quiet part out loud.
His insistence on forging his own path, defining himself and setting his own priorities has probably come with a cost.
Where the conventional path for a player of his talent would have been to try to force his way into a situation where he could put his individual skills on display, Jaylen Brown stuck with Boston, following advice given to him by Tracy McGrady, as revealed on the Cousins podcast earlier this week. Had Jaylen done what so many players before him have done, he might’ve ended up someplace where his skills would put him in the MVP conversation. After all, there aren’t that many guys who can put up 30 points a night while guarding the other team’s best player.
But that’s not the lot that Brown chose for himself. He didn’t follow conventions, and that’s put him on the outside looking in when it comes to conventional awards.
Brown is a smart guy, and I think he was smart enough to have been something of an outsider as a teen. He probably knows what it’s like to find yourself out of the in-crowd, and I think he’s absolutely correct that the MVP conversation is very much about a group of players that are ‘in’ and a group of players that are ‘out,’ and Brown, as an outsider, is probably incapable of doing anything that will get him ‘in’ the MVP conversation.
Brown is having a season that should net him serious MVP consideration, but it’s not going to happen.
As Brown expressed it on the Cousins podcast, the MVP trendsetters keep moving the goal posts on him, and I think that’s a fair assessment. He’s just not “MVP material,” in their view, and he never will be, whatever the heck that means. Even with some fans, I get the sense that he’ll never be good enough for them.
Brown’s always been something of a square peg, and honestly, more power to him for that. I don’t think he likes the hoopla that surrounds the game, and he clearly has been sacrificing his offensive game for years to win with Tatum. He’s not your ordinary everyday superstar, and the Celtics are that much better because he isn’t. I’m sure he’ll retire with multiple rings, and eventually view this year’s MVP snub as being of no greater concern than losing a high school popularity contest.
An unfinished symphony
One of the more impressive things, at least initially, about Beethoven’s Ninth is that he wrote the symphony after he was completely deaf.
But you see, the thing is, most composers right up until the advent of modern notation software, were more or less deaf when they wrote their orchestral works. They had to imagine how the instruments would sound together without actually hearing the piece as a whole, and often the first time the composer heard the piece performed in its entirety and in earnest was at its premiere.
The Celtics have been kind of like that orchestral work-in-progress this season. We’ve had to use our imaginations to fill in the gaps. Even with Tatum back, the team is still missing Vucevic.
This week, the C’s faced two tough tests—road matchups against San Antonio and Oklahoma City.
They essentially turned into rehearsals. As Grant Burfeind called them, these were information gathering performances. Data points were collected as the Celtics, minus key players in both games, fought valiantly to keep things close (especially close against the Thunder), but eventually dropped each matchup.
Yet, even as the C’s collected data points, the Spurs and Thunder were denied those opportunities, as the Celtics were less than full strength. The Spurs haven’t really seen how the Celtics matchup with Pritchard, Brown and Tatum in the lineup, and the Thunder don’t know how the Celtics will matchup against them either. That might not be important this year, but then again it might be.
The bottom line is that the Celtics are still very much an unfinished symphony—whether it eventually turns out to be a masterpiece remains to be seen.
Putting some records in perspective
Boston’s game against the Thunder was also noteworthy as Shai Gilgeous-Alexander broke Wilt Chamberlain’s record for consecutive games scoring 20 or more points.
I’m not going to say that SGA’s accomplishment is trivial. It plainly is not. Other stars before him have not come close to that number. After SGA, Wilt holds the next two records at 126 and 92 consecutive games. Fourth place, held by Oscar Robertson is 79 games. SGA just set a record that is 48 games longer than any other player besides Wilt.
But…
Those Wilt records need some context. First off, SGA set his record over the course of 127 consecutive games played. Wilt set his record over 126 games, period. He didn’t miss a single game during the course of setting that record. Wilt also holds the record for most consecutive 30 point games (65), the top three spots for most consecutive games with 40 or more points (14), the top four spots for most consecutive games with 50 or more points (7), and he is the only player to record multiple 60 point games in a row (4).
Additionally, Wilt’s 126 game 20 point streak was ended when he was ejected in his 127th game. He came back and immediately started another streak. This one was 92 games in length.
Wilt was a one man demolition squad in his prime.
Mind you, the game was easier back then. Most centers had come up under the instruction that leaving your feet to defend was a mortal sin, so it was relatively easy for a guy who was already taller than practically the whole rest of the league to shoot over the top of guys who were scared to death to defend him by jumping.
But the game was also harder. There was a level of physicality that would not be fathomable to players today. There were fewer teams too. This actually makes things harder not easier, because the best of college basketball’s talent was crammed into just eight teams when Chamberlain was in his prime. He also played every single game in three consecutive seasons. This during an era when transport was mostly by train, which isn’t as bad as it seems—unless you’re trying to sleep in a bunk that’s designed for a much much shorter person—and a time when sports medicine was little more than good intentions and an Ace bandage.
It was a period that suited Chamberlian to a T.
Of course, Chamberlain came up in the news on Wednesday night as well, when Bam Adebayo tallied 83 points against the hapless Washington Wizards
It’s too bad Wilt’s not here, because he would’ve been impressed by Adebayo’s free throw attempts in that 83 point game. Bam was sent to the line 43 times—an astonishing 26 of the Wizards’ 34 personal fouls were committed against Bam. The number of fouls called was also significantly higher than the Wizards’ season average, which is only 21.3 per game.
Was Bam getting a friendly whistle? Or was he just benefiting from the confusion of a bad defense trying to stop him at all costs?
In any event, the Miami Heat took to fouling Wizard players intentionally in order to prolong the game and give Adebayo more chances to score.
I’m not going to say that this cheapens the accomplishment of scoring 83 points, except that it kind of does.
I don’t think there should be an asterisk next to Adebayo’s name, but I think a bit of context for future fans is in order—a note that even though Bam got to second place within the rules of the game, those rules were bent a bit to give him as many chances to score as possible.
