[Amick] “A current general manager, speaking anonymously to comment on internal team discussions, told The Athletic in the wake of the trade that he doesn’t view Jaylen Brown as a top-50 player in the NBA. Even in the Boston front office, some believed Brown’s impact did not match his reputation.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7418310/2026/07/03/jaylen-brown-celtics-inside-trade-pov/
The days leading up to this week’s deal with the Sixers, it is quite telling that two of the reported suitors — Denver and Portland — had shown no interest in meeting the exorbitant asking price that Boston had previously put forth. Front office executives all around the NBA had been talking about the unreasonably high bar they’d set, how the Celtics expressed a strong desire to land as many as four first-round picks. Even teams that many assumed would eventually get involved, with the Houston Rockets among them, chose to stay on the sideline. Per league sources, the Rockets — whose head coach, Ime Udoka, had made an NBA Finals run with Brown in 2022 when he was in Boston — did not pursue Brown.
Another team with widely reported interest, the Trail Blazers, similarly did not join the chase. A Blazers team source said the Blazers were never enamored with Brown, even before Boston made it known he was available on the trade market. Two factors went into the Blazers’ disinterest: Their analytics viewed him as a negative player and the Celtics’ asking price was too high. “We were never aggressively looking to trade for him,” a team source said. “And particularly not at their price.”
The cool market suggested the existence of a significant gap between the general perception of Brown, who finished sixth in MVP voting this season, and the way he is seen within the NBA. Though the idea of him being viewed as the seventh-best player on a given team was widely mocked, a recent report that one front-office member saw Brown in that wayilluminated the reality that advanced analytics never shined too brightly on Brown’s game. Even more pointedly, a current general manager, speaking anonymously to comment on internal team discussions, told *The Athletic* in the wake of the trade that he doesn’t view Brown as a top-50 player in the NBA.
For all of Brown’s individual accolades, the Celtics over the years consistently saw no dropoff, statistically speaking, when he left the court. Even in the Boston front office, some believed Brown’s impact did not match his reputation.
Over the years, Brown had sometimes voiced that he didn’t believe analytics could capture everything he contributed on the court. He seemed well aware that some of the numbers weren’t favorable to him long before responding to that train of thought during a recent social media flurry. Brown pointed out that nobody has won more games than he has, including playoff games, since he entered the NBA.