The NBA offseason presents a pit that must be filled with trade rumors, free-agency drama, and delirium-inducing podcast segments. It takes a lot of slop to fill that pit to the brim, which is how you end up with Jaylen Brown and an ESPN dope conspiring to dust off a tiresome conversation about the place of analytics in the NBA.
Brown very much appears to be on the trading block, which is a weird place to be for a guy who has won a Finals MVP and is coming off the best individual season of his career, but here we are. It was widely reported that the Boston Celtics dangled Brown for Giannis Antetokounmpo before the Greek Freak was ultimately shipped off to Miami, and I guess once you dangle a guy of Brown's stature and temperament, you can't just undangle him. Type "Jaylen Brown" into Google or your social media platform of choice, and you will be blasted by a dozen or so reports, from NBA insiders you've barely heard of, about which teams are angling to pry Brown away from the Celtics.
One of those insiders is, I guess, Bobby Marks of ESPN. If you don't immediately recognize his name, you might recognize his shtick: He's the guy who appears across various NBA podcasts to remind listeners what a specific player's salary number is, and assure you that nothing good will ever happen to your team because of how close it is to the second apron. I assume this is what Marks was doing when he made an appearance on the Sirius XM NBA show over the weekend, but he also got little bit out over his skis and shared that an "analytics guy" from an NBA team had told him that he views Brown as "the seventh-best player on a team."
It is impossible for some crazy shit like this to get said on an NBA podcast or radio show and not end up being spread around by various Twitter accounts, which is exactly what happened. Because Brown is the type of guy who will spend a few hours on Twitch complaining about all the things that led to his team flaming out in the playoffs, he saw these tweets and had something to say about them. "Analytics nowadays used to discredit and control narratives - Roll the ball out none of these guys better than me on both ends who does he work for," Brown wrote.
He continued: "Nobody has won more combined regular season and playoff games since I entered the league 10 years ago."
And continued: "Analytics have / are ruining the game we playing AI hoops."
That got everyone riled up, and suddenly you had David West (solid guy to remember) spending several days hunched over his phone or laptop calling anyone who disagreed with his assertion, that the "entire premise of analytic basketball is Anti-Michael Jordan," a dweeb. It didn't help when an old clip of Josh Hart, taking a brief respite from saying, "Yo ... pause!" every 10 minutes on his own podcast, calling analytics something that was invented by "geeky, unathletic white guys who wanted to be part of the league," was resurfaced. Now every NBA blogger still on Twitter is in a defensive crouch, trying to defend analytics and the honor of geeky white guys.
We will set aside this debate about "the analytics" and their place in NBA basketball, because it is both exhausting and meaningless, but not before pausing to make two points: 1) Whoever told Bobby Marks that Jaylen Brown is the seventh-best guy on his team is a goofball, and 2) it is pretty funny for a guy whose extremely successful career has largely unfolded under the direction of Mazzullaball to be this mad about analytics.
Instead of debating Jaylen Brown and David West about whether three points is more than two points, I'd like to point out a structural flaw in the modern NBA offseason. We are now several years into the post-Woj era, and it is in moments like these that you can really feel his absence. That's because Woj was never just a newsbreaker, but an information conduit. Front offices and agents learned just as much from him about what moves teams around the league were trying to make as fans did, and he was able to secure his scoops by keeping the information flowing in both directions. He was a control tower, deciding what information became public and when, which in turn would set various offseason narratives on their course.
In Woj's absence, we are left with a disparate network of semi-insiders, who are faced with the conundrum of needing to fill thousands of hours of offseason podcast recordings while not enjoying anything close to Woj's access. It used to be that these guys could just wait for Woj to say something and then spend 90 minutes on a podcast dissecting it, but now they have to try to make their own news. That's how you end up with Bobby Marks on the radio yapping about some weird stuff a random team staffer told him. And that's how you end up with former NBA player David West being very nasty and rude to one of Defector's smartest and handsomest bloggers.
