Two weeks after the trade that sent Jaylen Brown from the Boston Celtics to the Philadelphia 76ers, the aftershocks from one of the most debated moves in recent NBA memory have yet to fully settle. The bewilderment surrounding the deal stems largely from what Boston received: Paul George, two first-round picks, and two second-round picks -a return many considered underwhelming for a Finals MVP on a team that won a championship 2 seasons ago. Beyond the asset question, Celtics president Brad Stevens handed a direct Eastern Conference rival a significant upgrade: the same Philadelphia team that knocked Boston out in the first round of the playoffs, coming back from a 1-3 deficit to win the series 4-3.

The trade was preceded by a wave of advanced metrics skepticism directed at Brown - most notably when ESPN's Bobby Marks revealed that an anonymous analytics executive had told him: "We view Jaylen Brown as the seventh-best player on a team." 

To try to cut through the noise, we went back to his last game as a Celtic -Game 7 against the Sixers, a 100-109 loss that ended Boston's season -and charted every single possession he played. What we found is more layered than either side of this debate typically allows for.

The Mazzulla-Ball Trap

Jaylen Brown is clearly not the primary reason the Celtics were eliminated. Beyond Jayson Tatum's knee injury, suffered in Game 6, ruling him out before tip-off of Game 7, Joe Mazzulla's decision-making was the most glaring factor in the defeat. While Sixers coach Nick Nurse leaned on six players for all meaningful minutes, Mazzulla chose to start Ron Harper Jr., Baylor Scheierman, and Luka Garza, three players who had combined for just 29 starts all season and made an unwanted piece of NBA history: the first time in playoff history that a team had three scoreless starters in a single game. 

Add Jordan Walsh and Hugo Gonzalez, and those five role players combined to go 0-for-12 from the field and 0-for-11 from three. Meanwhile, as Philadelphia ran a disciplined, focused offense built on pick-and-roll, isolation, and post-ups for Joel Embiid, Boston launched 49 three-point attempts and connected on just 13 (26.5%), against the Sixers' far more efficient 11-for-28. The starting lineup's collapse set the tone from the opening tip, with Philadelphia building a 32-19 lead at the end of 1^st quarter.

Even if Brown was far from perfect, his final line - 33 points, 12-for-27 from the field, 9 rebounds, and 4 assists - reflects a player who carried the Celtics' offense on his back, much as he had for most of the season. If you're looking to assign blame among the players, Derrick White's shooting - 9-for-26 from the field, 5-for-16 from three - was arguably a more significant factor than any of the issues in Brown's game. 

The Offensive Load

Before turning to what I see as the most important issue - Brown’s passing - it is worth noting the offensive load he carried. In this game, 28.6% of his actions came as a pick-and-roll ball handler, well above his season average of 22.4%. Another 30.6% came as a transition initiator or finisher, compared with a season average of 20.3%. His efficiency did not match that volume: 0.643 points per possession in pick-and-roll and just 0.467 in transition. But the deeper issue is not what those numbers reveal on their own; it is what they obscure about his role as a creator.

If we're looking for Brown's shortcomings as they showed up in this game, two moments stand out. The first was his inability to lead Boston's makeshift starting five through a brutal opening stretch - he began the game with three missed shots and two turnovers before converting his first field goal. The second, and more consequential, was the way the game ended: Brown missed his final four shot attempts in the fourth quarter -two mid-range twos and two threes, out of isolation, pick-and-roll, and spot-up situations, all of them in the closing minutes. Philadelphia used that stretch to pull away from 99-98 to 109-100 and close out the series.

Watch – Brown’s defense in the 1st quarter and his 4 missed shots at crunch time

The Passing 

Brown, as his shot profile and possession distribution make clear, is Boston's primary creator, especially in Tatum's absence. White and Payton Pritchard complete a backcourt trio with Brown at the controls, but he is by far the most dominant of the three. His final line - 4 assists, 3 turnovers, and one hockey assist - reads thinly relative to the offensive load he was carrying. And across the series, the pattern held: Brown averaged 3.3 assists against 3.6 turnovers per game, compared to 5.1 assists and 3.6 turnovers during the regular season.

Watching a full game makes the technical limitation that keeps Brown from being a truly great passer apparent. He tends to exhaust every scoring option first, usually driving, and distribute only as a last resort. And when he does pass, it's often not for a player who's moving - not to a cutter, not to a screener rolling to the rim, but to a stationary teammate who then has to restart the possession and recreate an advantage from scratch. That's the gap between Brown and Tatum. Tatum closed the series against Philadelphia, averaging 6.8 assists against just 2.8 turnovers, and he's the clearly superior playmaker of the two.

The Defense

Brown finished the game with the worst plus/minus on Boston's roster: −16 in 40 minutes. A significant part of that number is explained by when he played: he was on the floor for the entire first quarter, which ended with Philadelphia leading 32-19. The Celtics went on a 6-18 run to open the second quarter with Brown on the bench before he checked back in with 6:27 remaining in the half.

The most prominent finding in Brown's defensive data - beyond his 8 defensive rebounds -is the six times he was beaten off the dribble, most of them in the first quarter, when Brown was matched up against the electric Tyrese Maxey. That's another Mazzulla decision worth scrutinizing. Assigning Brown - an excellent defender, but a bigger wing - to Maxey, one of the fastest guards in the league, who feasted on him through pick-and-roll drives, finishing at the rim and creating for teammates. Later in the game, Brown demonstrated his defensive versatility, holding his own against Joel Embiid in the stretches where Boston went small.

The Bottom Line

At the end of the day, Brown wasn't traded to Philadelphia because of what he did or didn't do in Game 7 against those same Sixers - and not because of his shooting or playmaking numbers across the series, which were middling at best. He remains an excellent basketball player whose contribution to the Celtics was genuinely positive on both ends of the floor. The problem is structural. In the supermax era, when Brown enters Year 3 of a five-year, $304 million contract, you need to be a top-tier superstar to justify that salary and all the roster constraints that come with it. Brown, as Game 7 confirmed once again, is a star - But a flawed one.