Jaylen Brown vs. adjusted plus-minus

Not all analytics dislike Jaylen Brown's performance. Just the adjusted plus-minus metrics currently in vogue.

Good morning. This is probably not the right time to get into this. Alas. Let's basketball.

Let's get my qualifications to discuss this out of the way:

• I wrote for a few analytics-leaning websites earlier in my basketblogging career.
• I was an active reader and occasional poster at the famed APBRmetrics message board in the late 2000s.
• In my writing over the years at Ballhype, FanHouse and SB Nation, I often waded into the analytics vs. no analytics debate, often on the side of analytics.
• I took one math class in college – statistics – and received a C. I took no computer science class ever, at any level.
• I basically bowed out of serious basketball analytics by 2014 as the field became way more professionalized, secretive and more rigorous than I could handle.

Much has been made about how "analytics" don't think Jaylen Brown is worth his contract. This started well before the Jaylen Brown trade itself, with the whole Bobby Marks imbroglio, and has continued with Tom Haberstroh's Yahoo! piece getting a bunch of attention.

It's actually not all flavors of analytics that think Brown is deeply overrated. Saying analytics is like saying vegetables. There's a wide variety in there! There are certain analytic models that think less highly of Brown than other players. It just so happens that the analytic genre currently most in vogue – adjusted plus-minus – is the one that is skeptical of Brown's impact.