There’s a discomfiting undercurrent to all this Jaylen Brown discourse.Brown has always forced people into opposing camps. He was drafted by the Boston Celtics in 2016, a year before they drafted Jayson Tatum, and the two of them have kept Boston relevant over the last decade. However, both stars have had to constantly refute rumors that they don’t get along and don’t play well together — up to the moment that Brown claimed the 2024 finals MVP after the Celtics won Banner 18.“Yeah, the doubters, they may be quiet now, but they will be back,” Brown said that night. He was right.Today, just a couple of months after Brown, with Tatum rehabbing a torn Achilles tendon for most of the regular season, led the Celtics to a 56-win regular season, the discourse is about whether the Celtics will trade him. Even more disconcerting, a debate rages — online and on ESPN, the two-pot cauldron upon which all hot takes must, today, seemingly boil — about whether Brown is valuable at all.It’s not “Jaylen Brown is a really good player who has some flaws.” It’s “Jaylen Brown ain’t (bleep), and here’s why no one in the league likes or wants him.”Let’s get this out of the way. Whether it’s just following the data, or holding fast to the notion that Brown takes too many tough shots and turns the ball over too much, or being upset at Brown’s statement that this past year was “the most fun season” of his career even though Boston blew a 3-1 lead to the Philadelphia 76ers in the first round, or a critique of a player who is not bashful about expressing strong opinions on off-court topics and putting his actions behind his words, it’s wrong — loud wrong — to suggest that Jaylen Brown isn’t a great player and a winner.Is Jaylen Brown ready to leave Boston?Zenab Keita and Esfandiar BaraheniPlayers don’t produce in a vacuum. Brown’s individual numbers can be interpreted however one likes, but he’s on the floor with four other players who benefit from the gravity he creates and the open shots and driving lanes that he and Tatum provide. Brown’s defensive ability means he rarely needs help guarding opposing teams’ best players, even in the highest-leverage moments. Brown held Luka Dončić to 41 percent shooting as Dončić‘s primary defender in the 2024 NBA Finals. What was that worth to the Celtics during their five-game series victory?Some of this noise is just brinksmanship. Brown, in the wake of being shopped by Boston in its unsuccessful effort to trade for Giannis Antetokounmpo, has grown weary of hearing he’s on the trade block. Thus, many teams would now love to trade for Brown, just not at the price the Celtics are reportedly asking — multiple first-round picks, along with matching salaries. It is not a coincidence, I don’t think, that unnamed front-office staffers have conveniently chosen this moment to pull out their advanced statistics that “prove” Brown is less valuable on the court than most neutral observers believe.One brave soul, hiding behind ESPN’s front-office expert Bobby Marks, who did a radio interview over the weekend with SiriusXM, told Marks that his stats showed Brown was “the seventh-best player on a team.” Marks did not specify if the analytics guy meant the Celtics or a generic team. (In fairness to Marks, he followed that up by saying, “I was like, that’s a little bit of a stretch there.” He was not alone in asking folks to slow their rolls.)But some of this falls once again to our never-ending national dive into toxicity. It is not enough to prove myself right; I must prove you wrong, and make you look foolish in so doing.The latest salvo making the rounds: Brown is one of just two All-NBA players in the last two years with a career negative on-off net rating in the regular season and playoffs. The inference: Boston has won in spite of Brown’s, rather than because of him. Or, if you want the most charitable interpretation: In recent years, the Celtics have been much better than you think without Brown.What these folks never seem to acknowledge is that the Celtics, being a pretty sharp organization, are surely aware of the same advanced numbers.If Brown has been such a drag on the franchise, then why have they kept him around for a decade? Why did they give him a supermax extension worth $304 million in 2023 — which, at the time, was the biggest contract in NBA history? Why didn’t they trade him years ago to build around Tatum, when they could have saved money and gotten a more significant return for a then-younger Brown than they can get now?Former players such as David West, who scored more than 14,000 points in a 15-year NBA career, have jumped to Brown’s defense, with a familiar argument: Analytics has made the NBA into a homogeneous vat of basketball, where every team hunts 3-pointers and layups, eschews mid-range jumpers and post play, and removes much of the creativity and individual nuance from the game. Many around the league have pushed back on this hypothesis, pointing out that the NBA’s top teams play differently from one another. (The bad teams, though, may prove West’s point.)It’s not difficult to posit what most concerns West and other former players.Erasure.It hits different when it’s your career and life’s work that are being disparaged and dismissed.Of course, the NBA was less skilled, top to bottom, in the 1960s. But the league’s best players of that era were still great. Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain and Bob Pettit and Sam Jones, followed soon afterward by Elgin Baylor and Jerry West and Oscar Robertson, would have been legendary at any point in history. Recency bias makes it hard enough to fairly judge the quality of play when many of today’s fans never saw or competed against players from previous decades. That’s why it’s important to listen to those who did.I never saw Chamberlain play in an NBA game. Sonny Hill, the maven of Philadelphia basketball, himself an outstanding player who starred in the Eastern League and who was Chamberlain’s close friend from their days playing against each other in high school, did. I’d rather trust Sonny’s recollections over some dude 50 years removed, whose only familiarity with the Dipper comes through box scores and grainy film highlights.Many of today’s NBA fans discuss the league’s past in dismissive tones. From “plumbers and firemen” to frame-by-frame breakdowns of games in the ’80s and ’90s that show a lack of player and ball movement — leaving unsaid that the league’s rules on defense and contact allowed were completely different then than they are now — there is a consistent drumbeat that anyone who doesn’t worship the way the game is played today is a jealous hater who lacks the standing to lodge objections.Money is another factor. It is good business to have proprietary data at your fingertips, numbers for which NBA teams or basketball websites or Substack subscribers will pay. It’s even better for business to have both that data and an attitude in disseminating it, including tough-guy pejoratives on social media that most keyboard warriors would never say to West’s face. Rather than challenging him to improve his perimeter stroke, they would ask him and other former players for autographs and pictures.There’s a chance that all of this will fade — that there will be no trade, and Boston will decide that its best move is to run it back next season with Brown and a now-healthy Tatum, along with the role players who developed so rapidly last year.The argument about Brown’s value and worth will continue, because the important thing, after all, is to keep arguing.