National Basketball Association

Three Potential Career Outcomes for Jaylen Brown

Published Jun. 30, 2017 6:28 p.m. ET

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Jaylen Brown’s career could go one of three ways

Jaylen Brown has played a grand total of 174 summer league minutes in his NBA career, and is yet to log a single second of preseason action, let alone any regular season time. That’s not a lot of professional experience, and it’s certainly not enough to make any legitimate long-term career projections.

It’s the doldrums of the NBA offseason, though, so we’re going to get a little reckless and talk about a few potential player comparisons for the Boston Celtics’ young rookie.

We’ll run through three players with similar skill sets to Brown but a wide variety of career outcomes. This should serve as something of a continuum of scenarios from best case to worst case. Let’s start at the top.

Mandatory Credit: Mark D. Smith-USA TODAY Sports

The Dream: Kawhi Leonard

Let’s be clear about this from the start, Kawhi Leonard is an incredible talent. He’s a two-way monster and quite possibly the best defender on the face of the earth. To expect Brown to follow a similar developmental path would be unfair. With that being said, there are some intriguing similarities between the two players.

Much like Brown, Leonard entered the league as an athletic freak with severely limited range. In his final year at San Diego State, Leonard averaged 15.5 points per game despite shooting only 29.1 percent from three. Brown mustered an eerily similar 14.6 points per game while posting a three-point percentage of just 29.4 percent.

Leonard worked on his shooting tirelessly and finished last year, just his fifth, as the third best three-point shooter in the league (percentage-wise), and the MVP runner-up.

Leonard was always going to be a stud on defense, but very few people would have predicted he would turn into the type of offensive weapon he has, and Brown might have a more developed offensive game than Leonard did entering the NBA.

Leonard had the good fortune of being drafted by San Antonio. No NBA team matches the Spurs player development infrastructure, and their work with Leonard was masterful. The Celtics can’t offer quite the same support to Brown, but Boston is rapidly becoming an intriguing destination for anyone interested in maximizing their talent. If they can get Brown anywhere close to the player that Leonard is, they’ll be thrilled.

Mandatory Credit: Sam Sharpe-USA TODAY Sports

Something More Reasonable: Michael Kidd-Gilchrist

Much like Leonard, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist is a world-class defensive wing player. Unlike his counterpart in San Antonio, however, Kidd-Gilchrist hasn’t found a consistent shooting stroke. In fact, his shooting form seemed to deteriorate across the first two seasons of his career.

He’s worked hard to correct those issues and showed significant improvements in the seven games he played in last year, before going down with a shoulder injury that sidelined him for the rest of the season. That is an extremely small sample size, though, and no one would classify Kidd-Gilchrist as a quality shooter in the present moment, a distinction he shares with Brown.

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There is some danger in suggesting that Brown might evolve into as good a defensive player as Kidd-Gilchrist. It assumes that he’ll fully tap out his potential on that end. Brown is quick and strong. He has great balance and defends with tenacity.

Those are all extremely useful traits in playing defense, but they don’t guarantee the type of elite-level defensive play that Kidd-Gilchrist provides. Brown will have to work hard to understand the nuances of NBA defense and commit himself to the nightly grind of hounding some of the world’s best players. That’s a lot to ask of someone, but Brown has all the tools needed to do it.

The bigger point here is that even if Brown never develops into an above-average shooter, he could still have plenty of value. Having someone to stick on the other team’s best perimeter option and wreak havoc with his athleticism on the break isn’t a bad thing. Kidd-Gilchrist is proof of that. The Celtics won’t be over the moon if that is Brown’s ultimate ceiling, but they won’t be disappointed either.

Worst Case Scenario: Darius Miles

There is of course always the possibility that Brown doesn’t cash in on his considerable potential. He wouldn’t be the first to do so. In 2000, the Memphis Grizzlies selected Darius Miles with third overall, and later traded to the Clippers. Much like Brown, he possessed a tantalizing combination of size, speed, and leaping ability.

His career never amounted to much, however. Miles hung around the league for a respectable seven years, but never managed to play a particularly important role for his team in any of them.

Celtics fans will take solace in the fact that Brown has proven himself at the collegiate level, compared to Miles being drafted straight from high school. Still, projecting what type of player a 19-year-old will become is a lot of guesswork. Anyone that doesn’t consider a middling career like Miles’ a possibility for Brown is fooling themselves.

Ultimately, this is all an exercise in futility. Each player that comes into the league is unique. Components of Brown’s game will be similar to other players, but the sum of those components will be his own. It’s fun to speculate about what Brown may become, while he remains a relative unknown.

That speculation won’t matter once the season starts and we can watch him grow into the player he really is, a process that is even more enjoyable than concocting relatively baseless comparisons such as these.

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