Jaylen Brown

Jaylen Brown’s basketball contributions are often hard to disentangle from other variables — the enormous contract extension, his propensity for head-scratching turnovers at inopportune moments, the fact that he gets to play with and off of Jayson Tatum, the fact that his left-hand sometimes looks like it belongs to Chubbs Peterson. But the man does have an NBA Finals MVP and a championship ring to put on that big wooden left hand.

And you can always come back to the basics — reliable 20-point-per-game scorer and secondary creator, reasonably solid 3-point shooter, good defender, unimpeachable motor, fantastic finisher and a player who, at age 28, continues to make noticeable improvements on some of his biggest weaknesses. Don’t miss the forest for the trees — Brown is a very, very good basketball player.