The Boston Celtics’ first round of the 2024 NBA Playoffs begins in about a minute. They must contend with their playoff rival, the Miami Heat, who defeated them last year in the Eastern Conference Finals and forced them to trade away the heart of their team, Marcus Smart, to make a major upgrade in their interior.
This season’s Celtics team is among the best the franchise has ever had. They won 71.8% of their games, putting them fifth overall in the franchise’s storied history. Only one of those teams, the ’72-’73 team (which has the highest winning percentage in the team’s history, by the way), did not win a championship (they lost in the ECF to the Knicks, who went on to defeat the Lakers in five games).
This season’s Celtics also have the best record in the NBA, ensuring home-court advantage all the way through the Finals (should they make it).
To say expectations are high in Boston would be an understatement.
But there are also doubts. While it’s true the Celtics only lost 18 games this season (two of those losses came after they clinched the #1 seed and took their foot off the pedal), they lost to teams they may face in the playoffs:
Denver Nuggets (0-2)
Milwaukee Bucks (2-2)
Indiana Pacers (3-2)
Oklahoma City Thunder (1-1)
Los Angeles Lakers (1-1)
Los Angeles Clippers (1-1)
Minnesota Timberwolves (1-1)
Cleveland Cavaliers (2-1)
New York Knicks (3-1)
Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers (3-1)
Of course, many of those teams are facing each other in the first round, so the only team the Celtics have to worry about right now is the Miami Heat, whom the Celts defeated all three times they met this season.
Additionally, they’ll be without their superstar (and Celtics nemesis) Jimmy Butler, who will be out for several weeks with an MCL injury. They’ll also be without former Celtic “Scary” Tery Rozier, who is “week to week” with a neck injury and will miss at least Game 1.
But if there’s one thing I learned from watching Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown play basketball together these past several years, it’s that they both know how to play flat when it counts.
Here’s a reminder. Game 7 of last season’s Eastern Conference Finals against the Miami Heat in Boston, when Brown committed eight turnovers and went 1-9 from 3PT range:
Thankfully, Brown has improved his handles this season, especially with his left hand (which got uber-exposed last season). He decreased his turnovers from 197 last season to 168 this season, reducing his average per 36 minutes to 2.55 turnovers (for comparison’s sake, Lebron James averaged 3.52 turnovers per 36 minutes).
Unfortunately, the trend is going the other way when it comes to Jayson Tatum in clutch time. According to ClutchPoints.com, Tatum is ranked “dead last among 25 players with a minimum of 45 field goal attempts in clutch situations.”
Over the past three seasons, in fact, his clutch shooting has gotten downright abysmal. He’s gone from shooting 75% in his rookie season to shooting 26.9% when the shot is crucial to the outcome (the clutch squared stat below, which measures shooting percentage when the shot is the top 1% in potential win probability impact):
Hopefully, clutch shooting won’t matter in the first round when all signs point to a Celtics sweep (based on the current odds of Game 1, if a person bets $10 on the Celtics to win, they’ll only net 83¢ in winnings). But we’re gonna need some clutch shooting if we face Denver, Oklahoma City, the Pacers, or the Knicks.
And then there’s our coach.
While head coach Joe Mazzulla won two Coach of the Month awards this season and one last season (becoming only the seventh head coach in NBA history to earn at least three Coach of the Month awards in their first two seasons with a team) and was a finalist for the Coach of the Year last season, his youth, relative inexperience, and apparent arrogance (e.g., he sticks with his game plan even when it’s not working) make him perhaps the weakest link in the entire organization.
He has demonstrated time and again that he can’t compete with high-quality coaches. The Celtics outgun the Heat at every position and all down the bench, but if these games somehow come down to the wire, I have zero faith in Brown’s ball handling, Tatum’s clutch shooting, or Mazzulla’s ability to outcoach Miami’s tried and tested multi-championship winning coach, Erik Spoelstra.
Then again, the Celtics are the winningest team in the NBA. They’ve locked down home-court advantage and only lost four games at home all season.
With all my doubts, the reality is that if the Celtics are going to win their 18th banner anytime soon, they’re going to win it this season.
Earlier this week, Caitlin Clark — arguably the best pure basketball player ever in the NCAA (men’s or women’s basketball) — was selected by the Indiana Fever as the first pick in the WNBA Draft. She is, as many have said, a generational talent, and the attendance numbers for her games demonstrate her draw.
Iowa broke the women’s basketball all-time attendance record for a single game, with 55,646 on hand for its exhibition game against DePaul in Kinnick Stadium, home to the Iowa football team
Seventeen of Iowa women’s basketball’s 19 all-time sellout crowds inside Carver-Hawkeye Arena have occurred during the past three seasons
Away from Iowa City, the Hawkeyes have helped sell out or break an attendance record in 30 of 32 games this season.
On average, schools that have hosted Iowa have seen an attendance increase of over 150% compared with their other home games
The top five most in-demand NCAA women’s games this year have featured Iowa
The average price of tickets for the Hawkeyes since Clark joined the team in 2020 is up 224%
The average distance traveled by a fan to watch Iowa play is up 34% from last season
According to ESPN, the Fever’s regular season opener saw “a price increase of 91% since Clark declared for the draft,” and the Fever had to take “the unprecedented step of pre-selling single-game tickets to two games per day over a 15-day stretch” (i.e., you couldn’t buy a ticket to every game in a single transaction, but had to come back each day for 15 days). Further, “the average Fever resale price for home games is [as of April 11, 2024,] $182 — a 136% increase from 2023.”
The WNBA has also selected the Fever to have 36 of its 40 games broadcast on national television or by its streaming partners. Last season, they only had 22 games on national television.
Road teams are seeing an equal interest in games against the Fever. The Las Vegas team had to switch its venue for their July 2 game against the Fever to the larger T-Mobile Arena to account for all the excitement around seeing Clark.
Paying A Generational Talent
What does Caitlin Clark receive from all of this? Well, she gets sponsorship money, of course. According to one analysis, Caitlin Clark’s “name, image, and likeness (NIL)” is worth just under $1 million (for comparison’s sake, Lebron James’s son, Bronny, has a ridiculous NIL value of $7.4 million, despite not even being in the top five best players on his team!).
Before signing her contract with the WNBA, Clark had already made deals with NIKE, Gatorade, State Farm Insurance, Buick, Topps, and Panini America trading cards. More deals will obviously follow.
But from a pure salary level for playing basketball, what does this generational talent get?
Look at that again, especially on a yearly level.
For the 2024 WNBA basketball season, Caitlin Clark—one of the best college players to ever play the game—will be paid about the same as a mid-level corporate employee.
Comparing The Rookie Salaries of Generational Talents In the NBA & WNBA
This disparity between talent and pay is causing a lot of discussion about the finances of the WNBA.
For comparison’s sake, last year’s #1 draft pick in the NBA was Victor Wembanyama.
Wemby is a 7’4″ basketball god who is, without a doubt, the future face of the league. Like Clark, he is also a generational talent capable of single-handedly driving ticket sales for his team’s away games.
While Clark received a four-year contract worth $338,056, Wemby received a four-year contract worth $54.4 million.
The reason behind this is obvious. The NBA generates about $10 billion in revenue, while the WNBA generates about $60 million. The average attendance for an NBA game is about 17,000 people; for the WNBA, it’s about 5,500 people.
To continue the comparison, the NBA’s current highest-paid player, Jaylen Brown, will earn more in salary during the 2026-2027 season than the WNBA’s combined yearly revenue.
There are deeper, systemic reasons as well. Though women’s sports are healthier than ever, investments in them are still a drop in the bucket compared to those in men’s sports. While Deloitte predicts that 2024 will be the first time ever that the revenue generated by elite women’s sports will surpass $1 billion for the first time, the NFL alone generates roughly $22 billion in revenue per season. That difference in wholesale investment is going to reduce the earning potential of a woman’ athelete.
My Argument Isn’t What You Think It Is
I think Caitlin Clark’s salary is relatively appropriate.
I think Victor Wembanyama’s salary is wildly inappropriate.
It’s Not About Differences in Revenue
The NBA Player’s Association negotiated a collective bargaining agreement that ensures the players receive about half of all of the league’s “basketball-related income.” WNBA players receive about the same (provided certain revenue markers are hit). With the huge disparity in revenue (remember, $10 billion against $60 million), salary differences between the leagues will reflect that disparity.
With a difference of almost a million people watching your average regular-season NBA game vs the peak viewership of the WNBA Finals, your #1 rookie NBA player is, of course, going to make way more than your #1 rookie WNBA player.
It’s About Maximum Salaries FOR EVERYONE
Caitlin Clark is 22 years old. Her annual base salary coming out of college for the Indiana Fever is comparable to an account manager’s average base salary in Indianapolis, a position that often requires about three years’ experience in customer service.
She’ll earn this salary by playing the game of basketball for forty minutes a game at a maximum of 53 games a year (if her team makes the finals and every round of the playoffs goes the distance).
Her job isn’t just to play in those games, however; she needs to practice and condition, perform public relations for the team and league, and be available basically 24 hours a day, seven days a week for whatever the team or the league needs from her.
A survey of the Internet suggests that professional basketball players work over sixty hours per week and receive about two to four vacation weeks per year.
In return for that, Caitlin Clark will receive a guaranteed income of $76,000 as a 22-year-old college graduate.
I’d suggest that’s a fair income (give or take $10,000) for a sixty-hour-a-week passion-based job that includes plenty of perks and a union-negotiated benefits package.
And it’s about what Victor Wembanyama should receive as well.
Wemby and the other players split roughly 50% of that revenue. Where would the rest of those billions go if we dropped NBA contracts so they were comparable to the WNBA?
What if the money went to the states/regions/cities where the teams were located?
Imagine If You Will…
The Boston Celtics, who are above the NBA’s salary cap, still made roughly $88 million in profit last year. Their team payroll (players only) is about $183.6 million. If we reduce that to the WNBA’s team salary cap of $1.5 million and add the difference to the team’s profit, we get about $182.1 million in profit.
Let’s do the same for the team’s owners, executives, coaches, trainers, etc, all the way down to janitors, reducing each salary as we go and making the highest paid salary (assuming it’s the owners’) to $1 million a year.
According to RealGM.com, the Celtics have 157 staff and executives. Let’s wipe away some of the difficulties between roles, be generous, and give all 153 non-owner members of the organization the same as the players ($125,000 a year) and the four owners $1 million a year, bringing us to about $24 million a year, plus the $1.5 million in total player salaries.
I don’t know what the Celtics pay in salaries now for their staff and executives, but I have to imagine we just took a couple of million out of their total payroll and turned it into profit.
So now the Celtics have, maybe, $185 million in profit each year.
Imagine if that money, instead of going to the players or the owners, went to the city, region, and/or state.
The Boston Public School system just announced that it has to cut staffing at 70% of its schools next year. Some schools will lose up to 18% of their staff.
Now, the total budget for BPS is over $1.5 billion. Adding the Celtics’ profit would increase it by about 12%. That amount of money wouldn’t “save the day,” but it would make a significant difference.
Unfortunately, instead of doing good in the community, it’ll go into the pockets of single individuals.
That’s roughly $33.7 billion in profit from just 10 companies in Massachusetts. The total budget for my entire home state of Vermont is $8.5 billion.
Remember, the profits we’re talking about are obscene. None of it should belong in private hands, and all of it should be captured by the people.
Back to Caitlin
So, what are we really talking about when we discuss Caitlin Clark’s $76,000 salary? Sure, it’s a decent wage for a rookie in the WNBA. But this isn’t just about basketball or even sports—it’s about fairness, equity, and the absurd distribution of wealth in our society.
The enormous financial gap between the NBA and WNBA is just a part of the story. The deeper plot is how we, as a society, deal with the obscene amounts of money funneling into the pockets of a select few.
Instead of padding the bank accounts of the uber-rich, that money should be funneled into our schools, hospitals, and crumbling infrastructure.
We need to ask harder questions about why we’re okay with the stark inequities highlighted by Ms. Clark’s contract—not just in sports, but across all industries.
Let’s stop being spectators and start changing the game.
The Boston Celtics have clinched the #1 seed in the Eastern Conference with 11 games remaining on their regular season schedule. Boston’s 57-14 record has been enough to secure the feat with an 11 game cushion over the Milwaukee Bucks, who are still fighting to secure the second seed with the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Joe Mazzulla’s team is also in the driving seat to secure the best record in the NBA. As such, they should have a home-court advantage if they make it to the NBA Finals…
It’s not just that these Celtics are really, really good. They’re an absolute joy to watch, an aesthetic godsend. They’re reveling in sharing the basketball. They’re wearing out the bottom of the nets with their shooting. No matter who is on the court under what circumstances, they are playing complementary basketball in the spirit of Celtics Big Threes both original and sequel.
Next weekend, the New England Patriots will play in the Super Bowl for the ninth time in eighteen years, competing for their sixth Vince Lombardi Trophy in just as many years.
During that same time period, the Boston Red Sox won four Commissioner’s Trophies, the Boston Bruins won one Stanley Cup, and the Boston Celtics won one Larry O’Brian Championship Trophy. It’s been a fantastic run for the region, and no one wants it to be over.
Which is why, this year, many hope the Celtics can raise one more championship banner over the legendary parquet floor.
When Lebron James left the Cleveland Cavaliers for a team in the Western Conference during the offseason, Boston’s path to the Eastern Conference Championship seemed clear. Winning wouldn’t be easy, thanks to highly competitive teams coming out of Milwaukee, Toronto, and Philadelphia, but the strength of the Celtics’ lineup seemed to outweigh their competitors’, and fans felt justifiably confident going into the start of the season.
It’s now 48 games later; the season is slightly more than half over. With 30 wins and 18 losses, the Celtics rank as the fifth-best/tenth-worst team in the conference, and fans feel justifiably concerned going into the back half of the season.
No one quite knows why the Celtics have underwhelmed. Among the many possibilities are the leadership skills (or possibly the lack thereof) of Kyrie Irving, who is unquestionably the team’s most dominant player. The team has also been bedeviled by the slower-than-hoped-for recovery of Gordon Hayward, who missed the entire 2017-2018 season due to a gruesome leg injury, and an injury to Al Horford, who sat for 10 games and is only now returning to full strength. The team’s two younger stars, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, have seen their values drop as well, with neither of them living up to expectations set by their performances last year.
No one quite knows why Coach Brad Stevens can’t get his players to perform at the highest possible level of their potential, but he hasn’t and they aren’t, so the team is fifth in their conference.
The lineup still gives Celtics fans confidence, however. Kyrie Irving has proven that he can score almost at will. Marcus Smart, always among the strongest defenders on the court, has become a more consistent offensive threat, and Marcus Morris, Jr., has grown into a downright deadly three-point shooter who deserves a spot in the Three-Point Contest during the All-Star Weekend. Despite not doing it as often as fans had expected, Hayward, Tatum, and Brown are still capable of scoring 20+ points on any given night, and Terry Rozier, one of last year’s breakout players, given enough freedom and minutes, can still explode for an eye-popping series of plays, both offensively and defensively, and that explosion can take place at almost any particular moment. Despite injuries, Aaron Baynes is still having his best season on the court, and rookie bench riders such as Brad Wannamaker, Robert Williams, and Semi Ojeleye usually bring more to the court than they take off.
Because of the strength of their lineup, there’s still no rational reason to doubt the ability of the Boston Celtics to defeat their Eastern Conference competitors in the playoffs.
Of course, the Eastern Conference is drastically weaker than the Western Conference, and few fans suggest the current lineup will raise the Celtics’ seventeenth championship banner at the end of this season. But that doesn’t prevent this highly qualified team of basketball players from stepping onto the court and giving it a shot.
The Red Sox won their ninth championship in October. The Patriots might win their sixth championship next weekend. Half of the Celtics’ season might be over, but there’s still time for the team to get it together and bring home their seventeenth trophy.
But first, they’ll have to become better than the tenth worst team in the league’s weakest conference.
One of the cool parts of being a generalist (a job which isn’t available in most school systems) is being able to teach a wide variety of subjects. This quarter, I’m teaching in five.
Advisory
First, and with the direct support of two of my colleagues, I participate in an Advisory of seven students. For those who haven’t paid attention to the changes in pedagogical theory these past twenty years, “Advisory” is kind of like a mix between home room, study hall, and a workshop focused on the development of both personal character and intrapersonal skills.
Sometimes it looks like a bunch of people just hanging around a conference table. Sometimes it looks like a lecture by a teacher or an exhibition by a student. Sometimes it looks like a staff-supported homework club. Regardless of how it looks, it attempts to be an experiential practicum in community building: this is how you maintain a relationship in a healthy community.
Human Rights
The second class I teach focuses on human rights. I want the students to produce a video or audio-recording that connects at least one of the rights listed in the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights with the biography of an individual or group of individuals who fought to declare or protect that right — but I’m still working on the best way to help them do that.
My ultimate goal is to teach them how to research the progression of a topic through time by analyzing the actions of real-life individuals who were crucial to the topic’s current status. I also want them to understand the ways in which the actions of individuals can influence the actions of an empire, which will hopefully strengthen their conception of what’s possible in their own lives.
I just need to figure out how to get them from point A to point Z.
I also have to teach this subject to two different sections, one of which meets for 90 minutes a week, the other of which meets for 45. Obviously, the latter section will need to go from point A to point Z while skipping over points such as E, F, and G.
Dungeons & Dragons
My third class is, once again, Dungeons & Dragons. This quarter, I am the Dungeon Master for a party of six students, five of whom have significant experience playing the game.
I’ve written previously about using Dungeons & Dragons in the classroom, so I’ll just say the difference this time is that I’m trying to create a campaign that requires the students to investigate, analyze, and report back on a series of diverse cultures. The students won’t be “adventurers” as much they’ll be “scouts.” There will be fights with monsters and magic and perhaps, if I get particularly inspired, the tracking down of a conspiracy, but the goal — the academic goal — is give them the experience of thinking critically and in an anthropological way about the concept of “culture.”
Basketball
The fourth class is Basketball. A colleague and I are trying to develop close to a dozen rebellious and poorly coordinated teenagers who don’t understand the rules of the game into a servicable (and fun-having) basketball team capable of playing in some kind of official capacity on behalf of our school.
We run two 90-minute practices per week; so far, we’ve had one. I have my work cut out for me, but I love basketball, and while I doubt my coaching skills, I don’t doubt my knowledge and passion for the game.
I’m hoping to get a whistle.
Military Tactics
The last class I have to teach (also with a colleague) is Military Tactics. The name wasn’t my first choice. I wanted to call it “Jedi Training,” but my colleagues convinced me otherwise, since “Jedi Training” would make the students think it was a Star Wars thing, and it most definitely is not.
If you haven’t seen the movie, The Men Who Stare At Goats is a fictional representation of a nonfictional account of true-to-life programs sponsored by various agencies in the United States military-industrial complex. It explores the nation’s real-life effort to create a team of super soldiers trained in the art of extra-sensory perception and capable of “remote viewing” and even “remote assasination.”
I haven’t read the nonfiction book that the movie is based on, so I don’t know which parts originate in reality and which parts are wholly fiction. With that being said, the movie presents one of the initiatives as the brainchild of a soldier played by Jeff Bridges, aka, “the Dude,” and based on a real-life lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army who, among other things, was part of the team that came up with the slogan, “Be All You Can Be.”
In the movie, the lieutenant colonel was given a mission in the early 1970s to explore the ways in which the wisdoms of the counterculture might inform the military’s ability to successfully complete a strategic and tactical mission. Eight years later (in the movie), the soldier returned with an operations manual and the intention to produce — with military funds — a battalion of warrior monks to be armed with countercultural principles, paranormal abilities, and the ability to generate peace when possible and deadly violence when necessary.
There’s a lot to be doubted about some of the claims of the First Earth Battalion, but its existence is not one of them.
My colleague and I have both reviewed real-life documents produced for the First Earth Battalion, and I’ve done several hours of research into its history. My colleague and I also possess many years of knowledge and experience informed by the principles of the counterculture, most extensively in terms of the music of the Grateful Dead but also in more academically inclined ways.
Our general goal is to produce in our six or seven students not only a fascination with what our government is willing to pay for when it comes to achieving a military victory, but also a rudimentary experience of going through the training, an experience that will be one part intellectual, two parts physical, and three parts spiritual.
I am least prepared for this last class, but one becoming a Jedi warrior requires you to sometimes close your eyes and trust in the Force.
The Other Classes
I have more than those five classes on my schedule. Most of the others are one-on-one, where I’m either serving the student in a project-manager capacity or the student is serving me in an internship capacity (with tasks related to the school’s marketing needs and benefits related to the student’s communication skills).
Finally, for the last block of the week, I have a class where I join four musicians in the school’s music studio for a forty-five minute exploration of the realm of improvisational sound. It’s ideally suited to cleanse the soul after a hard week of school.
Looking over my classes for the quarter, I thank whatever experiences and people led me to become a generalist. It really does make teaching a hell of a lot more fun.
Boston Celtics's Jaylen Brown plays against the Minnesota Timberwolves in an NBA basketball game Thursday, March 8, 2018, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/Jim Mone)
Basketball, of all the sports, seems to me to have the most flow. It can be — and in my opinion, should be — back and forth, not always moving fast, sometimes real choppy and physical, while allowing, just once in a while, for a build up of energy so intense that it has no choice but to explode.
The players I love to watch are the ones who know how to stay present, the ones who refuse to surrender to the flow but also know when to go with it, the players who can keep their head above water, spot the channels, and know when to break.
Some people love to watch this happen on offense. They love to see the drive, the pass, the shot. I love to see it on defense: the deflected pass, the block, the steal, the taken charge, the fast and sneaky rebound, and the turn up the floor into transition.
I like players like Marcus Smart and Aron Baynes, and all the other guys who’ve ever earned themselves a Tommy Point.
That’s part of the reason I like these guys: because Tommy Heinsohn, a former Celtic player and a longtime local Celtic announcer, taught me to. I’ve been listening to Tommy for almost my entire life, and while he might be the biggest homer in basketball-announcing history, he also knows the game, and he heroizes the unsung effort above all else. Every night, he calls the audience’s attention to those moments in professional basketball when a player reveals his heart by rising above and beyond any reasonable expectation to instead reach for the greatness of the moment with no thought as to the accolades involved.
It’s Marcus Smart playing defense on Lebron James and forcing one of the greatest players in the history of the game to give all his effort every time he touches the ball. It’s Aron Baynes catching a deflected rebound in the middle of the paint and being so focused on the act of catching the ball that, now that he has it, he has no idea what to do with it.
But I wonder if it’s Jaylen Brown refusing to leave the Cleveland floor at the end of the game without first slamming the game ball through that god-damned hoop in an act of childish anger but also an act of defiance, an act of rejection, a willful and spiteful act that said “Fuck you!” to everyone and everything but mostly…the moment: the losing end of a hard-fought game.
Is that worth a Tommy Point?
Or is it worth our condemnation?
The ethics of sportsmanship suggest the latter. The Cleveland Cavaliers were perfectly willing to run out the clock, and most of the Celtics were ready to as well; but Tatum and Brown didn’t notice, and when Brown finally did notice, when he looked around and saw that all of his teammates and all of his opponents were just standing around, he got pissed, because he was still ready to fight.
Brown is young — twenty-one years old — and he just ran up and down the court with men in their late twenties and thirties. Those aging men might be willing to accept the clock, but a young guy like Brown, after 48 minutes of playoff basketball, he’s still ready to go, and now, having looked up, he’s the last to realize the game is over. That realization brings with it the painful knowledge that his team has finally lost.
His decision to slam the ball through the hoop after everyone else has given up is a warrior’s way of screaming, “FUUUUUUUUUUUCK!”
The problem is that Brown was standing on a basketball court with nine other guys, professional men who have long recognized that a professional man doesn’t act like that.
So is Brown’s dunk worth a Tommy Point? Does a Tommy Point also recognize self-discipline, or does it solely recognize the blend of talent and instinct, the ability to make one’s effort create one’s moment-to-moment reality?
I lean toward the latter. There is a place in basketball for sportsmanship, and it ought to be recognized as adamantly as Tommy recognizes effort, but a Tommy Point is not a sportsmanship award.
Jaylen Brown, in slamming the ball through an undefended hoop with near-on-zero seconds left, did not act like a sportsman. He violated the norms of the end game, which calls for the players to gracefully pass the last 40 seconds or so if the lead is insurmountable, each team dribbling out the 24 second clock and denying themselves the opportunity to make a shot.
Everyone else on the floor had acknowledged that norm, but Brown refused. He put the ball to the floor and went full speed towards the Cleveland basket, bypassing any defender who happened to react by default, stepping around them, rising up, and slamming the ball through the net with all of his athletic power and might, while everyone else, nine professional men, stood around watching: Look at the young boy go.
Is that worth a Tommy Point?
I don’t know. It demonstrated attitude, effort, and heart, but it was also too little and too late.
I like Jaylen Brown, and I appreciated how hard he played during that game. He got outplayed at instances, and he got ahead of himself at others, but he gave the game his all the entire time he was on the floor.
His final dunk was the culmination of that. He wasn’t done fighting, but he also hadn’t fought enough, and now the clock was telling him he had to leave the floor a loser; his slamming the ball through the hoop signaled his refusal to.
And that, my friends, ought to be worth a Tommy Point.
