Why Jaylen Brown is the most interesting pick in the NBA Draft
It was a minor surprise when the Boston Celtics selected wing Jaylen Brown out of Cal with the third overall pick of the NBA Draft Thursday night.
Perhaps more surprising still for many basketball fans was hearing that Brown is entering the NBA in a highly unusual way: He doesn't have an agent to help with his first contract.
That's right: Brown decided not to hire an agent to begin his professional career in a difficult field with millions of dollars on the line.
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Say what? Here's why.
To be clear, everyone hires an agent before the NBA Draft. There are workouts and interviews with team executives. Rumors and misinformation campaigns can influence selection order. It's big business centered largely around teenage prospects.
Brown, a hyper-athletic, 6-foot-7 wing, was projected to go between the third and tenth picks.
But Brown, who is 19, shocked the world when The Vertical reported in May that he would not hire a traditional agent to help with his first pro basketball deal. Instead, he planned to rely on a team of advisors for input.
"I got great resources, so I use them," Brown told The Undefeated a month before the draft. "I got people on the inside who are my eyes and ears. People who understand the NBA, who played in the league for 10 to 15 years, who understand what I need and what I don’t. They give me great feedback to help me with different teams. They help put me in place to orchestrate things the way I want them to be orchestrated."
One of those people is NBA Hall of Famer Isiah Thomas.
"He met all the top people in the NBA," Thomas told The Undefeated. "He has taken time to learn how the NBA works, how the union works and how the collective bargaining agreement works."
But Brown might not be taking as big a risk as initially seems.
The value of rookie deals is determined by NBA Draft order. Brown saves the potential commission an agent would charge -- which The Vertical reports would be about $300,000 over a four-year deal -- but doesn't have an official agent to negotiate with his new team on potential other matters. Agent Aaron Goodwin is reportedly helping him with outside business deals.
Brown is a very unique prospect in other ways, too. You might call him the most interesting man in the world, NBA Draft edition.
He was a high school superstar who chose Cal, a renowned academic institution, over basketball powers. He even took a graduate-level course during his one season in Berkeley.
"He is an extremely intelligent kid," an unnamed NBA exec told The Undefeated. "He took a graduate school class at Cal in his freshman year. He is a person who is inquisitive about everything. Because he is so smart, it might be intimidating to some teams. He wants to know why you are doing something instead of just doing it. I don’t think it’s bad, but it’s a form of questioning authority."
But that was all pre-draft talk. Now -- agent or no agent -- the real work begins for Brown in Boston.
Sam Laird is Mashable's Senior Sports Reporter. He covers the wide, weird world of sports from all angles -- as well as occasional other topics -- from Mashable's San Francisco bureau. Before joining Mashable in November 2011, his freelance work appeared in publications including the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, Slam, and East Bay Express. Sam is a graduate of UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, and basketball and burritos take up most of his spare time. Follow him on Twitter @samcmlaird.
