NBA free agency didn't exist when Voltaire insisted we not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but if it had, he might've coined the aphorism even sooner.
By virtue of earning a spot on the all-NBA second team, Celtics forward Jaylen Brown is now eligible to sign a $295 million supermax extension with the Celtics this summer that would make him the richest player in NBA history.
I know what some of you are thinking: Jaylen Brown? Richest player ever? Is he really worth *that* much?
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First of all, yes. Second of all, it doesn't matter, because the alternative is . . . there is no alternative.
Forsberg: Jaylen's All-NBA honor is great news for C's core
Brown may not be the best player in the league, but he is easily top 20 and maybe top 15, and this isn't baseball or football, where you can spend however many hundreds of millions that might've gone to one player on somebody else.
In the NBA, there's nothing more important than finding and keeping elite talent, and despite some flaws as a ballhandler and passer, Brown qualifies. He's an absurdly gifted one-on-one scorer who can do it at all three levels, and his midrange fallaway is borderline unstoppable. He just averaged 26.6 points per game, which is good for 10th in the franchise's storied history, ahead of Hall of Famers like Kevin McHale, Sam Jones, Tommy Heinsohn, and Jo Jo White.
Boston Celtics
To hear some tell it, though, the Celtics have a decision to make. Do they really want to devote 35 percent of their salary cap to a player who's no Giannis, Steph, or even Jayson Tatum, his first-team All-NBA teammate who will be eligible for a $318 million extension next summer? Maybe they should try to negotiate a slightly lower deal that gives him more than he could make elsewhere, but less than $295 million.
No team has ever had a player turn down a supermax extension, but haggling over 33 percent of the cap vs. 35 percent could make the Celtics the first, and there's simply no point to that exercise. Brown has earned his payday by the rules of the CBA, and someone as invested in the players association as he is doesn't strike me as a likely candidate to leave money on the table.
It's not like the Celtics have an alternative. I'll leave the cap breakdowns to Chris Forsberg and Brian Robb, but suffice it to say, the C's couldn't spend his $295 million on some other superstar. The point of the system is it enables the Celtics to overpay him, thereby making it easier to retain the player they drafted and developed.
Even before factoring in Brown's potential extension, the Celtics are already about $25 million over next year's cap, per Spotrac. If he were to play out the final year of his current deal at $31.8 million and then leave in free agency, it's not like the Celtics could just throw $300 million at Domantas Sabonis or Anthony Edwards next summer to replace him.
But that's enough math. The greater point is that the Celtics selected Brown third overall in 2016 in the hopes that he'd blossom into an all-NBA player, and now he has done it. They're not the Wizards debating whether John Wall and Bradley Beal were each worth massive contracts to guarantee they'd maybe be in the hunt for the seventh seed.
They're the defending NBA Finalists who are a perennial top-three seed capable of making deep playoff runs, pending Thursday night's Game 6 vs. the Sixers. The foundation of that success is the duo of Brown and Tatum, and the Celtics are in a position to ensure that neither of them goes anywhere.
So who cares if Brown isn't perfect? He's plenty good enough.