Stay With Me Here, Should Jaylen Brown Cut His Hair To Save His Season?
I fully understand how silly that headline may be to some, but I’m going to have to ask you to hear me out. It is well documented on this here website that I have an unhealthy relationship with a certain basketball team comprised of players who do not know I exist or give two shits about my happiness. Unfortunately, I’ve been this way my entire life and I feel like it is our responsibility as fans to make sure we are doing our part to ensure this team plays at the highest level possible. Sometimes that means thinking outside the box when you see a problem.
You see, we’ve been here before. Remember earlier in the year where something just didn’t seem right with Kyrie Irving? His efficiency was brutal, he started the first few weeks with 39/24% splits and the Celtics were struggling. He just looked off. The one thing we knew was that he was coming into the year with this sweet afro. Sure it looked cool, but there is extensive research out there on the internet that for whatever reason, hair can sometimes impact an NBA player’s ability to shoot/score. Don’t ask me why, that’s just science doing science things. Well, wouldn’t you know that on 10/30 it came out that he got a haircut and I wrote this blog
and Kyrie dropped 31 points on 10-16 shooting that very night. To those of us who pay attention, this is not a new concept. It worked for Marcus Smart, in that blog I went on to show his pre and post haircut numbers
Before haircut: .356 fg%, .304 3P%, .474 TS%, 9.9 ppg
After haircut: .481 fg%, .342 3P%, .600 TS%, 13.1 ppg
Now let’s do the same thing with Kyrie
Before haircut: .391 fg%, .241 3P%, .453 TS%, 16.4 ppg
After haircut: .502 fg%, .434 3P%, .617 TS%, 25.3 ppg
I think we all agree it did in fact fix his shooting woes right? Well then you tell me, if we now have two legit cases of something like this benefitting a struggling player, shouldn’t Jaylen at least consider it? It’s never the first choice, Brad has done his best trying to jumble rotations, brought Jaylen off the bench, you name it he’s tried it. Why not say fuck it and give this approach a shot? I know the flat top is Jaylen’s look, he’s had it forever, but this doesn’t need to be a permanent thing. Just get it cut so that you can find your rhythm again, then if you want to grow it back and can prove you can sustain it all the better. But the facts are right now it’s struggle city for Jaylen, and every time we’ve had a player go through something like this, they’ve gone to the clippers and magically things have drastically improved.
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Listen, is this me drastically grasping at straws a little bit? You betcha, but I also have evidence to support my claim. This team has too much talent and has too high of expectations to not try everything under the sun in an effort to get guys back to playing at a high level. At this point we need Jaylen to give this some serious consideration no matter how much he may not want to. Conventional methods haven’t proven to work just yet, so it’s time to go outside the box and hit up Kyrie’s barber. Do it for your psyche, do it for your teammates, do it for all of us who care way too much about the success of this team. You can laugh now if you want, but if this happens and Jaylen turns things around, I don’t need a thank you. I’m just here trying to do my part.
Did I just fix a major Celtics problem? I think I did.