This season saw a real deficiency of Boston Celtics highlight videos on my channel. From the 64 games that the Celtics played in the regular season before all professional sports got abruptly covidded, I made 25 total highlight videos for Celtics players. That’s fewer than one video every two games. It’s still fewer than one video every two games even when you add in that Brad Wanamaker highlight video that I should have made but didn’t. Meanwhile, a team like the Warriors got over 100 highlight videos this season.
Those jarring numbers point to an indisputable fact: role-players on the Celtics just aren’t as important as they are on other teams. A role-player-focused highlights channel such as this one will necessarily struggle when the scoring duties are dominated by the fearsome foursome of Kemba Walker, Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, and Gordon Hayward. A wing player on the Beantown Green Midgets is never gonna make a huge impact when playing behind GorJayJay (that’s my nickname for Tatum, Brown, and Hayward).
Javonte Green, the subject of this highlight video, was one of those marginalized role players. An old rookie is usually an old rookie for a reason (Green is 26, giving him a half decade of experience over the average rookie), but we never got a clear view of how good he could be in the NBA, since his minutes were sporadic and often in garbago time (he had almost as many field goals in the fourth quarters of games [45] as he did in the first through third quarters [52]).
That’s why I’m making these bucketilations for ultra-fringe role-players. So we can get all their buckets in one place and finally have enough footage in one place to make judgments about them. Sure, a video showing only makes will result in judgments that trend towards “favorable” and away from “this guy plays like a booty lollipop”, but that’s the nature of running a highlight channel that tries to balance “informativeness” with “entertainment”.
What are my judgments about Javonte Green? I’m so glad you asked.
Judgment 1: He’s fast. There’s some real speed on display here, and you can really see him take advantage of it on fast breaks. It’s not, like, Ish Smith levels of speed, but it’s definitely speedier than, say, Raptors-era Luis Scola.
Judgment 2: He can get up. There’s some nice whammage damage happening to these rims. His Twitter username, 2Xtremebounce, indicates that he is aware of his own hops and considers them an integral part of his game.
Judgment 3: He’s not much of a shooter. A smattering of threes (he shot 26% on those) and a single midrange pop (he took like, two of those all season), but that’s it. Everything else is at the rim. History has informed us that non-shooting wings are not really NBA-viable unless they’re great defenders (Rondae Hollis-Jefferson is an example). If I’m miscasting him as a wing and he’s actually a guard, well, non-shooting guards are also not really NBA-viable (David Nwaba is one of the few I can think of).
Judgment 4: I once went to Fanueiuel Hall and ate a slice of crappy pizza even though the tour guide lady on the bus said it would be good. I think it was Regina’s or something like that. To this day I think she was playing a prank on me. I spend hours every night watching prank videos on YouTube to see if I’m in any of them eating a slice of crappy pizza.
Judgment 5: I have no more judgments, but five seemed like a good number to aim for.
Will Javonte Green be in the league next season? The COVID-related salary cap confusion muddies the waters, and I don’t know enough about the Celtics to really have an informed opinion, so I’m going with an emphatic MAYBE on this one. My only advice to him is that he should try seeking the advice of Brad Wanamaker, who has experience being a latecomer to the NBA and also has a face which looks like it was carved with the chisel of wisdom.
In conclusion, I hate Celtics fans because they constantly boast about championships that were won during an era of the NBA where there were only three and a half teams at any given time, but I also feel sorry for them because they didn’t get to watch a lot of DTB highlights this season, so I’m offering this video to them as a combination “I despise you” and “You deserve nice things”.