Let me start this off by saying that I wouldn’t classify myself as a Dillon Brooks fan. In fact, I’m probably the opposite.
He’s a good player, but I don’t love his game. His shot selection is terrible and there are times where he just doesn’t need to be guarded on the offensive end, as we saw in the Grizzlies’ series against the Lakers. He probably — no, definitely — thinks he’s a bit better than he is.
With that being said, he’s still an extremely valuable player to have on your team.
He’s proven himself to be one of the better villains in the league. It doesn’t matter who he’s going up against — he’s confident. He will trash-talk you. He irrationally thinks he’s better than you. That’s a healthy thing for him as a competitor and for the league as a whole.
That’s why he’s such a fantastic defender. There aren’t many players in the NBA as committed to quite literally locking down the opponents best player and he does it pretty well.
Peep this wild stat from a deep profile on Brooks from ESPN’s Tim Keown.
“Brooks has matched up in the half-court defensively 922 times against this year’s All-Stars, the most of any player. He has held those All-Stars, from Tatum to Curry to Durant, to a 45.7% effective field goal percentage, which ranks first among the 72 players to record 400 such matchups. (League average, for comparison, is 54.6.)”
That’s good. This is what you can quite literally call lockdown defense. There are only a handful of players this good in the league at defending such a range of talented scorers in the NBA from Jayson Tatum to Steph Curry to Kevin Durant and more.
That’s why I was so confused by the report that Memphis is choosing not to bring Brooks back “under any circumstances.”
I’m sorry, y’all. But that is weird.
Now, there are legitimate reasons that Memphis would not bring Brooks back. For example, that shot selection thing is a real problem. But for the reporting to say that Brooks won’t be back under any circumstances? I’m sorry. That just doesn’t make a ton of sense to me.
But that’s kind of been par for the course for Brooks over these last few weeks if we’re being honest. It all starts with him trash-talking LeBron James — or “poking the bear” as we love to call it — and it just continuously devolved into something very different in the days and weeks following.
After Brooks called LeBron James old, it almost felt like the entire NBA and all of its fandom came to James’ defense as if someone really needed to defend the NBA’s all-time leading scorer.
You had Stephen A. Smith saying that James needed to bust Brooks. Then, Doris Burke kind of went in on Brooks’ talent during a live broadcast.
Doris Burke Fr cooked Dillon Brooks 😭 https://t.co/JyL7fZlju5 pic.twitter.com/vlgjBQCbvm
— andrew leezus (@AndrewLeezus) April 23, 2023
That stuff is mostly fine. It’s an honest analysis and critique. Is it harsh? Sure. Maybe even a step too far in some moments. But it is what it is.
Where things really started to go too far was with the jokes. Every single Grizzlies loss somehow turned into a referendum on Brooks as a player and led to jokes flying in from across the internet. It got to the point where Brooks very clearly felt targeted. And that’s not what happened — he started this with his trash talk and it just escalated. But perception is everything and Brooks had clearly had enough. That didn’t stop everyone from pressing harder and harder to the point where things bordered bullying.
Fast forward to Tuesday when reports came that Brooks was told to kick rocks by the Grizzlies and all most people had to offer up were jokes.
RELATED: 5 teams that might sign Dillon Brooks in NBA Free Agency.
There’s no real acknowledgment of the human element here. Brooks isn’t a person to most people — he’s just a caricature. Someone most folks will never meet in their own worlds.
But, the reality is, he’s a dude who just experienced a failure. He had a bad series and wound up losing his job for it after having a pretty solid year and a very good run with the Grizzlies. If that feels harsh, it should.
All of a sudden, that bit of perspective we gained after Giannis Antetokounmpo’s talk about failure is gone out the window. We’re right back to square one with jokes and ridicule for missteps that these athletes make. We revel in the consequences they suffer because, after all, the NBA is an entertainment product first.
And, look, the league is better with villains. We love a good foil. We need people to shake things up in the league. It’s awesome and entertaining when that happens.
We’ll always have agitators. Folks like Draymond Green, Jae Crowder and more still exist. There are also guys coming up like Jose Alvarado and Jeremy Sochan who fit snuggly into that role. But it’ll be a while before we get someone who goes full-on villain as Brooks did.
We only have ourselves to blame for that.