Christian Braun season discussion
Throughout the season this guy has gotten a lot of hate. Offensively he’s struggled with his shot and finishing which looked great last season. But let’s talk about what he went through.
He played through a calf injury to start the season (mentioned this months later on podcast), had a significant ankle injury which caused him to miss basically half the season (came back early to try and play and sat back out, got flamed by people saying he was waiting for jokic— btw, he didn’t come back when jokic did, he waited out even longer), maybe was never healthy, came back in the playoffs and got injured in game 1 and played through it.
He was not even on the injury report for 2 of these injuries. He fully played through and it probably caused him even more hate because people didn’t know. And the last one during the playoffs? MPJ talked about, Adelman said he wasn’t fully recovered at the end either, he didn’t even talk about it as an excuse.
We have seen him come back each season to be a contributor and an iron man for the nuggets and a couple unfortunate things happen this season which hamper him, and everyone wants to drop him. Or say he’s constantly injured. He has been an iron man for us his other years, not what I would call injury prone.
All those offensive struggles btw, while injured, yet some people also said his defense was worse. Have you guys watched him this season? His defense was crazy good. He got fried by shai in 1 game this year and people ignored what he’s done on the defensive end even through injuries.
In the playoffs his defense was great. He is the primary defender on ant. Some people will say ant was injured, but he was straight up locking edwards. In 110 possessions, anthony edwards scored 9 points with CB as his primary defender. 9 points. On 38% True Shooting. Unfortunately as a perimeter defender with constant switches you can’t always be on your man, but still overall ant was heavily limited to 18.5 ppg in 30 minutes a game on sub 50% TS in the games he played. And if you point out injury, look what ant did to the spurs. He just came back off injury during the playoffs. He didn’t do that to us. Braun may be the best primary defender on ant in the league and we’ve been seeing it since the first time he defended him. And overall he can play team defense and guard other players well too. He is a PoA that absolutely did the job of a PoA during these playoffs.
In players who played over 50 minutes for us this season in the playoffs, he had the second best on off (+6.5, spencer jones +6.7). And yes, he wasn’t a huge offensive contributor this year in the playoffs. But when you are battling through injuries and are the PoA on a superstar, it can happen.
TLDR: Great defensively, even in a down offensive year. Played through multiple injuries this year. including in the playoffs— no complaints, took responsibility, has shown he can improve before. Let’s wait till next year (you know the ACTUAL first year of his contract— some of you were acting like he was already getting paid $25 mill) before declaring him the worst contract in the league, and give him a chance. Of course, with this team playoff performance, as Kroenke said, anyone but Jokic is on the table. But it’s not a time to sell extremely low on Braun, or even give up valuable assets to get rid of him.