Jaylen Brown’s Recent Celtics Quote Doesn’t Bode Well For Baylor Scheierman
Boston Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla had a question to answer about his bench entering the 2025-26 NBA season. Who was going to get the bulk of minutes as bench wings? A preseason competition emerged between rookie stud Hugo González, Jordan Walsh, and Baylor Scheierman, and González ended up winning that battle.
Walsh has recently become a fixture of Boston’s rotation, too, leaving Scheierman the odd man out of the young trio.
When Celtics star Jaylen Brown was talking about Boston’s bench depth the other day, he didn’t mention Scheierman. This wasn’t an intentional slight or anything from JB, but more so an indication or reminder to us that Scheierman has more or less fallen off the map of Mazzulla’s game plan on a nightly basis.
“Jordan, Hugo, and Josh (Minott), you know, they’ve rotated between who’s got minutes, who started, and I think their mindset has all been the same,” Brown said, per WEEI’s Justin Turpin. “So we just got to continue to empower that.”
Brown also mentioned Josh Minott, who is a big wing capable of playing the three or four spot for the Celtics.
It’s been a tough series of events for Scheierman, who was selected with the No. 30 overall pick in the 2024 NBA Draft by the Celtics.
Scheierman’s actually shot the ball well from three this year (52.6 percent), but his lack of defensive value is what’s placed him behind González and Walsh, neither of whom is a terrible shooter in their own right.
A lot of people have compared Scheierman’s potential to current Celtics sharpshooter Sam Hauser, but Scheierman is miles away from Hauser as a defender, too.
There’s still hope for Scheierman to break through in the NBA (if not with the Celtics, with someone else), especially because he’s already shown that he can shoot with the best of them, having exploded for a couple of big scoring games.
To stick somewhere, Scheierman’s going to have to work his tail off to improve defensively in a big way, even more so than he already has. There’s a bare minimum level that he needs to reach to be able to be playable, and his fellow Creighton alum Kyle Korver would be a good guy to study in that regard, as would Doug McDermott (another Creighton Bluejay).
Both Korver and McDermott were athletically challenged on defense, but they used their brain power and basketball IQ to maximize their value on that end, and a lot of it comes down to always having perfect positioning.
Right now, the tenacious defense of González and Walsh stands in stark contrast to what Scheierman provides on D for the Celtics, and Mazzulla knows it. That doesn’t mean that Baylor isn’t a highly talented player. He was a first-round pick! This is just another example of how nearly impossible it is to earn a consistent role on an NBA roster.