
Boston Celtics fans earn the dual title of most passionate—and most obnoxious—according to The Athletic’s annual NBA player survey. Can this fierce energy keep pushing the team toward greatness, or is the reputation a double-edged sword? John Karalis of Celtics On SI unpacks exclusive player insights on everything from the league’s hardest defenders (with Victor Wembanyama dominating votes and Derrick White as Boston’s lone honorable mention) to which NBA city tops the dreaded “no-trade” list. This episode breaks down where Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, Derrick White, and Payton Pritchard rank among the NBA’s most underrated, and why no Celtics players made the overrated list. Karalis explores player-driven ideas for rule changes like overtime Elam endings and hockey-style subs, plus whether tanking is truly a problem or just overblown hype. Don’t miss this candid analysis of league narratives, Celtics roster impact, and what player perceptions mean for Boston’s future.
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NBA players speak. They said a lot. And you. Yeah, you. You're about to get a big compliment. Hey, welcome back to the show. I'm John Corrales. Today's show, we're looking at the Athletics player survey, something they do every year. It's an anonymous survey done by the reporters all across the Athletic take advantage of their great numbers and they ask players anonymous questions like who's going to be the mvp, who's going to win the championship, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And the interest they have some interesting results. So later on we'll get to some. I love this one. The no trade cities and this concept of hey, no one wants to play in Boston and blah blah blah. No, that's we'll dispel that in the third segment plus some rule changes in the second segment. Underrated, overrated players and where Celtics kind of fell on that. But let's start right at the top. And the question here again, this is all at the athletic. Who has which arena has the most passionate fans and which arena has the most obnoxious fans? And wouldn't you know it? Both of them. TD Garden. That is a huge compliment for you. You are passionate and obnoxious. And that just sums up Boston in a nutshell. Celebrate that. Take it in. Honk your horn. If you're driving, just pump your fist. And I bet you the person next to you knows what you're talking about. The TD Garden has the most passionate fans. 20 so 161 players. Let's, let's also get this out there. It's not like they pulled all the players. It's like almost 600 players in the league. I don't know how, how it all works out with the two ways now, but there's 161 or so, 159, whatever players that answer these questions. So it's a, it's a small sample size. Take it for what it's worth. The fact that 20%, almost 21% said TD Garden has the most passionate fans and it's just ahead of the Madison Square Garden and the Paycom Center. Those are the top three kind of by far. But then you follow that up with the most obnoxious fans, which just. Beautiful. Chef's kiss. Good job everybody. At TD Garden, that's 32% of the votes and that's ahead of 18% at the Xfinity Mobile Arena. The 76ers fans and more than the New York Knicks fans. So you've really, I mean, just outdone yourselves there, Celtics fans. This has been a, a great, a great year for you. And listen, the obnoxiousness comes from I think being good for as long as the Celtics have been good. Fans love that. We know that there's a level of civic pride and personal pride that people take in, in their sports teams. Like people legitimately get a personal kind of emotional like this big dopamine rush in. Wins, I see just from the traffic on wins versus losses and depends on the loss. Sometimes people get, have angry losses, but the crushing losses, the real tough ones where people are just like, you know what? I just, I don't want to hear about it. I don't want to think about it. And they, whatever. They don't, they don't want to listen. They don't. They just shut everything off. Probably drive in silence or put on something like Rage against the Machine and just scream at the top of their lungs and get all the rage out. But when they win, man, and there's been a lot of winning in Boston. There just has been a lot of winning in Boston. Even though this year's playoffs went how they went during the course of the regular season, man, 56 wins, they've been winning 50 plus games, 60 games. It's been a lot of winning. Fans get obnoxious when it's winning time. And also, let's just put this out there. It's cold. Winters suck in Boston. Everybody, everybody walks into that building with a little bit of an attitude. You drove through sleet and snow. It sucks out there. It, it gets dark at 4:30. You just walk in snarling. You just walk in angry. You want to take that out on somebody, that somebody's the other team. So that I think feeds into the obnoxiousness of Boston Celtics fans. So kudos to you and I think that is a great place to start. And now I'm going to go into the who is the league's best defensive player? And this is a super, super interesting question to me here. 151 votes, 41 said Victor Wembanyama. And I think that's pretty, pretty strong. Basically indicative that everybody understands it's Victor Wembanyama by a mile. And then every you look at the pie chart or the graph and it's 4.6% these guys, 4% these guys, 3%. So there's a lot of like a couple of guys here, a couple of guys there say, you know, Chris Dunn, Kawhi Leonard, Scotty Barnes. But here's where it gets interesting to me. First of all, no one on the Celtics makes the graph of, you know, like the athletic puts their graph together and it's little blue line. And no one, no one gets the blue line. The only Celtics that show up in the others receiving votes, the only Celtic that shows up is Derrick White. So D. White is not even in the league's defense, best defensive player kind of category. So I don't know where players kind of rank these guys. You might, you might have on top, you know, front of mind. Okay. SR. Thompson, sure. Scotty Barnes, absolutely. Kawhi, Herb Jones, all of these guys, you know, Amar, Amen, Thompson. So the Thompson twins, sure. Lou Dort, Dyson Daniels, these names are there. Rudy Gobert gets 2%. Stefan cast. But you get into the others receiving votes and you get really good defenders. Bam. Giannis, see Chet Holmgren, obviously Derek White, Dean Wade gets a vote and you know, doesn't get a vote. Jalen Brown. Jalen Brown does not get a single vote from anybody in this, in this particular thing. No one said Jaylen Brown. That doesn't mean they don't think he's also a good defender or the second or third or fourth best defender. But this is a little bit of a blow and a little bit of a motivating factor for Jalen. You know, you're. Jalen has spent a lot of time sitting there saying he's the best two way player in the league. And to the point with the Victor Wembanyama thing where he was on his stream, he was like, I'm the best two way player in the league. Well, not Wemby, but Wemby's an alien. I'm the best human two A player in the league. I said defender two way player in the league. So for a guy that touts himself as the league's best two way player, that's human and not an alien like Victor Wembanyama, it's kind of wild to see that the players there isn't like a groundswell of like, yeah, man, Jalen's out there too. You know, if I'm not going to say it's Wemby, I'm going to say it's Jalen. No, I mean, they barely said it was Derrick White either. And I think Derrick White is an incredible defender. He's going to probably be first team all NBA, all, all defense. But if I'm Jalen Brown, I'm looking at this, I'm going, hey, I don't see my name anywhere in best defensive player. And I think for he loves to call himself the best two way player. I think this past season he probably learned how hard it is to defend on a regular basis the other team's best player and still be the number one option. That is hard to do. Wemby does it because he's got an eight foot wingspan and can block somebody at the three point line, jumping from the paint like he's, he's a freak of nature. Jalen may become a better, like go back to being a better defender, but he gave the initial point of attack. You know, you guard their defense best, best player. He gave that assignment to other guys. Jordan Walsh, you know, Ugo, Gonzalez at times, Derek at times he kind of gave that responsibility to other players. So I'm very curious to see if this complete lack of mention in this motivates him in any way defensively next season. We know what Jalen does. Jalen takes everything that people say that is a hint of negative and he processes it in a way to blow it up, make it front of mind and use it as the fuel to get him to that next level. To the point where we did this podcast, he probably misremembers a lot of how his career has gone because he's processed everything in the most unhealthy way for a human being, but the best possible way for his own. Kind of like driving him to become better. So this, if anything, this is the Principal Skinner who said, oh, we all know these children have no future. And then he stands there, he says, prove me wrong, kids. Prove me wrong. No one has mentioned Jaylen Brown as the BET league's best defender. All right, so prove him wrong. Jalen. That's that's how he has to process this. This isn't a gotcha. This isn't a thing of like, oh, look at this. You're wrong. They don't believe you, Jalen. Now it's like, take that and process it. But they didn't, they didn't buy in. Like, they, they listed everybody. Donovan Clingan got mentioned before Jaylen Brown got mentioned, right? Like, that's, like I said, Dean Wayne got. Dean Wade got mentioned before Jalen got mentioned. So that's also just side note, when we talk about media voting and trust me, I don't want to be. I, I don't want to be a voter. I do not want to be a voter. I don't want the responsibility of my vote swinging. What one guy gets onto a team and doesn't get a max. I don't want any of that stuff. That's not for me. I don't want to mess with the player's money. Someone else can bear that. I'd like, if I got it, I would treat it with the utmost respect. I just, I don't want it. I don't crave it. But if you gave the players the votes, you get stuff like that, right? You get stuff like Dean Wade gets mentions as a better league's best defensive player ahead of Jalen Brown. No disrespect to Dean Wade, but come on. All right, who's the most underrated and overrated player in the league? Where do the Celtics fall on underrated and overrated? That's coming up next on the Locked On Celtics podcast. Today's show is brought to you by quo. Missed calls and slow follow ups. That's no good for your business. You need QUO Q U O the business community communication system built so you never miss a call. They're bringing you the show because they want to make sure you're not leaving money on the table without even realizing it. Quo helps businesses keep every conversation organized by letting your entire team manage calls and texts from one shared number. Get no more drop messages, get no more missed opportunities, no disconnected communication, which is the worst. That drives me crazy. I do not want to do business with companies that have one person that I talk to say one thing and another person I talk to say another thing. That's an easy way to lose that business. So QUO keeps everything in one clean thread. Calls, texts, voicemails. They. 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I'm doing this show as the late night Shay Gillis Alexander is talking on the screen to my left right now. So if I want to get some chips to sit here and listen to these guys talk, I can. Right now I can doordash while I'm doing the show. So it's there for me when I'm done. So from tip off to overtime, stay in your bag and order on DoorDash. Get snacks, drinks, gear, whatever you need. Phone chargers, whatever gets you through the season delivered right to your door. DoorDash in your bag all season long. Thank you for making Lockdown Celtics your first listen every day and being with me every Monday through Friday. Whenever I do drop a bonus podcast, you're there. So make sure you're subscribed to get those. Get into the YouTube comments, share your thoughts there about all the stuff that I'm talking about here. All the the obnoxious fans celebrate that in the comments section. The Jalen Brown stuff, everything that I'm about to talk about. So please let me know what you're thinking. If you're new to the show, I'm John Corrales. I'm a beat writer. I cover the Celtics for Sports Illustrated's Celtics on SI. I've been covering the team for 20 years doing this podcast for 10 and today we're getting through more of the Athletics just highlighting some of the Athletics player survey and we're going to get to the underrated and overrated players. The underrated players. A lot of Celtics represented now this is again 151 votes. So there's a lot of, a lot of names and everybody's within 4%, 3.3% 2.6. So there's a lot of names up there, but at the top, Derrick White is tied with Jalen Johnson. Jalen Brown is right behind that. Drew Holiday, by the way. Peyton Pritchard is in there. So a lot of underrated players on the Celtics with Derek, Jalen, and Peyton Pritchard. So this is. If Jalen's looking for motivation in this, you can. You can. Actually, you know what? As I'm talking, I'm saying it out loud. Jalen, the way his brain works, the way I think it works, he'd probably be like, what do you mean, underrated? What do you mean, underrated? You don't. You don't think I'm. I should be rated? Like, that's. When you're somebody like Jalen Brown, that's just always looking for that motivation, that type of thing. That. That. That little caveat, that little. It's like, oh, yeah, man. They're talking about, you're better than people think. Well, what do you mean? What are people supposed to think? This is very, like, what is it, Goodfellas, where Joe Pesci is like, am I a clown to you? Like that. That's. That's this whole process right here. What am I underrated? I'm not rated to you? I should be rated. What. What. What do I do? That doesn't make me rated to you. That's the Jalen Brown mentality. So nice to see Peyton Pritchard get in there and get some love. Derek White, perennially the most underrated player in the league. I'm not worried. Not worried at all about his shooting season. Not worried. Well, okay. I wouldn't say worried, but I understand why people will bring it up and be like, hey, dude, that. That was a whole season. That was a long slump. You know, he is. He is. He cooked like he's in his 30s. And it's because of where he was in San Antonio shooting wise, and then came to Boston with all of that extra help, and that helped him out shooting wise. And now back to, you know, with Jason out, just a lot more on his plate, and there goes the shooting again. Right. Going back to his San Antonio days. But I think the. The part that doesn't worry me is that, well, Jason is back and Jalen is going to be back, and you don't need Derek to be the. That other guy. In fact, as I'm saying this, the thought pops into my head when you talk about making a trade for Giannis and Tendokounmpo and trading away Jalen Brown. For people who want to say that, again, I'm against that move. One of the side effects that I haven't even considered until just now is that you're going to push Derrick White right back into the same role that he had this past season with one of the J's here and one of the Jays gone. And now he has to be a primary ball handler because Giannis is not going to be an initiator. He can bring the ball up on the break and pick the ball up at half court and still take two steps and get himself to the rim. But you're still going to need Derek to, to do a lot of that ball handling and pull up, you know, that type of stuff. And I just. If you're keeping Derrick White and trading away Jalen Brown, I just wonder if the net effect is you're keeping a worse version of Derrick White. Whereas if you keep Jalen and Jason and Derek, you get more catch and shoot Derek, and that's the Derek that I thought could be an all star this past season. So I think it would be, it would, it would be a smart move to consider all of the side effects, that of a trade, which obviously there's no doubt that the Celtics front office does. If we trade for this guy, what does that do for our team? And I'm sure there's a lot of frank talking through some of this stuff, and I would assume that what, what does Derek White become is, is part of the conversation. But for you and me, we have to consider if you're saying, yes, I'm willing to trade Jalen. Are you willing to trade Jalen and have that version of Derrick White, or do you now have to trade Derrick White and if you're doing that, you're completely remaking the team and what are you getting? What are you hoping for? I just, it's. I'm not saying you're not potentially like, you can trade for Giannis and move Jalen and move Derek and, and who knows what that gets you and you could still build a champion that way. I'm not, I'm not ruling that out. But it. You start to, you, you knock that first domino and, and you don't know how many are lined up behind it. And I'm not a big fan of, of that necessarily. So I'd prefer to keep the Jalen, Jason, Derrick White perimeter because that's such a good perimeter. Like, you can not mention Jaylen Brown defensively. You put those three guys out there in the perimeter, it's still pretty good defensively quickly. Overrated player number one, Alperin Shingoon. No Celtics on this list, which is great. This is the best news. Like everybody on the Celtics is underrated. Nobody is overrated. That's great. So Alperin Shingoon, number one, Rudy Gobert, as usual, tied for second with Trey Young. Yeah, baby. Carl Anthony Towns. Paula. Ben Caro in there, John Morant. So it's an interesting, it's an interesting group. But that, that, that, that group at the top there makes makes sense. Alpishing goon, man, that's the NBA players do not seem to like Alperin Shingoon. Like, he is just, I, he's right there with I, I don't know if they. You say most overrated player, that might be most hated player. And there are only 81. 81 players cast their vote on that one, which is very telling. So many players like, I don't care if I'm anonymous. I'm not answering that question. All right, but this might be my favorite question here. What's the first team on your no trade list? Where do the Celtics who have this reputation if nobody wants to play in Boston, where do the Celtics fall on their don't trade me their list? That is coming up next here on the Lockdown Celtics podcast.
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Thanks for making Lockdown Celtics your first listen every day. If you never miss an episode, let's make it official. Join the lockdown every day or club. Get ad free audio access to our members only. Discord and more. All built for you our most loyal fan. So check it out at lockdownceltics.super cast.com lockdownceltics.supercast check it out there. 5 bucks a month or 50 bucks if you want to pay for the full year up front. Going back to the athletic player poll and just they had a lot of questions. I'm just picking out the ones that made you know were interesting at least interesting to me. This one's a good one. What's the first team on you? No trade list. I 100 agree with this. If I was a see if you can remember what is my least favorite NBA city. I agree with the players. 120 votescast 36% people said Memphis Grizzlies sorry Memphis Tennessee I just don't, don't enjoy Memphis at all. That's a tough one. Washington. This was done before Washington won the the lottery so I wonder if that would change. Sacramento Tough hit Sacramento. Sacramento's not that bad. New Orleans. What what send me to probably best if I wouldn't I'm just thinking of if if I was a player I, I'm gonna, I'm just gonna say that the 6.7% so what is that eight players, nine players who said this are just thinking of their own well being and saying look dude, you can't trade me to New Orleans because I would just implode. I would be out of shape. I would trust me if I, if I lost this job and had to cover another team and a job opened up in New Orleans and that would be tough because it'd be like I just, just enjoy New Orleans a whole lot. I think my quality of work might suffer. Okay, so where are the Boston Celtics? Not on this list other than the others receiving votes. So 0.8%. That's like one or two players said Boston, Philly, Miami, Chicago, Cleveland and Houston. The Lakers got more mentions than that. So whatever the reputation of the Celtics was, and maybe there's obviously teams above them in the free agency, the free agency is a little bit of a different story. But as far as a trade, I don't. Very few players would refuse a trade to the Boston Celtics. So that little bit of whatever that reputation was that is, is clearly kind of fading or gone. Let's have a couple of fun ones here. I want to hear your take in the comments on this one. If you were a commissioner for a day with broad power to push through any change, what change would you make to the league? Now this is players. So players are saying no back to backs, fewer games. Rule changes in favor of defense, those tied for the top three. Expansion is right there with it. Penalties for referees, changes to the collective bargaining agreement, ending betting relationships, more personal freedom of expression. That's like don't tech me up a four point line and all star changes. Those are the, that, that's the entire list. I like the idea of no back to backs. I like the idea of fewer games. That's not going to happen because you, this is great for players. Are players going to give up some of the money that's involved here? Probably not. People don't want to give up money even though maybe it changes the max from, you know, guys making fifty and sixty million dollars to making forty something million dollars. Whatever, whatever that would be. They. No one's gonna be like yeah, no, I'll give up $10 million or whatever for it. But if you want it, you got to give up something and that's something you're gonna have to give up. I'm in favor of that. As far as rule changes, I, I have two. One is something that you probably have heard before. Another one is something not really. It's. It's out there. Number one is Elam ending for overtimes. No. Five minutes. No, none of this. I think if you want to just play the game in regulation, fine. Play the game in regulation. Overtime, first team to seven points is just do it. Don't, don't, don't. Give me five minutes. Give me. Most of these games would end in three minutes. Just it, it doesn't mess with the, the stats. And I'm, I'm in favor of the elamending for all games. But you want to, you want to keep things normalized at 48 minutes. No problem. I, I can move on that. Elamending for overtime. It's just an extra five minutes. This just, let's make everything end if you're going to go to overtime, let's make every single overtime end with a game winner. That's a simple rule change. It doesn't throw off, you know, the, the, the statistics. It doesn't throw off anything. Doesn't change the integrity of the game. Elam ending for overtimes just makes perfect sense to me. Set it at seven points so it's not just the first two three pointers. You still got to go out there and hit it. You got to make at least three buckets to, to win the game. You can get, you know, you can give up a run, but you, there's still a lot of pressure there. You, you could potentially end games on free throws. That's going to happen, but you're more often than not going to like, there's going to be that anticipation. You've scored, you've hit a three in a layup and now you've got the ball and everybody's like, oh, here we go. That's, that's what you want, like in an overtime. And how many times you play overtime in a regular season? 5, 6. Sometimes you play it more, sometimes you barely ever. So let's elame ending for overtime. Number two. Let's speed up the game Hockey substitutions so you can sub players in and out while there is live play. You can do it very simply. You can't. We can make the rules so it's, it's only after a made basket. So it can't be on a steal, only after a made basket, only in a certain zone in the backcourt. And you know, you could, you have to signal for it ahead of time. A team could press and kind of like make that whatever you can, you can have a strategy in there, but instead of waiting for a stoppage, let's just get, let's just get these guys going in and out. Let's stop with the, you know, the pointing and the, oh, I gotta take my stuff off and I gotta do all this and no, let's just sub them in and out. Boom, boom, boom. Move this thing. Let's get it going. I think that would speed up the game a little bit. It'd kind of be fun to have guys going in and out. You can, if somebody gets hurt, you can just grab them, sub them out and like, you can. There's just, I, I, I think it just makes the game flow a little bit more. So I, all right, that's my Rule change. You tell me what you think. I. I've thought this out. I do think in a specific zone in the backcourt, on the fly, when you're walking the ball up after a made basket is an easy way to sub somebody in and you don't have to wait for a stoppage. All right. You know, I am. There's one more here that I wanted to touch on, and it's how much of a problem is tanking? 159 votes, 43% said it's a little problem, so. And then 28.3% said it's not a problem, so let's add those together. What's that? 61 point, 62% that said it's either not a problem or a little problem. And 28% said it's a big problem. Now, again, 159 votes. So it's not the whole league, but I'd still say two thirds of the people polled said tanking is a little problem or not a problem. And the reason why I bring it up is because. And I'll make this a topic on another podcast when we talk about off season. I'll get Keith Smith on and we'll do a whole thing. This lottery reform that's coming, the three, two, one plan is this major reaction to a problem that I think people locally really weren't complaining about too much. People in Washington and Utah, they. I don't think there was a ton of complaining because they understood what was happening. The tanking thing became a major, major thing. Obviously, the tanking was bad this past season. My take on tanking is that it was the, the reaction is going to be overblown. It's a, it's a harsh overreaction to a problem that was bad this year because of the way this draft was. It's such a deep draft. It's a unique thing. And on top of that, the teams that were aggressively tanking this year, they'd already made moves to be good next year. So the problem was solving itself. Everything was starting to work out. It was going to be fine. But no, a few national voices started writing and podcasting about how tanking was horrible and in the league. Like, it caught momentum, the talk shows caught it, got into it, the first takes started yelling about it. And this commissioner is just very sensitive about the public perception and the owners are sensitive about it. And now it's this massive overreaction and that's going to hurt the Celtics because it changes how first round picks are going to be traded because the flattened odds are going to change the value of first round picks and where does the Celtics first round pick. How valuable is this versus not valuable. I've mentioned this before on the podcast, but that's a problem to me where you're, you're in the middle of this system, you're in the middle of this collective bargaining agreement where the team has worked its way to get out of the second apron and out of the first apron and, and now it has to make trades. And all of a sudden all of the moves that had made before, now the value of certain things has changed and you don't just. That's, that really is unfair to the teams, all the teams, not just the Celtics, all the teams that are out there making moves and having picks and did some other team trade away a pick that all of a sudden you're like, wait a second, I wouldn't have traded this if I thought these were odds were going to be like, I wouldn't have done this if this is how the, the system. Like why, why all of a sudden does my traded pick suddenly become this much more valuable? I, I didn't, I never would have done this move or I'm not going to do this move now. Because the value of a number one pick is, is, or the first overall pick or your first round pick, all of that stuff. So all of this is to say the players don't think tanking is that huge a problem. I think a lot of people outside of the national voices don't think, didn't think that tanking was a such a problem, that it needed a major overhaul, that I think everything was correcting itself naturally and it was going to be fine. You have other things that are bigger problems, but here we are. I, I'm very curious to see how the, the lottery reform is going to change things. Maybe it'll be great. Maybe it'll be great. I think it's a wild overreaction right now and we'll see, we'll see if it's something else I say I was wrong about. Who knows? All right, that's the show. Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. Thank you for being with me Monday through Friday. Still Monday through Friday, even through this off season as the playoffs roll on. There's be draft stuff. There'll be more team building stuff. I'll have guests. I have, I'm gonna have you covered. We're still talking Celtics. We're doing it in a meaningful way, a fun way. I hope so. Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. And now Please share the Podcast Tell everybody they should be listening to and watching the Lockdown Celtics Podcast Here in the Lockdown Podcast Network, it's your team every day. 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Episode: Boston Celtics Crowd RANKS #1 in NBA Survey | Jaylen Brown & Derrick White OVERLOOKED
Host: John Karalis
Date: May 21, 2026
John Karalis dives deep into The Athletic’s annual NBA Player Survey, focusing on how Boston Celtics fans and key players—especially Jaylen Brown and Derrick White—are perceived by their peers. The episode unpacks fan reputations, player rankings for defense, underrated and overrated players, trade destination preferences, and player-suggested rule changes, while infusing classic Boston pride and a wry sense of humor throughout.
“That just sums up Boston in a nutshell. Celebrate that. Take it in. Honk your horn… the person next to you knows what you’re talking about.” ([03:04])
“Jalen has spent a lot of time sitting there saying he’s the best two-way player in the league… For a guy that touts himself as the league’s best two-way player… it’s kind of wild to see that the players… no one said Jaylen Brown.” ([10:13])
“Jalen…the way I think it works, he’d probably be like, what do you mean underrated?...I should be rated!” ([16:56])
“You say most overrated player, that might be most hated player.” ([20:02])
“Very few players would refuse a trade to the Boston Celtics. So whatever the reputation of the Celtics was… clearly fading or gone.” ([27:27])
“It’s a wild overreaction right now and we’ll see if it’s something else I say I was wrong about. Who knows?” ([36:12])
On Boston Fan Reputation:
“TD Garden has the most passionate fans… and the most obnoxious fans. Just beautiful. Chef’s kiss. Good job everybody.” ([03:46])
On Jaylen Brown’s Mindset:
“Jalen takes everything that people say that is a hint of negative and he processes it in a way to blow it up, make it front of mind and use it as the fuel to get him to that next level.” ([11:12])
On What “Underrated” Means to Brown:
“What am I, underrated? I’m not rated to you? I should be rated. That’s the Jaylen Brown mentality. So, nice to see Payton Pritchard get in there.” ([16:55])
On Boston’s Trade Destination Perception:
“Very few players would refuse a trade to the Boston Celtics. So… that reputation is clearly kind of fading or gone.” ([27:27])
Karalis wraps up by reinforcing the dynamic between player perception, media narrative, and actual league sentiment—often at odds. Boston fans should embrace their hard-earned, dual reputation; Jaylen and Derrick’s (under)appreciation by fellow players signals both a chip on their shoulders and an opportunity; and the NBA’s policy pivots (especially on tanking) continue to reflect outside pressure more than actual stakeholder concern.
For full episode context, skip the intro, ad reads, and outros—jump right into the basketball talk at [01:06].