Every basketball player dreams of being the NBA MVP. It’s an extremely prestigious award, and players have to win one to be considered one of the greatest ever. This also makes the culture around it quite toxic, and Boston Celtics superstar Jaylen Brown spoke about how players must ‘sell their soul’ to win it.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is the reigning MVP and looks set to win another this season. His main competitors appear to be Nikola Jokic and Luka Doncic. Both SGA and Luka are criticized for one aspect of their game: trying to get cheap free throws. And that’s exactly what Brown highlighted.
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“If you want to be a great player, you gotta sell your soul,” Brown said on his latest stream. “You gotta be a flopper. If you want to be an MVP, you want to be top of the top, you gotta sell your soul and just be a flopper.
Oklahoma City Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander reaches to steal the ball from Los Angeles Lakers guard Luka Doncic. Mandatory Credit: Alonzo Adams-Imagn Images
“I could do it. I could start going to practice and like, working on… like working on throwing my head, you know what I mean?” Brown suggested in his tirade that he thinks playing basketball this way isn’t for him, though. He called flopping ‘whack’ and said he would never want to play that way.
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This is a divisive topic in the modern NBA, but one that fans also regularly call out. It’s hard to dispute this considering that Doncic and Gilgeous-Alexander are both at the top of the free-throw attempts list this season. To say they are selling their soul for the MVP might be going a bit too far, though.
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