Basketball is not a sport, it's a way of life.

Jalen Green is trying to do his best GOB

There are a rare few artistic productions in this world so great that they permanently rest upon the insurmountable precipice of perfection. These are works whose pristine construction, self-referential beauty, and reverie-inspiring splendor have secured them a place above ever-changing mores and measures of beauty to which many find themselves subsumed. While this is far from an exhaustive list, some works that have had the greatest impact on me include: The Mona Lisa (Yes, low-hanging fruit), Pietà (To see it in person is to have your concept of beauty shift ever so slightly without return), Akira (There remains no greater anime movie in my eyes), the Sistine Chapel (I took a photo; don’t tell anyone), The Arnolfini Portrait (A masterwork of brush, contrast, and iconography), The Godfather Part II (My wife still hasn’t seen this... I’ll be back in three hours; I have something to do), The Blueprint (Ah man, remember when Kanye was a musical genius?), and Arrested Development (Of course, I mean pre-reboot).

While that’s as far as we’ll go into beauty and perfection, it seemed like a nice and wordy way to bring us to today’s real topic…

Arrested Development seems an apt place to start when discussing Jalen Green—not only because it reflects the state his game seems to be in, but much like GOB, I’m not so sure we’re good here.

It’s not that Green is exactly bad, it’s just that in his fourth year, he feels like the same player he was when he entered the league. An early strong start this year—27.9 ppg, 43.1% FG, and 40.7% 3PT over the first five games—was hoped to signal the continuation of what some saw as an ascendant stretch of play last March. But after the standard hot-start regression, the Rockets guard is back to looking like the same feast-or-famine player we’ve come to know and shrug.

Here’s a look at both Green’s counting stats and percentages over his first four seasons. (Be sure to interact with the graphs either here or via the link.)

The static nature across the board reflects a player who hasn’t changed in any significant way. While a visible upward trajectory would be ideal, even a dip and spike might suggest a season in which Green was trying to augment his game in ways that forced growth. Instead, he remains comfortably stuck as a player that is woefully inefficient, underwhelming as a playmaker for others, and who generally doesn’t offer much positive impact if he’s not cooking offensively. Which, to be fair, Green can definitely do—he’s scored 40 or more points seven times in his young career, the same number as Ja Morant and Jaylen Brown since the start of the 2021-2022 season.