Malcolm Brogdon made a solid first impression

When the Boston Celtics announced they had acquired Malcolm Brogdon via trade earlier this summer, it was as if our birthdays had come early. After falling short in the NBA Finals, the need for a shot creator off the bench was apparent, which spurred Brad Stevens into action.

Yet, while we were all calling for some more potency from the bench, you would be hard-pressed to find many people who thought Brogdon would be a viable target. I mean, almost every Celtics fan wanted him, but not many believed his arrival would be possible without giving up significant assets in return. Yet, once the Indiana Pacers decided to hit the self-destruct button, the notion of seeing Brogdon in green suddenly morphed from being a dream into a potential reality.

Against the Charlotte Hornets on October 3, we finally got to see Brogdon take to the court in the TD Garden and run the rule over what his diverse skillset can do for a Celtics team that was already among the league’s elite. As it turns out, Brogdon can provide a lot.

It all started with the veteran’s processing speed — a term I once hated because it made players sound like robots that could be upgraded and/or discarded without a second thought, but have come to appreciate as an all-encompassing term for mental intangibles that separate the good from the elite. In general, processing speed is the ability to perceive an action, decide how to respond to said action, and then execute your response – and the faster you can do those three things, the quicker your processing speed is.

According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, all elite athletes have off-the-charts processing speeds, “In conclusion, we have demonstrated that professional athletes as a group have extraordinary skills for rapidly learning unpredictable, complex dynamic visual scenes that are void of any specific context. It is clear from these results that these remarkable mental processing and learning abilities should be acknowledged as critical elements for world-class performance in sport and potentially elite performance abilities in other dynamic contexts.”

This above possession is an exceptional example of Brogdon’s ability to react to an ever-changing environment at speed while still making the best basketball play available to him. As we can see, the Charlotte Hornets are looking to take away the middle of the court by overloading it with defenders, while the low-man is expected to rotate over to corner shooters…