What week is it in this A.J. Brown saga? It feels like we have to track it by months at this point. It's been a long time.

At this point, it's difficult to even think/feel/believe/want anything to specific to come from the situation, other than for it to end one way or the other. That tends to happen when a much-ballyhooed trade seems to involve much more smoke than fire.

With that in mind, though, I did want to provide one bit of perspective when it comes to the actual cost of acquiring A.J. Brown for the Patriots. The words "first-round pick" can mean a whole lot of things, so I thought it best to zero in on the exact area in the first round that the Patriots own their pick this year to try to provide some detail on the caliber of player that gets taken that late in the first. That way, perhaps we'll all be able to determine how we feel about coughing up a first-round pick, if that is indeed the high end of the asking price for Brown.

Plus, some thoughts on Red Sox owner John Henry oddly breaking his yearslong Twitter silence, an unlikely performance from the Celtics' impressive win over the Thunder, and the Bruins' handling of top prospect James Hagens turning pro.

--This will not be a scientific endeavor, but merely one to shed a different light on what's at stake in a potential A.J. Brown trade. There are some who might never even consider trading a first-round pick, no matter the circumstances. Others may be willing to dish them out whenever the opportunity to acquire game-changing talent arises.

But as we all know, not all first-round picks are made the same. And with the Patriots owning the 31st overall pick, I decided to look back at the last decade of players picked between No. 30 and No. 33. According to the Jimmy Johnson NFL Draft value chart, No. 30 is worth 620 points, and No. 33 is worth 580. The parameters are a bit arbitrary, sure, but it felt worthwhile to include the first pick of the second round in there.

The goal of the exercise is to answer the simple question: Would you trade having this player on your roster for four or five years in exchange for, say, three years of A.J. Brown?

While that conclusion will be subjective, I'll also use Pro Football Reference's weighted career approximate value to help apply an objective measure to determine whether picks were big hits, big misses, or somewhere in between.

With that setup now complete, here are those players.

The Big Hits

Lamar Jackson, QB, BAL T.J. Watt, LB, PIT Landon Collins, S, NYG Ryan Ramczyk, T, NO Tee Higgins, WR, CIN Emmanuel Ogbah, DE, CLE Kaleb McGary, T, ATL Byron Murphy, CB, MIN Germain Ifedi, G, SEA Gregory Rousseau, DL, BUF George Karlaftis, DE, KC

Of course, Baltimore drafting Lamar Jackson-- a two-time league MVP, three-time First Team All-Pro, and four-time Pro Bowler -- with the 32nd overall pick in the 2018 draft will go down as one of the greatest draft steals of all time. He is the exception among exceptions to this exercise.

Though T.J. Watt -- eight-time Pro Bowler, four-time First Team All-Pro, and one-time Defensive Player of the Year who shared the NFL's single-season sack record with Michael Strahan until Myles Garrett set a new standard this past year -- is not far behind, having been selected by Pittsburgh with the 30th overall pick in 2017.

Outside of maybe Tee Higgins and Landon Collins, the rest of the list may lack major star power but includes solid, high-end contributors who proved to have been extremely valuable on their rookie contracts. ("Value" does have to play a role in this equation, after all.)

Of the 40 players looked at in this exercise, 11 made the "Big Hits" list. We all struggle with mathematics from time to time, but even I feel comfortable saying that's a touch above 25 percent. (The handy calculator application informs me that it's 27.5 percent, to be precise.)

The Big Misses

Lewis Cine, DB, MIN Kevin Dodd, DE, TEN Reuben Foster, LB, SF Deandre Baker, CB, NYG N'Keal Harry, WR, NE Noah Igbinoghene, CB, MIA Felix Anudike-Uzomah, DE, KC Stephone Anthony, LB, NO

There shouldn't be a ton of debate on this part of the list, as the majority of the players have done little or nothing in the NFL, despite getting the requisite extra chance or two that accompanies being a high draft pick.

Lewis Cine was the last pick of the first round in 2018, and he ended up taking 10 career defensive snaps. Kevin Dodd was the first pick of the second round in 2016, coming off a 12-sack season at Clemson. He registered one sack as a rookie and didn't play beyond his second year. Patriots fans need no reminders about N'Keal Harry, who caught 57 passes for 598 yards and four touchdowns over three seasons for New England.

You get the idea. There's no doubt about this part of the list, which includes eight of the 40 players, or 20 percent. That means the odds are slightly better to land a hit than a miss.

(Note: Cornerback Jeff Gladney, who died in a car crash in 2022, was not used for the purpose of evaluation in this exercise.)

The In-Betweens

Malcom Brown, DT, NE Austin Corbett, C, CLE Tyson Campbell, DB, JAX Damarious Randall, S, GB Sony Michel, RB, NE Joe Tryon-Shoyinka, OLB, TB Logan Hall, DE, TB Clyde Edwards-Helaire, RB, KC Mike Hughes, CB, MIN Odafe Oweh, DE, BAL Nolan Smith, OLB, PHI Joey Porter Jr., CB, PIT Kevin King, CB, GB Daxton Hill, DB, CIN Vernon Butler, DT, CAR Will Levis, QB, TEN Nate Wiggins, CB, BAL Ricky Pearsall, WR, SF Xavier Legette, WR, CAR Keon Coleman, WR, BUF

The largest group of this exercise invites the most debate. Either "that guy's awful!" or "he's way better than that!" could be shouted about some of them, I'm sure. But the point is this: These are all NFL players who contributed or continue to contribute at differing degrees of impact. If you're building a 53-man roster, these are players who are useful to that goal ... but they're probably not considered game-changers.

This group accounted for half of the group -- 20 out of 40 -- and helped illustrate that a "first-round pick" can mean something very different than it seems on the surface.

The Too-Soons/Miscellaneous

Maxwell Hariston, CB, BUF Jihaad Campbell, LB, PHI Josh Simmons, T, KC Carson Schwesinger, LB, CLE

This was last year's crop of picks from No. 30-33, and it's obviously too soon to place value one way or the other on the players just yet. At this point, though, Carson Schwesinger-- the Defensive Rookie of the Year -- looks like the best of the young lot.

A fun fact: The second round in 2020 after the group of Igbinoghene, Gladney, Edwards-Helaire and Higgins was stacked with talent. Michael Pittman Jr., D’Andre Swift, Xavier McKinney and Kyle Dugger went next, with Miami guard Robert Hunt going a couple of picks after Dugger. Jonathan Taylor was taken 41st and Cole Kmet went at 43. Safety Antoine Winfield Jr. went at No. 45, one pick after Grant Delpit. Jalen Hurts was the 79th pick, while Ezra Cleveland and Jeremy Chinn closed out the round. The first round had tons of talent that year (Justin Jefferson, CeeDee Lamb, Joe Burrow, Justin Herbert, Tristan Wirfs, Jordan Love, etc.) but the collective of that second round might be an even match overall.

Another fun fact: After the run of receivers -- Pearsall, Legette, Coleman -- in the late first/early second two years ago, Ladd McConkey went 34th to the Chargers (thanks to a trade with the Patriots). McConkey has clearly been the best pick of that lot.

The Conclusion

Well, that's up to you now, isn't it? When it comes to trading a first-round pick, there's no right or wrong answer, but this admittedly unscientific experiment showed that teams have gotten a home-run player about a quarter of the time, teams have essentially wasted their pick a little less than a quarter of the time, and teams have gotten serviceable if uninspiring players half the time.

Would you give up having any of those "In-Between" players on your roster in exchange for having A.J. Brown? Most folks would agree that the answer there is yes.

Yet if you believe you're missing out on T.J. Watt or Lamar Jackson or someone who can start at offensive tackle for five years, the decision remains a challenging one to make.

--Red Sox season has begun, so there's actual baseball to discuss, examine, and pick apart. What a gift. The return of baseball season always brings with it a return to a certain daily rhythm, one that those of us who are maybe too sports-dependent will certainly appreciate for the next seven months.

This year, the season also brought another return in the form of John Henry returning to social media, seemingly just to dunk on Dan Shaughnessyregarding an extremely unimportant topic.

Historic— John W. Henry (@John_W_Henry) March 23, 2026

Henry hadn't tweeted since the website was actually called Twitter. His previous tweet (non-retweet division) was sent on June 11, 2021. He sent one other tweet in 2021 and a four-tweet thread about Liverpool in 2020. That's it.

Yet when Dan Shaughnessy felt it necessary to correct himself after accusing NESN of being cheap, Henry fired up his app to roast his media frenemy.

It was ... odd, especially considering he hasn't talked to Red Sox reporters in a group setting since the spring of 2020. He even stopped talking to fans after The Great Booing Incidentof 2023 at the team's Winter Weekend event.

Ultimately, fans don't care whether or not the owner speaks publicly, so long as that owner is fully invested in the health of the team. The Red Sox sliding down the leaderboard of MLB's top payrolls this decade would indicate that perhaps the latter isn't as true as it once was, thus leading to more calls for the former. So whether it's with his own voice or with his checkbook, people do want to hear from John Henry on matters other than what Dan Shaughnessy is idly tweeting during spring training. Something tells me, though, that that's the last we'll hear from the team's owner for a long time.

--The Celtics' win over the Thunder on Wednesday night was tremendous. They weren't rattled after falling behind early; they dominated the second and third quarters and held on in the fourth despite Shai Gilgeous-Alexander's best efforts to ruin everybody's night at the Garden. This win, in conjunction with the competitive shorthanded losses in San Antonio and OKC, certainly makes it reasonable to start cooking up scenarios where the Celtics not only make the Finals but actually compete to win. Considering where everybody's expectations were in October, that's truly, truly insane.

What's more insane to me, though, was the performance of one man in this game: Baylor Scheierman. With all due respect to the second-year guard, he looked un-rosterable in the preseason this year. Yet on Wednesday, he nonchalantly went toe-to-toe with the league MVP? Excuse me?

Man WHAT a sequence from Baylor Scheierman Has hit 2 huge threes since coming in and forces this TO on SGA OKC mixing up coverages possession to possession and he makes them pay for coming off of him to help on JB https://t.co/QsJUKOnECp pic.twitter.com/CMozOh7ukC— NikNBA🏀 (@NIKNBAYT) March 26, 2026

If the Celtics are to go on a real postseason run this spring, they'll need their role players not to turn into pumpkins under the playoff pressure. That performance -- and the past couple of months, really -- provides some reason to believe Scheierman is built to withstand it.

--While the Celtics were taking down the reigning champs, the Bruins were authoring a come-from-behind overtime victory on the road against the best team in the NHL. Quite a night for Boston sports fans, even it required some remote control mastery and a deep focus.

It's been a bit of a roller-coaster week for the Bruins, who had an emotional comeback win in Detroit on Saturday night, then laid an egg at home against a bad Leafs team, before the aforementioned win in Buffalo. In the midst of all of that, they finally signed top prospect James Hagens after some reported back-and-forth about where he'd be starting his pro career. Ultimately, the Bruins settled on Providence instead of Boston, and Hagens made his debut on Wednesday night in Springfield.

For as much as it would be exciting to see the No. 7 overall pick from last year's draft immediately joining the NHL club and providing the proverbial shot in the arm, and for as much as it's always a fun time to throw a tomato or two at Don Sweeneyjust for sport ... this doesn't feel like the wrong move.

On a paper level, there's a ton of mediocrity in the Bruins' forward lines, so throwing Hagens -- who scored 34 goals and added 24 assists in 34 games for Boston College this year -- into a third- or fourth-line role shouldn't be the tallest of tasks for Marco Sturm. That's a fair enough take.

Yet that collective mediocrity has produced a whole lot more this year than anyone expected, and benching a veteran in favor of a teenager with no pro experience could certainly disrupt the chemistry of the team -- chemistry that was clearly on display when the likes of Viktor Arvidsson, Casey Mittelstadt and Pavel Zacha all scored clutch goals in the win in Buffalo.

Hagens will almost certainly get his chance in the 10 games remaining on the regular-season schedule and, most likely, the postseason. Yet with the Bruins snip-snapping their way into and out of comfortable playoff position every other night like Michael Scott, there's no reason to force it at this point in time.