The Boston Celtics, maybe more than any team in the league, embrace analytics. Yet team decision-makers often remind us that you can't make decisions based on numbers alone. There's a balance to be found between what your eyes tell you and what the numbers suggest.

That is why California forward Jaylen Brown is one of the more fascinating players in this year's draft. If the Celtics are interested in Brown with the No. 3 pick, the team will be forced to essentially choose a side of the fence. The eyeball test with Brown shows a 19-year-old with intriguing raw athleticism, while multiple computer models suggest Brown will struggle to make an impact at the next level.

There's a buzz about Brown in these final days before the draft on the strength of his pre-draft workouts. ESPN draft guru Chad Ford even moved Brown up to No. 3 in his latest mock draft.

Ford noted that multiple teams deemed Brown "stellar" in recent workouts and said on air that, despite a shaky freshman season, Brown might have the highest ceiling of any player who is expected to be available when the Celtics are on the clock.

There is understandable intrigue with Brown. Still a teenager, he has an NBA-ready body and maturity beyond his years. Read this story on Brown and you come away thinking how Boston coach Brad Stevens would love a kid who said, "I’m a big believer that it takes 20,000 hours to be great" -- because Stevens is on record as a subscriber to Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000-hour theory.

It's easy to talk yourself into Brown and what the finished project might someday be. But multiple computer projections raise all sorts of caution flags after Brown's lackluster freshman season.

Consider this: The six players ahead of Brown on Ford's top 100 big board -- Ben Simmons, Brandon Ingram, Jamal Murray, Kris Dunn, Marquese Chriss, and Dragan Bender -- all rank inside the top 10 in Kevin Pelton's stats-aided draft projections. Brown, meanwhile, plummets all the way from seventh on Ford's big board to No. 39 in Pelton's model.

More condemning is this: In the stats-only portion of Pelton's model, Brown ranks an impossibly low 101st among all draft-eligible prospects with a WARP (wins above replacement player) of minus-0.5. For the sake of comparison, Bender ranks second in that model with a WARP of plus-3.4.

Take a stroll through the archive of draft WARP projections and that mark gets even more worrisome. While a decent number of players have been taken in the first-round teens and 20s with a negative WARP, only two players have been selected in the top 10 with a negative WARP since 2006 -- Austin Rivers (minus-0.1) at No. 10 in 2012 and Joe Alexander (minus-0.1) at No. 8 in 2008.

Rivers, traded twice (including to and from Boston), has found a bench role with his father's depth-lacking Los Angeles Clippers. Alexander has played more games in the D-League (80) than the NBA (67) and is now toiling overseas.

Brown scored alarmingly low in Nylon Calculus' projection model. Author Andrew Johnson noted, "Brown leads the 'Do Not Want' list, his overall play all year indicated less than a starter performance at the college level. In my training model, not a single player went from this level of play in their draft year to become a star in the NBA."

Then there's Steve Shea's College Prospect Ratings, which also uses on-court performance to project NBA potential. CPR was bullish on some of Boston's most recent draft picks, such as Terry Rozier, R.J. Hunter and Jordan Mickey last season (all three ranked in the top 15). Among this year's class, Brown ranks 36th overall -- sandwiched between Weber State's Joel Bolomboy (42nd on Ford's big board) and Stony Brook's Jameel Warney (78th on Ford's big board).

Those are less-than-inspiring outlooks, especially when you're a team looking to hit a home run with a top-three pick.

Not all draft models are completely sour on Brown. ESPN's analytics group has a projection that incorporates adjusted game stats with scout's rankings and pegs Brown 11th among all players who competed collegiately. Still, this suggests that -- excluding international bodies -- there are still eight other players beyond Simmons and Ingram who deserve attention at the top of the draft before Brown.

What's more, that same analytics model suggested that Brown has the highest bust percentage (38 percent) of any player in the top 18. Brown is given only an 8 percent chance of being an All-Star and a 21 percent chance of being a starter over the first five seasons of his career. The numbers for being a bench player or bust is nearly 72 percent in that same span.

The lingering question: Are the Celtics and their number-crunchers at their BIA -- Basketball Intelligence Agency -- willing to look past the caution flags? Is the risk worth the reward with Brown?

A survey of Boston's draft picks since 2010 reveals only four players who were drafted with a negative WARP. Other than Fab Melo being chosen at No. 22 in 2012 (when the Celtics had back-to-back picks), the other three were taken with picks No. 45 or later. What's more, two were overseas stashes (Colton Iverson and Marcus Thornton), while the other was cut in January of his rookie season (Kris Joseph). As for Melo, the Celtics dumped him after one year, and following an unimpressive season in the D-League, Melo wound up playing in Brazil.

WARP is certainly not the deciding element in Boston's draft-decision process, especially not for a young player with a limited college resume. Avery Bradley, who was an All-Defense first-teamer this year, was a mere plus-0.3 WARP when the Celtics snagged him at No. 19 in 2010. On the other end of the spectrum, JaJuan Johnson was a respectable plus-1.9 WARP, but he played only 36 games his rookie season before bouncing out of the NBA. He's been toiling in the D-League ever since.

During an appearance on Boston sports radio WEEI on Monday, ESPN hoops expert Jeff Goodman said of Brown: "My gut says [Celtics president of basketball operations Danny Ainge is] not going to take a guy that’s not a skilled guy right now. ... Physically, he’s got a great body, already 6-foot-7, 225 [pounds]. He’s a man, you could put him in there today. The equivalent I’ll give you with him is Stanley Johnson, the Pistons rookie who kind of looked like a man-child. But Stanley Johnson has proven that he can make shots; Jaylen Brown hasn’t. That would scare me if I were the Celtics, to bring on another, really, nonshooter at this point. He may develop into a decent shooter."

Brown might ultimately use all these negative projections as motivation. Even at his young age, there is a chance he'll contribute quicker than some in the 2016 class because of his NBA-ready body. It's worth noting that just about everyone available at No. 3 will have some sort of question lingering around them.

Yet the Celtics would really have to trust their eyes to roll the dice on Brown that early in the draft.