The NBA’s newest sensation is set to make his Boston debut Tuesday when Brandon Jennings and the Bucks play the Celtics. A wondrously skilled left-handed point guard, Jennings has drawn comparisons to Tiny Archibald and Kenny Anderson, among others. 

He is too quick to guard on the perimeter and too good a 3-point shooter for defenders to duck under screens on the pick and roll. He keeps the ball in his hands the majority of the time and probes the defense — a la Chris Paul and Steve Nash — and he has made the Bucks exciting for the first time since Sidney Moncrief’s tomahawk dunk landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

If his story were to end there, all that would be compelling enough to make an effort to watch the 19-year-old play ball, especially when one can imagine an Eastern Conference point guard triumvirate of Jennings, Derrick Rose and Rajon Rondo battling it out into the next decade.

But the basketball part of it is only a portion of his story. Only 19 games into his NBA career, Jennings already is “important” in ways that Tyreke Evans or Jonny Flynn will never be, for while Evans and Flynn were getting hyped by Dickie V and earning millions for Memphis and Syracuse, Jennings was in Italy making money for himself. 

The move brought considerable consternation to NBA general managers, who dropped Jennings like a stone on their draft boards for a number of reasons, but mainly because he didn’t actually play all that much and because he called out Ricky Rubio in the days leading up to the draft, which conveniently allowed GMs to question his maturity.

Funny, but if Jennings were an anthropology major at, say, Tufts, a couple of semesters in Europe would have been part of his maturation process, along with the requisite side trips to Amsterdam and Ibiza. (For the life experiences, naturally.) But anthropology majors aren’t also expected to take Arizona to the Sweet 16.

This is what I wrote before the draft:

If Rubio is the most interesting prospect in the draft, then Jennings might be the most important.

The man who orchestrated the move, Sonny Vaccaro, believes that Jennings will be a pied piper for other preps to follow in his high tops, but Jennings’ experience was by no means smooth.

His greatest hits have become a YouTube sensation, and while one can see the talent, there are questions about whether his game will translate into a team setting. Jennings, bless his heart, tried to turn up the hype meter by taking shots at Rubio, which only added to team’s skepticism about his maturity.

He might very well become the leader of a movement, the way Kevin Garnett paved the way for high school players to skip college and go straight to the league, or he might be remembered as a curiosity.

On draft day, eight teams passed on Jennings, including the Knicks — who might never live it down — and the Timberwolves, who took Rubio and Flynn only to see R-squared take his no-look passes and floppy hair back to Spain.

As ESPN’s resident college hoops suck-up Jay Bilas blasted Jennings during the telecast, his agent, Bill Duffy, had him sequestered in a hotel so as not to embarrass his client on live television, only to have him return to Madison Square Garden for his David Stern moment after the Bucks surprisingly took him 10th. Just to spice up the whole thing even more, Jennings had an awkward conversation/interview with rapper Joe Budden, in which he ripped the Knicks, Rubio (again) and generally said a lot of things he would never say in a mainstream media interview.

After all that, no one really knew if the kid could actually play.

Then he went for 17-9-9 on opening night and dropped 24 points on Detroit and another 25 on Chicago in his first three games.

All of that was a prelude to the night of Nov. 14, when he went for 55 against Golden State and followed that up with 25 points, seven rebounds and eight assists two nights later in a two-point loss to Dallas. The little corner of Twitter that watches League Pass every night exploded, and a bona-fide phenomenon was born.

With Jennings leading the way, the Bucks won eight of their first 11 and suddenly ESPN was scheduling Milwaukee games on Friday nights. Just as the hype meter threatened to rage out of control, the Bucks dropped seven of eight and Jennings has found himself in a shooting slump, where they and he reside now.

Although he clearly is a work in progress, Jennings is the unquestioned Rookie of the Year front-runner and arguably the biggest story of the first quarter of the NBA season.

We won’t know for some time if Jennings will become the KG of the new millennium, leading an army of disaffected preps against the NCAA establishment and taking the NBA by storm. Others have already followed, notably Jeremy Smith, who skipped his senior season of high school and whose unpleasant experiences in Israel were chronicled in this New York Times story.

We don’t even really know if Jennings wants the role, or whether it’s a fair burden to put on his shoulders. We do know he can play, and that is reason enough to watch.