As the Celtics march towards the playoffs, Jaylen Brown is finding his groove.
It’s been a mixed bag for Brown in his 8th NBA season. He’s made strides as a decision maker and passer. He has improved as a post scorer. On the other hand, Jaylen’s defense regressed from the heights of the 2024 NBA Finals, and up until recently, was having one of the least efficient scoring seasons of his career. But as he typically does, Jaylen Brown has started to turn it on as he prepares himself for the playoffs.
Over Jaylen’s last 12 games, he is averaging 23.8 points, 6 rebounds, and 4.6 assists on 60.5% true shooting. In other words, Jaylen Brown is cooking. The 60.5% true shooting would be a career high for Jaylen if he could maintain that mark for a full season. This is in stark contrast to his first 39 games, where he was putting up 23.0 points on 54.3% true shooting, which would be the lowest mark since his rookie season.
What has changed for Jaylen Brown amidst this more efficient scoring stretch? A lot of it has to do with his three-point shot coming back. Brown is shooting 35.5% from three over his past 12 games. Sadly, I’m not sure we will ever return to the heights of the 2020-2021 seasons where Jaylen shot 39.7% from three. But that’s ok, we don’t need Jaylen to be a long-range sniper. We need him to be around league average (36%), so defenses continue to respect him from outside the three-point line.
The Boston Celtics don’t need Jaylen Brown to be a long range sniper because he has turned into the team’s battering ram. In a system that relies heavily on three-point shooting, Jaylen is now relied upon to be a two-point metronome. Sometimes you just need a large, powerful Jaylen Brown to bully someone for two points. That’s what we’ve seen a lot over the past couple seasons. That’s what we’ve seen in recent weeks. And that’s what we saw against the Denver Nuggets.
Jaylen Brown has turned himself into an overwhelming physical force. We often see this in the form of hunting mismatches which we saw yesterday in Jaylen’s relentless assault on Jamal Murray.
While we can point to Jaylen missing a couple of clutch opportunities down the stretch, I thought the process on these misses was great.
I’ll take those shots from Jaylen Brown every day of the week.
I think Jaylen Brown’s development as a playmaker has flown somewhat under the radar this season due to the underwhelming scoring efficiency and defensive regression. But considering how Jaylen’s decision making was considered a fatal flaw just two seasons ago, the development in that area continues to impress me.
Jaylen is up to 4.7 assists per game on the season, a significant leap from his previous career high (last season) of 3.6 assists. Jaylen is also currently having his best season from an assist-to-turnover ratio perspective. His assist to turnover ratio for this season is sitting at 1.75. This means Jaylen is racking up 1.75 assists for every turnover he commits, which is up from the career high he set last season of 1.50. Very impressive for a guy who had a negative assist to turnover ratio (0.94) in the 2019-2020 season. This playmaking development was on display against the Nuggets.
It did not seem conceivable that the 2019 version of Jaylen Brown would be making these plays consistently. It’s a massive credit to Jaylen for continually working on his weaknesses, not something that can be said for a lot of players in the NBA.
A lot of this is not a surprise to me. I was never overly concerned that Jaylen had forgotten how to effectively put the orange ball into the basket. My only concern with Jaylen right now is that he has mentioned a sore knee a couple of times.
“My knee been bothering me a little bit, but any time I get two feet in the green, I can just rise up,” Brown said yesterday. “I think I’m one of the best in the game at that.”
Take care of that knee and let’s get ready for another monster playoff run for Jaylen Brown.
