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Jaylen Brown feels he’s one of basketball’s best—and he’s right
Brown may not have been the NBA's player of the month, but he's positioned himself for the three awards that really matter.
COMMENTARY
Many of the best basketball players in the world are notoriously nearly as good at manufacturing disrespect and turning it into motivation as they are at their craft itself, and on both fronts, Jaylen Brown has proven that he is as good as it gets.
Last week, Brown was denied the Player of the Month award for the month of December. The fact that Jalen Brunson averaged nearly as many points—and won the NBA Cup’s MVP award in December, which almost certainly was the reason that cemented his selection—was of little consequence to the Celtics star, who used Saturday’s game against the Clippers as a stage to perform his displeasure, and his well-earned postgame platform subsequently as an opportunity to voice it.
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In a calm tone that was at odds with the furious 50-point outburst he directed at the Clippers, Brown pointedly lauded Kawhi Leonard as a player worthy of admiration for his two-way brilliance (“people don’t understand how much effort it takes to put so much energy on both sides of the ball,” Brown opined, quite correctly) and called the NBA media’s narratives “lazy” for focusing on offense and “tough shotmaking.”
“I know it’s entertainment, and that’s what we want to push,” Brown said. “But if it comes down to this basketball s***, I just feel like I’m one of the best.”
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Saturday’s performance was the clearest message in a career year to date that Brown is within his rights to claim that mantle, although reprimanding the media for their reliance on “tough shotmaking” as a metric was a little ironic given how he had just laid waste to the Clippers.
Brown’s season has been built on tough shotmaking, or at least, it has been built on the fact that he has become so good at creating his own shot that he has found ways to make tough shots uniquely easy for himself.
Once again on Saturday, Brown got wherever he wanted on the floor. Once again, he dominated the game in the mid-range, but what set Saturday’s performance apart was the fact that when Brown makes a high volume of 3-pointers, he morphs into the best scorer in the league, and he caught a massive heater against the Clippers.
At one point early in the third quarter, Brown was double-teamed by John Collins and Ivica Zubac, and he deliberately dribbled into the lane as Zubac fretted about Neemias Queta standing nearby, only to flip in a left-handed floater as Zubac tried to recover back to him.
The next four shots by Brown were masterclass in tough shot-making made to look easy. A few minutes later, Brown jogged up the floor, snaked around a screen and tossed up a mid-range jumper that hit nothing but net with both Zubac and Derrick Jones Jr. contesting. He then buried a heavily contested 3-pointer over Jones Jr., a fall-away jumper over Brook Lopez, and a forward-leaning 3-pointer which was briefly the pinnacle of his heat-checking until the fourth quarter, when he took (and made) an even more audacious 3-point attempt from the corner. The Clippers hung with the Celtics for several minutes with unreal shotmaking of their own, but eventually they (like 21 teams previously this season) folded under the pressure applied by Brown.
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After the game, Brown praised the coaching staff and leadership of the Celtics, pointing out that after all the trades that tore apart the roster, to be 10 games over .500 and “damn near in second place” at this stage “rarely ever happens.”
But Brown is (at the very least) equally integral to the team’s record as Joe Mazzulla, and his development arc is nearly as unprecedented as the Celtics’ success.
When Brown was drafted, he went from an athletic 3-and-D rookie to a superpowered bench player behind star veterans to a precocious star himself trying to help lead a team out of the ashes of the disastrous Kyrie Irving experiment into genuine title contention. He was flawed but brilliant in their first run to the Finals, and he was equally brilliant (and much less flawed) in the subsequent successful run to the title. In the process, he and Tatum changed the way Luka Doncic is viewed around the league and caused what might prove to be irreparable damage to the Dallas Mavericks franchise.
Over the years, Brown has become one of the NBA’s best at driving toward the hoop, throwing on the brakes suddenly and elevating over a backtracking defender, which in turn makes his mid-range shooting lethal. He made such strides on the flaws in his game—most notably his handle—that when the Clippers tried sitting on his right hand to force him left on Saturday, it felt like a relic of a bygone era. If he still has holes offensively, they might be his somewhat inconsistent 3-point and free-throw shooting, but he’s up to 37 percent from deep (more than acceptable) and a hair under 78 percent from the line (five percentage points better than his career average) while averaging a career-high 30.1 points per game.
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And already, you can see the trap we are falling into—one that Brown himself called out postgame: These are just Brown’s offensive stats. Joe Mazzulla said that Brown texted him asking to guard Leonard, who has been on a heater himself.
“Why wouldn’t I?” Brown asked, when a reporter questioned him about it, and it’s a fair question: ESPN’s Bobby Marks pointed out that according to one data service, Brown is holding opponents to a 39.37% FG pct as the closest defender, which trails only OKC guard Cason Wallace among 111 qualified players.
Player of the Month is, in the grand scheme, something of a silly award—no one besides Brunson and Brown will remember December’s Player of the Month at the end of the year (without Googling: Who won last December’s Player of the Month?). Nobody making the case for LeBron James over Michael Jordan will cite the fact that James leads Jordan 41-16 in Player of the Month selections.
There are three awards that people generally remember, and Brown has now vaulted himself into the conversation for all three.
All-Star is, of course, locked up. Brown will be an All-Star, and if he’s not a starter, it’s a travesty for which the NBA’s voting fans—not media—will have to answer.
The only question for Brown in All-NBA voting is whether he will remain this healthy (everyone reading this, take a minute and find some wood to knock). If he keeps playing at this level and reaches the requisite 65 games, he should earn his first All-NBA First Team nod.
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The biggest, of course, is MVP. Even after Saturday’s game (and even with Nikola Jokic sidelined for an amount of time that could essentially eliminate him from the race), Brown faces an uphill battle on that front—Shai Gilgeous-Alexander remains the overwhelming favorite.
After SGA, however, some of the other names that are often mentioned ahead of Brown come down to a matter of preference, and a strong case could be made in Brown’s favor. Is Luka Doncic really more valuable to the Lakers than Brown to the Celtics? Is Brunson more valuable to the Knicks?
Many players overstate the extent to which they have been doubted throughout their careers, but Brown’s complaints have more merit than most—look no further than preseason projections about this team. That the media (including this writer!) believed the Celtics might be better off tanking for a high draft pick in Jayson Tatum’s absence when a former Finals MVP on the roster was fully healthy and ready to lead a team for the first time in his career speaks to how underestimated Brown has been.
“I like when people doubt,” Brown told reporters. “It fuels me. So even though it would be nice to get some respect …”
Here Brown paused for several seconds, a pregnant pause that might have been pointed, or might have simply been a chance to gather his thoughts.
“Keep it up,” he finished, simply, and both he and the assembled reporters—who had just seen him put 50 points on the hottest team in the NBA—chuckled. “I definitely use it as fuel.”
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Whatever reason Brown needs to fuel his maniacal work ethic—the work ethic that prompts him to walk the bottom of a pool during the offseason, and the work ethic that drove his rise from role player to MVP candidate—we won’t participate in it here anymore. There does not seem to be a ceiling to what Brown can accomplish, this year or next.
When it comes to this basketball s***, Jaylen Brown really is one of the best.
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