All-Star. All-NBA. Eastern Conference Finals MVP. Finals MVP. Champion. Jaylen Brown has achieved just about everything an NBA player can dream of when they start their career. A raw prospect out of Cal, JB is a paragon of skill and player development. Whenever a weakness is identified, Jaylen Brown incessantly dedicates himself to eliminating it.
Once upon a time, I wrote about Jaylen Brown. That article contained many things: poor jokes, stretched metaphors, and the occasional decent point. It is, in other words, exactly like everything else I write. I bring it up now for one reason.
In that article, I make the point that Jaylen Brown shouldn’t focus on improving as a playmaker because that was skipping a step. First, he needed to maintain his current usage and playmaking volume but cut down on his turnovers. Well, let’s take a peek at the numbers from the Celtics most recent championship run.
Jaylen Brown’s playoff usage % versus his turnover % since he became a high-volume player. This season was his highest usg% and his lowest tov%. He’s evolving. pic.twitter.com/zyFOxUwP2z
— Wayne Spooney (@WSpooney) August 1, 2024
It was his highest usage of his playoff career combined with the lowest turnover percentage since he became a high-volume star.
Jaylen Brown is a downhill attacker. He is at his best when he gets into the teeth of the defense, usually off the dribble. That is also the turnover zone. Defenders collapse, they swarm, and they try to fill passing lanes. Jaylen has had trouble down there, until this season.
Limiting turnovers is one of the more difficult skills to master. It’s a fine line between reducing their frequency without it impacting your strengths and aggressiveness. He’s achieved these results in two ways. First, he’s playing off of two feet in the paint more — hop stepping, establishing, and then tricking defenders with an array of pivots, fakes, and counters to get his shot off or find a pass.
He also improved as a post-up player, especially in the playoffs, often turning hard drive opportunities into controlled and patient post ups.
Per Synergy tracking, he didn’t turn the ball over once while posting up in the playoffs.
The recurring theme in May, June, and July was Jaylen’s comfortability getting into the paint and playing at his pace and dictating the defense. He’s strong enough, athletic enough, and talented enough that he doesn’t need to force anything.
This is just another reflection of who Jaylen Brown is as a basketball player and a person. It takes a mature, confident personality to achieve what Jaylen has — to truly accept his weaknesses, face them head on, and eventually conquer them.
Jaylen’s game still isn’t perfect, but when you get to where he is, improvement becomes a series of nit-picks, like that strict English professor that always corrected your passive voice (I swear I do it less now, Professor Higginson). Now that the turnover issues are corrected, it’s time he spreads his wing as a playmaker. He’s shown flashes, but his passing numbers don’t stack up to other wings with similar usage.
While he turned in a legendary on-ball defensive playoff run, he’s still got issues off-ball. Like everything with Jaylen, he’s slowly eroded this weakness through sheer force of will and hard work, but the riverbank isn’t completely washed away yet. He still gets lost in off-ball actions a little too much, often the only Celtic spinning around looking for his cover, but those instances are becoming quite rare.
Here’s the thing, if Jaylen does correct these weaknesses, where does he go? What type of player is he then? An on-ball scoring assassin that also is a plus-playmaker? An elite on-ball defender that executes the off-ball scheme perfectly? That is rarified air, but I wouldn’t put it past Jaylen Brown to be breathing it in a year or two.
Even if Jaylen doesn’t improve on what he is right now, we already know the most important thing about his game: he’s good enough to be a champion and good enough to be the best player in an NBA Finals. The pressure is off Jaylen to improve, but that probably won’t stop him.
