By sharpening his skill set without losing his edge, Brown has turned a long-simmering question into the Celtics’ most reliable force
The Boston Celtics nearly lost Game 3 over the course of eight minutes—all the time it took for the championship favorites to fritter away a 21-point lead in the fourth quarter, allowing the Dallas Mavericks back into a game and a series that should have been effectively over.
And perhaps the Celtics would have lost Game 3, but for the resolve of Jaylen Brown. During those eight minutes, Brown was the only Celtic to score. First, after Dallas surged to a 12-0 run, he sealed Luka Doncic in the post and canned a Doncic-esque fadeaway over the top of him. Then, following another 10-0 Mavericks run, Brown patiently waited out a Jayson Tatum drive so that he might swoop in for a putback off his costar’s miss.
Both baskets were, on their face, unremarkable.
Yet they were all that Boston could do to stem the tide at a point in the game when all the momentum had shifted in Dallas’s favor. “Big time,” Derrick White said. “Big-time shots.” It was in keeping with a trend: When the Celtics do fall out of sorts, it’s usually Brown who offers the most powerful correction.
A committed drive to answer a run. A huge stop that changes everything. “I felt like I’ve been able to deliver just by being patient and being poised,” Brown said.
But it’s more than poise; Brown is playing the best, most mature basketball of his career. It’s why he now finds himself a win away from the title and, most likely, winning Finals MVP. No other perimeter star has played more stifling defense throughout these playoffs—save for maybe Tatum. Few have attacked so fiercely and consistently, even in pressurized moments when all the team’s concepts have ground to a halt.
No matter what Jason Kidd would tell you, his suggestion that Brown is, in fact, the best player on the Celtics was a transparent bit of gamesmanship—naked enough in its intentions to draw knowing glances from the attending media and tactful dismissals from all the other Celtics asked for comment. “J-Kidd, man,” Al Horford said. “I see what he’s doing.” It also hasn’t worked; Tatum didn’t try to take over the series to prove Kidd wrong, Brown didn’t dial up his game to prove him right, and the Celtics on the whole have controlled these NBA Finals through patient, coordinated team basketball.
Yet part of the reason that Kidd (or any opposing coach) would even try to lob that particular grenade into the Celtics locker room is that, on many nights, Brown is at least close enough to being Boston’s best player to start some conversation—or, rather, stoke a long-burbling conversation that has been had to death, in all its possible forms, with so much great basketball reduced to fake trade scenarios and projections of ego.
For two similarly sized forwards charting a course as teammates, every failure has invited thorough examination.
And Brown and Tatum have failed plenty, often by falling just short—of the Finals, time and time again, and eventually of the title, after finally breaking through to the championship series in 2022. “Experience,” Brown said, “is the best teacher.” When the Celtics lost, it wasn’t just Tatum and Brown that came under fire, but the very concept of their partnership.
It wasn’t always this smooth. Over the years, both had to learn how to play like stars without recentering the offense on themselves. And even when they did, they managed to inspire chatter over whether, given all their talents, they might be better off apart.
