Jaylen Forgot How to Shoot And Other Mediocrities

Last season, Jaylen Brown famously said that the Celtics refused to skip steps. In so doing, the team won its most games and its first NBA championship since 2007-2008. I did not believe then and do not believe now that Jaylen was a better player than Jayson Tatum, but there is one way in which he was more valuable. Specifically, because Jayson is so consistent, the team's performance often sways with Jaylen's performance. Last season, when he was focused and excellent, the C's were unbeatable. Right now though, he is shooting and playing abysmally.

No matter which metric you look at, from traditional to advanced, Jaylen has never shot the ball worse from the field than he has this season:

• FG: .444 is the worst mark of his career
• 3P%: .322 is the worst mark of his career
• 2P%: .515 is the second-worst mark of his career. He shot .507 on two's the first two seasons of his career.
• eFG%: .503 is the worst mark of his career
• TS%: .541 is the second-worst mark of his career. He shot .539 in his rookie season.
• League-Adjusted: FG+, 2P+, 3P+, eFG+, and TS+ are all the worst marks of his career.

All of this is to say, this isn't a matter of cherry picking one stat over the other. Right now, Jaylen just can't shoot. And while it's not isolated to any specific location on the court – he's shooting worse this year from all buckets of distance (0'-3', 3'-10', 10'-16', 16'-3P, and 3P), where it's killing the C's most is from 10-16 feet:

(Sorry, still a little punchy, couldn't get the axis labels to work)

By his fourth season, Jaylen got that percentage up to .488, and then stayed consistent at .484 and .474 in the Eastern Conference championship season of 2021-22. Then it kicked up a notch. The past two seasons, he hit more than half of those midrange jumpers, making it one of the most valuable weapons in the game. This season though? He's shooting so poorly he's nearly back to how he shot from there in his rookie season.

The shooting is especially troubling because it seems to be affecting him in the other phases. He is still trying to take on the hardest defensive assignment, but he is sometimes getting lost on switches, and is definitely not closing out fast enough. And on offense, he's turning the ball over at a near career worst rate. Jaylen is getting more assists this season, and he has seemingly made that a focus, but even with the increased assist numbers, he still doesn't have a 2:1 assist to turnover ratio, and he still doesn't have elite touch or court vision. His lob passes are still clunky, and this is often driven home when he misses a lob, and then Payton Pritchard or another guard immediately comes back down the court and executes the same play better. This happened Monday in Orlando. The broadcasters tried to lay it at Luke Kornet's feet, but really the roll man has to be able to just catch the ball and jam it through.

This, to me, is a good problem to have. Despite the title of this piece, I don't think Jaylen Brown actually forgot how to shoot. He's going through a slump, and/or is bored, and/or is still battling lingering injury issues. These are the trials of being a champion, and needing to bring it every single night, and sometimes not being able to. I'll also allow that some of these woes are concentrated in the first six games of the season. Since then, he's shot .461 from the field and .341 from three. But these percentages still lag behind what we've come to expect from him, and his three-point shot in particular has abandoned him in December – he's hit just 18 of the 62 three's he's taken this month, for a woeful .290 percentage.

Jaylen Brown will play better, I have no doubt. And there have been plenty of reasons why the C's have been mediocre this month. But the list very much starts with Jaylen.

Other Mediocrities

Let's not just single out Jaylen though. There have been a bunch of other reasons the C's have been mediocre in December:

• Kristaps Porzingis is not in shape. He's a step slow or worse on defense, and opposing teams have noticed and are taking advantage. He needs a couple of weeks to get in better shape, to say nothing of the strength of his ankle, which also clearly still isn't 100%.
• Jrue Holiday needs his minutes managed. The C's seem to have noticed, as he is playing 2.2 minutes per game fewer this season – from 32.8 last season to 30.6 this season. It needs to drop down some more to keep Jrue fresh for the end of games and for the whole season.
• Derrick White is shooting too many 3's. Jayson Tatum has shot more three's than White overall, but more of Tatum's three's are designed shots in the flow of the offense. White gets a decent amount of those as well. But as the team's primary ball handler, he is too often taking three's early in the shot clock when he hasn't given a play any oxygen to find a better shot, and that has a compounding effect on the offense. Derrick needs to take three to four fewer three's per game in my opinion, especially when he's going through his annual slump. After shooting .419 on three's through November, his percentage has dipped to .337 in December. Just shoot fewer three's! He's shot 17-for-32 on two's this month. The problem is those 32 shots have come across 10 games. At a certain point, you have to adjust your game plan to accommodate what is working and what isn't.
• Teams are showing Payton Pritchard respect. Payton Pritchard is so good that the second you forget about him, he burns you. And he burned A LOT of teams in the first few weeks of the season. The problem is teams are no longer forgetting about him. In the last three games, he shot 2-for-7, 3-for-7, and 1-for-9. For a large part of this season, Pritchard has given the rest of the team a breather on offense, taking the ball and making magic happen. He has some of the lowest marks on the team for percentage of his field goals that are assisted. But as teams pay him more respect, he's going to have to start trying to find his shots in the flow of the offense like everyone else.
• Sam Hauser is very much still hurt. Kudos to Hauser for trying to play through it, but you can see he's not right. In his last two games, he's played a cumulative 30 minutes and taken precisely one shot. That's a huge aberration and it really isn't helping the team, because he's also been a little slow defensively (back injuries are no joke), and is getting burned at that end. His stretch on the court in the fourth quarter where the Sixers kept switching him onto Tyrese Maxey is what put the game out of reach. It's not Sam's fault, because again, he's trying to game through the pain, but those minutes really would have been better served going to Jordan Walsh.
• Joe Mazzulla is getting a little (more) stubborn and a little inconsistent. Mazzulla is just not trusting the bench enough recently. Luke Kornet in particular has been really excellent lately. But for whatever reason, in the Dec. 19th loss to the Bulls, Kornet only played 19 seconds. For the life of me, I could not tell you why. Some matchups are not Luke Kornet matchups, but that was not the case here, as evidenced by the fact that he played his usual 19 minutes in the next game against Chicago, and the C's won handily. Another example would be Jordan Walsh. After playing at least five minutes in 12 of the team's first 18 games, he has done so in only three of the 13 games since. Again, I don't have a rational answer to this. I thought Walsh was on the road to earning some more playing time that could help spell the Jay's a little more as the season wore on, but we appear to be back to square one. Also, after playing Tatum the entire first quarter in all but one of the first 25 games or so, Mazzulla has been switching it up again. Why? It's not like the team's 20-5 record could have been much better.

It's good to write again. I honestly don't think I've ever been busier than I was these past two months. Every time I thought I might have time to write here, I remembered I had three or four other more pressing things to do. I have a lot of league-wide thoughts that I want to get to soon.