Karalis: Brad Stevens needs to keep Jaylen Brown involved offensively

Jaylen Brown is causing problems with the Boston Celtics. 

He’s too good. 

It’s a nice problem to have, but Brown’s ascension has actually created a bit of an issue that was highlighted on Tuesday night against the Los Angeles Clippers. 

Brown went into the half having hit seven of nine shots for 16 points in a duel with Paul George. One game back from sitting to rest his sore left knee, Brown was back to his old tricks. But after the half, Brown was just 1-for-5 from the field with no shots in the fourth quarter. 

Zero. 

Jaylen Brown is too good to not get any shots down the stretch of a tight game, but he’s also too good to get any plays run for him. 

It is a bit of a catch-22 for the Celtics, who both need to run plays for Brown but who also need him to be a floor spacer in a lot of situations, which he was on a key fourth-quarter layup by Jayson Tatum.



His occupation of Nic Batum opened up the lane for Tatum. On this third-quarter play, Brown spent the whole possession in the corner. 



Okay, that’s going to happen from time to time no matter what the offense looks like. Tatum has his “stand in the corner” moments too. Floor spacing in today’s NBA is more important than ever. And Brown’s moments in that role have certainly diminished. 

Last season, 2.7% of his field-goal attempts were corner 3-pointers, and he was an elite 48.4% shooter. This season, 1.3% of his attempts are coming from the corners, where he’s a ho-hum 34.7%. He’s still taking the same percentage of 3-pointers, about 12% of his overall shots, but that 1.4% difference is now coming from above the break 3-pointers. 

Regardless of where he is on the floor, teams see him as a dangerous 3-point shooter and they need to stick to him, which is why the Celtics will rely on him to be in that role from time to time, but it still causes the conundrum the Celtics faced in the third quarter Tuesday night. 

How do the Celtics manage to keep feeding the hot hand of one All-Star, try to get a cold All-Star going, all while last year’s All-Star is heating up? 

The Celtics don’t have the right roster construction at the moment to answer this question. With Tristan Thompson and Daniel Theis on the floor, one of that Celtics trio has to be a corner floor spacer. Walker could transition his game a bit to be a spacer more often, but that isn’t happening tonight against the Toronto Raptors. It’s important that he come back and continue to find his game before he adjusts to being something else. 

So with Walker not yet an option, that responsibility tends to fall on Brown or Tatum, with Brown spotting up more often, probably because he’s already proven he can be great at it. 

But his past greatness in that shouldn’t preclude him from having some of the fun right now. He’s grown into a fairly prolific scorer, and when guys who want to score don’t get the ball very much, they tend to force up shots once they get a touch. 

For example, this play in the third when Brown got a rebound and put this shot up right away. 



There was no chance he was giving that ball up. 

One of Brad Stevens’ post-break challenges will be to figure out how to keep Brown more in the offensive mix without adding too many new wrinkles to the offense. 

One of those could simply be not starting the two-big lineup, but that’s being used as a way to get Robert Williams much-needed minutes while keeping everyone happy. While the double-big lineup has gotten better, Stevens has said in the past that it was temporary. It has now become more permanent out of necessity, but it presents the rest of the offense a bit of a problem. 

The best solution would be to move one of those centers in a trade. Three bigs, who each deserve minutes, create too much of an imbalance on a roster devoid of wing depth. Swapping out Thompson for a wing who can help space the floor and giving him minutes to Theis and Williams would help solve the issue of getting Brown shots. 

That’s also not happening tonight, so it’s going to be up to Stevens and Brown to find ways around this issue. Stevens has to find ways to get guys moving on the floor so even when Brown does start in the corner, the entire play isn’t always about getting one guy a pick-and-roll and the rest just see how the play develops. 

“It’s not the way that I necessarily would want to play,” Stevens recently said. “(Cutting has not) been a strength of ours either. And so I think we do need time to work on it. At the same time, we’re going to have to force some of it.”

Stevens has been reticent to script out too much of the offense because he believes in a read-and-react style where everyone on the floor plays off each other, the ball moves, players cut, and the ball ultimately finds the right guy for the right shot. 

Achieving that perfection is Stevens’ white whale, but it’s obviously not going to happen with this team. Stevens has to live up to his word to “force some of it” and sprinkle in more opportunities to keep Brown centrally involved on the offensive end. 

And this is more than just feeding Brown’s ego as a new All-Star or making sure his shot totals line up with the rest of the team’s big guns. This is a matter of keeping Brown engaged on both ends of the floor. 

Brown has a tendency to lose focus on the floor. It hasn’t happened quite as much this season as it has in years past, but when it happens, it can be costly. He’s prone to giving up backdoor cuts and losing his man defensively, and a lot of that has been the result of offensive issues that keep him from staying in the moment on the defensive end. 

Stevens needs to find a way to keep Brown locked in offensively so he can stay focused defensively. 

Brown has earned his right to eat first on offense. He, Tatum, and Walker are very obviously the three best offensive players on the team, and Stevens has talked constantly about the rest of the roster complimenting their games. What Stevens can’t do is turn Brown into too much of a complimentary player himself for too long, or else he risks losing a lot of the progress Brown has made.