Jaylen Brown’s season has been as frustrating as it has been amazing.
His 25.6 points per game is good for ninth in the NBA, but among that current top nine, Brown’s field goal percentage is fourth, and his 3-point percentage is first.
However, his bout with COVID-19 cost him precious preseason time and hurt his ability to recover, which showed itself in bad performances against the Toronto Raptors and Washington Wizards, both of which followed overtime games.
Just as he was getting past this issue, he pulled his hamstring at the end of the third quarter against the Miami Heat.
“It’s grade one, so it's nothing severe,” Brown explained after going through a workout at the team’s practice facility. “I'm just working to get back so I can be able to be with the team ... I’m without pain at this point. Still got some tightness but no pain.”
Brown has dealt with right hamstring issues before, which is why Ime Udoka said Brown “was being overly-cautious himself because of his past history.” Brown says that history not only made him cautious about taking himself out, but also how he approaches the rehab.
“I think that every time I’ve had a hamstring injury, I’ve had to sit down for at least five or six days and then come back, depending on the severity of it,” he said. “But this one, being a recurring injury, I want to make sure that I take the proper precautions to make sure that one, I have my hamstring for the next 10-15 years. And two, that this is not an issue going forward so that I have to be away from the team.”
According to Cleaning the Glass, The Celtics are +16.2 with Brown on the floor, five points better than the next Celtic (Marcus Smart, +11.1). That puts Boston in a tough spot with the Raptors in town.
Toronto is, if nothing else, going to swarm and throw different defensive looks at teams. Without Brown, Jayson Tatum will have to be ready to see two and three defenders in his way all night.
“(We) worked on blitzing that some teams have done with Jayson with Jaylen being out,” Udoka said. “Implementing a different package with Jaylen out and also our second unit. Hitting on quite a few things ... continuing to work on our spacing leads into all those areas.”
For now, they’ll have to figure it out without Brown. He says the one or two week initial timeline seems right, but a more specific return to play will be “based upon how today's session went, tomorrow’s session goes, and we go from there.”
He says he’s pain free, but he still feels the injury doing simple things like getting out of the car or out of bed. Each step is geared towards not only coming back, but avoiding another re-injury of the same area. He admits he’s come back too soon in the past, and he doesn’t want to do that again.
“I do want to make sure that it's not an ongoing issue,” he said. “So they want to make sure I do all the proper stuff this time to make sure this doesn't happen again later in the season.”