Jaylen Brown has been vocal over the years about playing fast. They came into the season preaching about speed and tempo. They wanted to play differently and get away from last year’s style when they were second to last in pace at 96.59 possessions per 48 minutes.
They're last right now, with 96.69 possessions per 48.
Life is a little different than the Celtics, and Brown, expected.
“Scoring is a lot more effort than it was in previous (seasons),” Brown said after the team’s Saturday morning practice. “I just gotta exert a lot more energy play-to-play offensively, trying to find ways to get easier baskets, baskets a lot closer to the rim or I don’t have to dribble the ball as much. As of right now, game 13, game 14, every basket is energy. And I’m up for it, but it’s more energy than (I expected).”
That has an impact on how fast Brown and the Celtics play. The percentage of Brown’s shots where he’s dribbled 3-6 times has increased from 31.5% of the time to 42.6%. He’s creating for himself a lot more, with 5.5% increase in his unassisted makes this season.
Brown is doing a lot of that work in the mid-range this year, hitting 53.2% of those shots. That's a nearly perfect number for mid-range shots to be encouraged because they are almost equal to the 36% he’s shooting from 3. At that rate, the efficiency is a close enough match to keep shooting them.
“That’s always been my game and my shot,” Brown said. “Over time, those shots have been discouraged a lot. This year we go tot take whatever shot we can get, right? So I think everybody's encouraging me to be myself.”
But that comes with a price. Brown admits that knowing how hard generating offense for himself has been is slowing him down when it comes to transition. There are times when he’ll walk the ball up the floor instead of pushing because he knows he’s about to expend a lot of energy in the half-court offense.
Brown has also been hampered by a hamstring issue. He’s played through it, but it’s not helping him play faster.
“I'm coming off of still an injury, so I'm looking to get stronger as the year goes,” he said. “So like, the first 13 games, I'm looking to see what the next 13 games look like.”
OVERALL PACE IS UP
“I feel like the whole league is playing faster,” Brown said as part of our back-and-forth about his pace of play. “The league has gotten a lot younger, and I think everybody's made an emphasis of that. So it's like, maybe it doesn't come up in the margins as much.”
He’s right. Last season, 13 teams averaged more than 100 possessions per 48 minutes. This year it’s 25. If you tick the meter up one possession to 101, only four teams crossed that threshold last year. This year it’s 17. Miami, Portland, and Washington are all faster than last year’s top team, the Memphis Grizzlies.
Boston’s condensed early schedule might have played a part in their slower pace. They're on their third day off and they’ve still played more games than half the conference. Let’s see what happens to the pace numbers over the next few weeks.
HARDEN WORKS OVERTIME
The Clippers are in town to face the Celtics tomorrow afternoon, and they might still be feeling the effects of their double-overtime win in Dallas last night.
James Harden played a career-high 51 minutes on his way to a 41/14/11 triple-double. That's a lot of work for the 36-year-old Harden. The Clippers are already a slow basketball team by choice, so this could be a chance for Boston, with some fresher legs, to run past the Clippers.
DON’T EXPECT GONZALEZ IN MAINE
I thought the Celtics would absolutely take advantage of their schedule this week to send Hugo Gonzalez to Portland for some full-game action. Yes, he’s working and practicing, and making plays off the bench for the Boston Celtics, but wouldn’t this have been a nice chance for him to grab 38 minutes of free-flowing play?
“I haven't thought about that, no,” Joe Mazzulla said. “He just came into the season with an open mind through training camp and preseason, and I think he showed and proved, one through his work ethic, his maturity, but really his defensive instincts, that he could play at this level. And so I think that's more valuable than anything at this particular time.”
Gonzalez is 19, but he’s not your typical teenage rookie. His time in Spain has taken him to high-pressure, high-intensity situations. So while getting a chance to play a full game of basketball sounds nice, Gonzalez is open to whatever Boston’s plan is. He’s not going to push for anything outside of that.
“That’s not something that depends on me,” he said. “We got a lot of people that think and know what is better for each player. Whatever they got for me, I'll be happy for it, because I know they want the best for me as a player today and as a player in the future. So anything they got for me, I'll be prepared for.”
Jaylen Brown understands the up-and-down life as a 19-year-old in the NBA. It wasn’t the exact same situation, but he gets some of what Gonzalez might be feeling.
“I've been in that spot … you gotta be ready at any given moment, any given time,” Brown said. “Don't worry about how many minutes you're playing versus not playing. In the grand scheme of things, when you look back to my rookie year, nobody really pays attention to that. I had like 20 DNPs my rookie year, and I was the third pick. So it doesn't really matter about that. It matters how much you progress.