Getting to Know Jaylen Brown

Jaylen Brown, the Boston Celtics’ Thinking Man.

“I’m a big believer that it takes 20,000 hours to be great,” Jaylen Brown said in a pre-draft interview. “Kobe put in those hours. I’m trying to chase that model, that representation that Kobe laid out for us. He set a great example and I’m trying to follow.”

Then a University of California, Berkeley freshman, Brown was explaining to Marc Spears of The Undefeated why waking up as early as 4:26 am to workout was commonplace for him. “I heard stories that Kobe Bryant wakes up at 4 or 5 and he’s at the gym at 5:30. He’s fully drenched in sweat by 6:30. He hits the weights after at 8 and then he starts practice at 10 back in the gym. All that Kobe has accomplished has been by a relentless work ethic.”

Now in his second year with the Boston Celtics, swingman Jaylen Brown’s work ethic has paid off. He has jumped from being a role player who was largely relegated to the bench in the playoffs to being the team’s second-leading scorer at 14.4 points per game. Rookie teammate Jayson Tatum has received the lion’s share of media hype this season – deservedly so when he’s lead the league in points per shot attempt – but Brown’s rapid improvement deserves serious attention.

Brown displays both a hyper-competitive attitude towards basketball and the tendencies of a cerebral renaissance man. Brown watched his mother, Mechalle Brown, earn her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan while raising him and his brother as a single parent. Brown’s grandmother had the boys writing book reports and doing phonics exercises in their summers. Brown places a huge emphasis on learning and paid it forward this past September, talking to young Boston students about the importance of education.

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Brown was the captain of his high school chess team. “If I’m getting to know you,” Brown told Matt Peterson, “I play you in a game of chess just to see how your mind works a little bit.” He chose to attend Cal-Berkeley because of its academic prestige, and wrote a graduate dissertation in his first semester.

Brown interned at Base Venture, a Berkeley venture capital firm, where his boss said he’d be a natural if he weren’t NBA-bound. “I can teach you how to invest, and I can teach you how to be a venture capitalist, but I can’t teach you the softer skills,” partner Erik Moore said. “He’s got that, intuitively, and innately. He’d be great in this role.”

He taught himself Spanish in five months, and intends to learn three more languages by the time he’s twenty-five. He’s an avid reader. He quotes Martin Luther King and Albert Einstein from memory in press conferences. He plays guitar, and has even entered the rap world.

Oh, and the Counting Crows have endorsed his future senatorial campaign.

Brown is, of course, more than a cerebral wunderkind. He is scoring 16.6 points per 36 minutes, and is shooting an elite 41% from distance (recall that Brown was not billed as a shooter coming into the league). He’s driving the lane and finishing tough shots thanks to his athleticism. He is the second option for the East’s top team as a sophomore.

Brown has stepped up defensively, admirably stepping into the role of the team’s top wing defender. He has tremendous length and athleticism, but he is also just intelligent. He understands when he can leave his man to help. He knows how to position himself to send his man into the teeth of the defense. He is displaying better and better instincts in the passing lanes.

It also helps when you have the strength to fight through two screens, the quickness to recover halfway across the arc in two seconds, and the length to block a jumper from Kevin Durant. There’s a reason scouts lauded his “NBA-ready body”.

And yet, Brown is still only 21 years old. He is still raw. ESPN’s Chris Forsberg compiled some insightful defensive statistics in a Christmas Eve article on Brown. Brown is in the 70th percentile or better (very good) defending post-ups, isolation plays, and pick and roll ball handlers. Yet he is only in the 42nd percentile defending handoffs, and only the 21st on spot-up shots (after being in the 90th percentile last season). On the offensive side of things, he is still sloppy with his handling, still gets overwhelmed in traffic, still doesn’t have the court vision to be a threat passing the ball.

“I think Jaylen learned a lot through his first year,” coach Brad Stevens said before Boston’s November matchup against Golden State. Brown, ever the student, ever passionate to learn, was a sponge in his first year. Before the draft, an anonymous NBA Assistant General Manager had this to say to The Undefeated:

"He is a person who is inquisitive about everything. Because he is so smart, it might be intimidating to some teams. He wants to know why you are doing something instead of just doing it."

If you ask Brown what his biggest challenge is, he’d tell you it’s not on the court, but in his mind. “I can analyze things almost too much, sometimes. And that’s not just in basketball, but life in general,” Brown said before a game against the Orlando Magic. He has worked with mental skills coach Graham Betchart for years, working to overcome the immense pressure he places on himself. “In high school, if I had a bad game, I couldn’t eat,” Brown told SportTechie in a September interview.

But then there he is, at the gym bright and early in the morning. Or maybe he’ll be working on his third language.

“It’s not just that he wants to be an excellent basketball player,” said Derek Van Rheenen, the professor teaching Brown’s graduate-level course. “He wants to be a scholar.”

Next: Celtics beat Cavaliers with defense and depth

Jaylen Brown, the Celtics’ thinking man, is poised for great success on and off the court.