Boston Celtics SG/SF Jaylen Brown will be inactive tonight vs. Houston Rockets

While his status was questionable coming into Sunday, Jaylen Brown has officially been ruled out for the Boston Celtics.

Following an embarrassing 115-83 loss to the Toronto Raptors, Boston Celtics head coach Ime Udoka sounded off on his team (transcript via MassLive):

"“I said that’s as ugly as it can get,” Udoka said on addressing his team after the game. “One thing I can’t stand as a coach is to get punked out there, and I felt they came out and punked us, outplayed us, played harder than us, all the things we talked about. You don’t want to overreact and panic. We’re going to stay together and keep our head up. But I said use these boos as motivation. We deserved it, the way we played.”"

Losing to the New York Knicks in double overtime 138-134 was one thing. The Cs showed fight last Wednesday and got a career-night from Jaylen Brown, who’s out Sunday with a knee issue against the Houston Rockets, in their comeback efforts.

Jonathan Feigen of the Houston Chronicle had the details of Brown’s ailment:

The Rockets are a young team with plenty of athleticism that are going to inevitably face severe growing pains in 2021-22. Already they’ve lost by 16 points to the Minnesota Timberwolves, although they did hang 124 points on the Oklahoma City Thunder, who admittedly are an expected Western Conference cellar dweller just like Houston.

Whether or not they have a night where no one could get it going from the field or they run all over an older team that overlooked them remains to be seen.

Without Jaylen Brown, Udoka could go in a number of directions with his lineup. He can insert Dennis Schroder at the PG spot and slide Marcus Smart over to the 2, or he can dip into his reserve wing unit and deploy Aaron Nesmith, Romeo Langford, or Josh Richardson instead.