There’s no denying it; under Brad Stevens and Joe Mazzulla, the Celtics have been a very analytically driven team, with Jaylen Brown being the main outlier. The team has loved players who fill up the spreadsheets, and the numbers tell us they are even better than we realize. Derrick White was a great example of this movement, but we see it in Payton Pritchard, Sam Hauser, Neemias Queta, Hugo Gonzalez, Baylor Scheierman, and especially in Jayson Tatum.
But with Brown, it has always been eye-test and box score stats propping him up while the advanced metrics paint a different picture. His efficiency numbers have never been great, the on/off numbers became a national news story, and a lot of the catch-all impact stats say JB is a good player, but not an elite one, and certainly not one that warrants a supermax contract.
And despite Jaylen’s feud with the media and the analytics community, his own organization turned out to be the very people he was fighting against. Brad and the Celtics are all in on the analytics, and this move is further proof of that.
Celtics fans have made excuses for JB’s numbers for years, but maybe it’s time to find out how accurately they told the story. For basically the entire time he was in Boston, the Celtics have been a better team with Brown off the floor. It has been the case in games when he sits out, it has been the case when he’s playing but sits on the bench, and it was even the case last season when he finished 6th in MVP and Jayson Tatum missed most of the season.
They were +9.4 per 100 possessions with JB off the floor and just +5.7 when he was on. Still good, but certainly not great. The Celtics also went 9-2 last season in games that Brown didn’t suit up for, which doesn’t exactly help the false narrative that he was carrying a group of bums to the 2-seed in the East.
Celtics have been better without Jaylen Brown for most of his career
And if that’s too small a sample size for you, they’ve gone 47-10 in the last four years without Brown, which is good for a 68-win pace. His on/off numbers have only been positive in three of his 10 seasons, and not since 2021-22, and unfortunately, those numbers have been even worse in the last two playoff runs, capped with the Celtics being -16 during Brown’s 40 minutes in the Game 7 loss to Philly, while the non-JB Cs outscored the Sixers 21-14 while he was on the bench.
Celtics numbers with/without Jaylen Brown pic.twitter.com/gL1qlmMc8n
— Joe Murray (@JoeyMurr) July 2, 2026
Say whatever you want about these stats and about Jaylen as a player, and trust me, as a JB-lover and diehard Celtics fan, I’ve said it all over the last decade, defending our dear, sweet 2024 Finals MVP. But the Celtics clearly believe that this move was about addition by subtraction and that the team will simply perform better without having Brown on the roster.
Brown puts up points and makes tough shots, but he's a pretty average shooter, his assist/turnover ratio is almost neutral, he can be a ball-stopper with suspect shot selection and decision-making, and his off-ball defense is not good. He's an amazing talent, but the fit in the Mazzulla-Ball system is clunky, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest he doesn't actually make his teammates better or drive winning.
Removing him from the equation, enhancing more efficient players, and leaning into the system is the path that Boston has chosen. It’s a bold gamble, and one that could absolutely blow up in their faces, but it’s supported by numbers. The very same numbers that Jaylen and many others deeply loathe. Stevens and the Celtics have picked a side in this debate, and soon, we’ll finally find out if numbers actually do lie.
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