Three key ways the Celtics’ offense changes without Jaylen Brown

With the news that Jaylen Brown’s hip flexor injury will keep him out for at least one more contest, I wanted to examine how the team’s offense changes without him on the floor. Brown’s injury has clearly affected his game (his field goal percentages are far worse from almost everywhere on the court), so hopefully some rest will do him good.

However, the show goes on. If you include last year, we have a pretty good example of how the team’s style changes without Brown, so let’s break it down.

Less rim pressure and fewer freebies

Jaylen Brown leads the Celtics in drives per game this season with 13.3almost twice as many as Jayson Tatum’s runner-up 7.6 (the gap wasn’t as big last year, but Brown still led with 10.1 to Tatum’s 9.1).

On a related note, Synergy says Boston ran just eight isolations as a team in each of the Atlanta and Charlotte games; they had averaged 15.8 in the six previous games.

And of course, fewer drives mean fewer free throws. The Celtics are far more likely to blow the whistle when Brown is on the court. He generates plenty of free throws himself, but forcing the defense to rotate also makes it easier for other Celtics to attack defenders out of position and draw free throws as well.

More transitory

If you have less isolations, it makes sense that you would have more passes, right? This may be the change most visible to the naked eye.

In general, Boston’s offense is not particularly pass-heavy, ranking in the bottom half of the league every year during coach Joe Mazzulla’s tenure. Of course, that’s not an indictment of the record-breaking offensive system; The Celtics simply don’t have to work as hard as other teams to make a good shot!

Brown’s role is to be a play-finisher far more than a playmaker, and he has the lowest number of net passes on the team (he receives 46 passes per match but only makes 31). Without Brown’s ability to get to the rim, however, the team do need to create more openings through passing rather than creating on the ball. In the previous two games without Brown, the team averaged nearly 15 more passes per game. match. It is neither good nor bad, but it is noteworthy.

An increase of three

To make up for Brown’s lack of creation on the ball, the team is shooting numerous threes — this year, Celtics three-point attempts up 9.9% when Brown is off the floor, a huge change in the shot diet. That was more than a 5% change last year. (This partially explains the fewer free throw attempts Boston also takes without Brown).

Losing Brown redistributes his shots to the Celtics’ other skill players, each of whom (minus Luke Kornet and Neemias Queta) have shot more than half of their attempts from three (compared to Brown’s relatively low 30%). Sixth Man of the Year Payton Pritchard has seen his scoring jump from 14.7 points with Brown to 20 in the two games without him despite playing an identical minutes load, and that was an even bigger jump last year!

So, to recap, the Celtics lean even more into their long-range shooting, even if it takes a little more passing to get there. The team’s offense has never struggled with or without Brown (they went 12-0 without him last year and are undefeated in two games this year), but it looks a little different.

Brown’s head-down drive to the basket is a key source of the Celtics’ offense, especially on those rare nights when the three-pointer doesn’t fall. In the playoffs, it is important to have as many ways to score as possible. But for the regular season, we have ample evidence to suggest that the team can survive without him for short spurts.