BOSTON – If you can picture a pelican trying to eat a thrashing shark, that’s what it was like watching New Orleans attempting to contain Jaylen Brown Wednesday night.
JB ripped through the Pelicans’ defense to a season-high 41 points at TD Garden, where he pushed the Celtics to their league-leading 30th win by a score of 125-114.
Brown did most of his damage from inside the 3-point arc, shooting 6-of-7 at the rim, 6-of-8 from mid-range, and 8-of-9 from the free-throw line. The should-be All-Star starter also made 3-of-6 from deep, giving him a cumulative shooting clip of 15-for-21 from the field.
“He just took what the defense gave him, read the defense, made the right play, and got into a great rhythm,” said interim head coach Joe Mazzulla. “It was good to see him get into that rhythm for our team.”
Brown was relentless on his drives to the basket, scoring and getting to the free-throw line at will.
That’s something that Brown, who entered Wednesday night averaging a team-high 11 drives per game, has focused on this season and plans to do even more moving forward.
“I think I can get to the rim at a good rate this year,” he said. “I definitely want to keep that up. I don’t want to let the defense off the hook, but I feel good about a lot of the shots I took from three. Some of them went down, some of them haven’t. But I definitely still think I’m going to look to get to the basket a lot more for sure just for the remainder of the year.”
Taking that approach against New Orleans allowed Brown to achieve the sixth 40-point game of his career, pushing him past Sam Jones and Isaiah Thomas for the sixth-most in Celtics history.
Brown was also aggressive on the glass where he pulled down a game-high 12 rebounds to mark the second 40-point, 10-rebound game of his career. He’s now just the fifth Celtic ever to log multiple 40-point, 10-rebound games, joining Larry Bird, Tom Heinsohn, Paul Pierce, and Jayson Tatum. Bird accomplished the feat 29 times, while the other three each have five such performances to their names.
Tatum joined in on the fun with Brown, logging 31 points and 10 rebounds. Together, they combined for 72 points, 22 rebounds, and just two turnovers.
The last time two Boston players logged 30 points and 10 rebounds in the same game was Pierce and Antoine Walker on March 7, 2001. And the last time a pair of Celtics pulled off that stat line in a win was Reggie Lewis and Kevin McHale on Jan. 10, 1990.
“They continue to grow in front of our eyes,” Al Horford said of the Jays. “They feed off each other, and that’s what really drives our team.”
Brown has grown both in skill and in physique to help drive both the team and himself. He has developed into one of the more forceful slashers in the NBA, and that’s all thanks to the hard work he put in during his offseason workouts.
“I definitely feel stronger this year,” he said. “My body is in better shape. I probably put on some pounds of muscle in the summertime. So, I’ve been trying to use it as much as I can.”
Horford can see the difference, too.
“When he drives, I feel like people feel it,” said the veteran center. “When he’s hitting you when he’s driving, that’s real. So it’s good to see him play at that level and have his mind made up that he’s going to attack the paint.”
New Orleans took the brunt of that attack Wednesday night. Brown’s shark-like, thrashing drives were just too much for the Pelicans to swallow.