BOSTON – After being inexplicably left off this year’s All-NBA team, Jaylen Brown came out Wednesday night with a message for all the voters who failed to include him on their ballots.
That message was a 40-point eruption in Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals, which sparked a 126-110 win over the Indiana Pacers to give his Boston Celtics a 2-0 series lead.
When asked if he felt motivated by the All-NBA snub from the voting results that had been released the night before, Brown responded by claiming to have bigger fish to fry than to worry about a regular-season recognition.
“I mean, we're two games from the Finals,” he said. “So honestly, I don't got the time to give a (expletive).”
Whether he intended it or not, Brown’s All-NBA case was broadcast to the world at the perfect time.
The superstar wing was a confident and dominant shooter from all over the court, attempting 17 shots from inside the 3-point arc, 10 shots from outside the arc, and 11 shots from the free-throw line, while tying his career playoff-high in scoring. He also tied a career playoff-high for points in a quarter with a 17-point second frame.
“Just being aggressive,” Brown said of his scoring approach. “Wanted to get out in transition and run. Wanted to attack their smaller guards to put pressure on them, get to the baskets, get to the free-throw line.”
It was nothing new for Brown, who was in attack mode all season long. He averaged 23.0 points per game – a stellar mark for someone playing alongside two other elite scorers in Jayson Tatum and Kristaps Porzingis – while shooting a career-high 49.9 percent from the field.
“Ya’ll see what I see,” Jrue Holiday said of his teammate. “A great player, a great leader, but wants to win and takes things into his own hands. Having a guy like that on my side, I love it … The way JB is playing, man, is outstanding.”
It was somewhat poetic that Brown happened to be playing against one of the players who beat him out for All-NBA Third Team: Tyrese Haliburton. So of course, JB went out and scored four times as many points as Indy’s point guard.
It should be noted that Haliburton had to leave the game late in the third quarter due to hamstring tightness, but up until that point, Brown had outscored him 31-10.
However, for Brown, this wasn’t about making an individual statement. This was about making a statement on how his impact leads to winning. And that’s one of the many things head coach Joe Mazzulla loves about him.
“I think he cares about [the All-NBA snub] in a way that motivates him, and I think he doesn’t really care about it at all because he understands that winning is the most important thing,” Mazzulla said. “So he has an innate ability to just get better and to work hard, he has unreal confidence, but he’s also not afraid to work on things that he knows he has to get better at. So you see him every day at shootaround or practice, he’s out there with six or seven coaches working on every possession, every spacing imaginable so that he sees his reads. He just cares about the right stuff. Obviously, I think stuff like that does motivate him, but I know he also really wants to win, and he has a growth mindset and wants to get better.”
Through that approach, Brown is better than he’s ever been. He was the hero in Game 1 with his clutch play on both ends of the floor toward the end of regulation. He was by far the most dominant player on the court in Game 2. And to show for it, his team is now just two wins away from punching its ticket to the NBA Finals.
At the end of the day, that’s the only statement that matters.