A cliché? Yes. Forgotten a few weeks a year? Most often. New Year’s resolutions don’t suit everyone, but as we say goodbye to 2025 and welcome 2026, I’m going to set a resolution for every Celtic for the remainder of the 25/26 season.
To start, we look at Jaylen Brown. In a season of reaching greater heights than many of us thought possible, his performance so far may leave you thinking that Brown should be left alone, praised and celebrated. Honestly, another day I might be inclined to agree, but Brown is fully realizing his potential. With Victor Wembanyama and Giannis Antetokounmpo missing time, I think Jaylen has a real chance to make the All-NBA First Team, and with those high expectations, there is one area of his game where I would still like to see improvement. Let’s look at Jaylen Brown in the fourth quarter.
If you’re reading this, then you know that Brown is putting up career numbers in both volume and efficiency. On the season, Brown is a hair (pun unintended) below thirty points per game, and reading the last ten games it seems like he continues to improve as the year goes on.
31.3 PTS | 7.1 REC | 5.5 AST | 1.1 TSL | 0.6 BLACK
62.9 TS% | 55.7 2P% | 41.7 3P% | 79.4 PI%
9.7 FTA | 35.6 MINS | +6.5 +/-
This ten-game tour de force contrasts slightly with Brown’s final performance against the Blazers over the Christmas period. Two clutch time turnovers meant the spoils stayed with Rip City, and that led me to dig deeper into Brown’s quarter-by-quarter breakdowns on the year.
Boston is the second-best fourth-quarter team in the entire conference this season. They have a net rating of +9.6, but when Brown is on the floor in the fourth, the Celtics have a net rating of -3.8. If you look at the Celtics players’ plus-minus by quarter this year, Brown ranks 4th, 3rd, 8th, and 13th from the first to fourth quarters, respectively. This stark contrast makes one believe, but it suggests that there is still work to do for JB in the final situations.
We are now a little over a third of the way into the season and these numbers could be normalizing. In general, fourth quarter data can also be less reliable because you can’t filter out wasted minutes on sites like NBA.com. However, this drop in efficiency is consistent with that of other very high usage readers in the past. Luka Dončić has been criticized for years for his decline in efficiency and production in the fourth quarter. During the Mavericks’ deep playoff runs, Kyrie was often dubbed the de facto closer, with Luka seemingly spent after three quarters of ultra-high usage. Luka’s physical condition was the main explanation for this change in efficiency, but that’s not a criticism you could level at Brown.
It’s not Brown’s shot either. In the fourth, JB still scores 6.7 points (15th best in the league) on 60% true shooting. He’s also shooting nearly fifty percent from three in the fourth quarter, so it’s not like the scoring majesty we’ve been treated to so often this year disappears in the clutch.
These surprising figures can perhaps be explained by the attendance/revenue ratio. It’s hard to spot the problem at first glance, but what jumps out is that Brown’s ATO drops from an elite 2.36 in the second quarter to 0.8 in the fourth quarter. As the pace of play slows even further toward the end of games, it will appear that the ball begins to stick, and the static nature of the Celtics offense can be exploited by opposing teams. See the two turnovers the other night against the Blazers:
Brown has played at his own pace all season, but in clutch scenarios, teams are often more willing to take risks by deploying more aggressive defensive coverages. On this particular possession, Brown delays his initiation a half-second too long after Queta’s turnover, leaving him isolated on an offensive island with a swarm of members rushing to steal the ball. Not a minute later, Brown saw similar defensive coverage:
On this play, it’s Derrick White setting up the screen. The Celtics’ two most skilled and valuable players working together makes perfect sense. White moves away, ready to receive the ball, but an emboldened Blazers perimeter team invades again.
For me, these stocks are too stagnant. The league has embraced movement and dynamism to a greater degree this year than at any time in the last forty years. Brown is partly to blame for its lack of urgency, but the play itself is too conservative to begin with. This puts Brown in a position where he is entirely dependent on his savvy, will and skill to generate points late in games. From a scoring perspective, that production continued to show in the fourth, but right now there is a fundamental problem with how the offensive scheme isolates Brown from his teammates and how his pace clashes with aggressive defensive coverages.
Don’t get me wrong. Jaylen should be celebrated, even deified, for his efforts this season, but there is still work to be done. As 2026 approaches, I’d like to see Jaylen reduce his assist-to-turnover ratio to fourth, and I’d like to see him do it in two ways.
First, pace of play. I want Brown to look to attack more quickly in clutch situations, rather than allowing the defense to set up and charge. Keep them responsive. Keep them on their toes.
Second, and this is a bit of a cheat because it depends as much on Joe Mazzulla as it does on the Celtics’ number one, putting the ball in Derrick White’s hands more often. Allow White to set the table for Brown in the fourth. White’s ball security is elite; he’s a possession-saving mainstay, and shifting more responsibilities into D-White’s capable hands can help Brown be his best as the Celtics enter 2026.
