His mid range game has never been this good, but it’s absolutely a case of them swapping old/injured (Horford, Jrue, Zingis) with young/energy (Queta, Simons, Garza, Walsh, Hugo), tweaking the system and having success.  Pre-injury Jayson Tatum would flourish with this supporting cast as well. 

Agree. He’s getting all the credit because people love PPG over everything else.

It’s impressive that he’s maintained his scoring efficiency while taking 5 extra shots per game. But him taking 5 extra shots at slightly below league average efficiency is not the main driver of the Celtics.

On the most basic level, the team has been worse than last year with Brown on the floor and better than last year with Brown on the bench:

Brown On

• 2025: +9
• 2026: +4

Brown Off

• 2025: +9
• 2026: +11

Raw on/off isn’t great over a single season, but this is the 4th consecutive season Brown has had a negative on/off.

The more advanced impact metrics show the same thing: Brown has been good, but not much better than previous seasons. Brown’s EPM by season has been comically consistent:

• 2021: +2.3
• 2022: +2.5
• 2023: +2.5
• 2024: +2.5
• 2025: +1.1
• 2026: +2.4

Other advanced metrics (which combine adjusted on/off with box score stats and some tracking data) all agree that Brown is good, but not great:

• DARKO has him as the 26th best player in the league
• LEBRON has him 27th this season (min. 800 MP)
• xRAPM has him around 50th.
• He’s not in the top 100 in 2-year, 3-year, 4-year, or 5-year RAPM, which adjusts on/off for quality of teammates and opponents
• Even pure box score stats, like BPM, has him outside the top 30 this year.

In short, Brown is going to get a lot of credit (from MVP and All NBA voters, and from himself apparently) because he’s scoring a lot. But, despite the increased volume, his impact is still the same as it’s always been. Being one of the least efficient volume scorers in the league – without being a great playmaker – isn’t actually that great. Of the 22 players scoring at least 22 PPG, Brown is 20th in TS%:

Provided by Stathead: Found with Stathead. See Full Results. Generated 1/30/2026.

What celtics fan has been discrediting our other players? We are all screaming from the rooftops how happy we’ve been with Queta Walsh Gonzalez Garza. There’s been some celtics fans disappointed in Whites steep efficiency drop off but you saying “a bunch of celtics fans told me” is just you making shit up

So weirdly Brown and everyone else has stepped up besides id say White and Pritchard. They both have their nights but its pretty obvious they were perfectly cast the previous year and their efficiency has tanked.

They both have their strengths still, like White is an all NBA defender, but they need someone with more offensive gravity.

never had the best on-off is an understatement

he has like 2 or 3 seasons with a postive on-off lol

Yep I’ve also seen the Celtic sub parrot that exact sentiment lol. That the whole team was basically imploding and Brown was the only thing holding them together, but not only that but leading them to the 2 seed!

Lol yeah nah fuck that BOS has had even their very end up bench guys step up massively this season. Walsh and Gonzales have been legitimately been more important to them than Brown some games lol. And Pritchard became a starter when he was already starting quality prior to this season.

like idc man clearly the problem is with the advanced stats or how much weight we’re putting on them because there’s no way you watch Jaylen Brown this season and say yeah, his overall value is about the same as Donte DiVincenzo (as EPM would have you believe this season)

basketball fans need to stop treating these advanced analytics as gospel and take a holistic view of the game, you gotta understand how any given player’s individual skillset both unlocks and restricts overall team strategy

on-off says my team is better when I take JB off the floor, cool. answer me this, if I’m making a gameplan to win a game, what options does whoever off the bench give me that‘s better than the options that Jaylen Brown can give me?

Last year Brown was WAY below those players in the advanced metrics, it almost isn’t fair to group them in with him because the gap is so enormous.

VORP (randomly picked as an example): Edwards (8th), Booker (72nd), Siakam (41st), Brown (121st)

Advanced stats like all of those guys way more than Brown. A better example is someone like Klay Thompson.

The gap for Isiah Thomas specifically is because he was a massive playoff riser

On/off isn’t an advanced stat

Banchero

The Kobe Bryant Award?

Those 13 mins are when the Celtics backups are playing the other team’s backups. So I guess what this is really saying is Boston has better depth than most other teams.

Is that any different than other MVP vote getting type guys though? SGA last year had a huge On/Off last year, was OKC not a deep team?

It’s been this way his entire career (though to a lesser degree).

They’ve always held up really well with him on the bench, or when he’s missed games (84-35, higher win % than when he plays).

Ye 600 minutes into wonky stat land

Yea, if a stat is telling you that Jaylen Brown isn’t even a top 100 player, then idk if you are using the right stat lol

Maybe the stat isn’t all that useful?

If on/off determined All-NBA 1st Team and top 5 MVP vote getters this year:

1. Giannis
2. Jokic
3. Markkann
4. Siakam
5. MPJ

Then why is White so much better in the same stat despite playing the same number of minutes?

I mean it’s 3 out if 145. If it was about garbage time, weaker lineups etc that would show up for at least more of the 145 top five MVP finishers who also presumably weren’t on the court for that.

The Raptors for a long time were a very good team, year after year with Demar and Kyle but Demar consistently had a negative on/off. 

People blamed Kyle playing with the bench and doing well for this. Then he got traded to SA and for the next three years it was the same until he had the best season of his career in Chicago and he was finally a positive. 

It wasn’t any of the excuses causing the consistently negative on-off, it was because he defense was poor and his style of play didn’t lead to winning unless he got much more efficient (which to his credit he has as he got older).

A year of on-off numbers are probably not very meaningful. But years worth of them definitely can be.

Jaylen Brown is not quite as good as his counting numbers but he is still very good and the Celtics would be a lot worse without him eating offensive possessions (as a Raptors fan it’s like a much better version of Ingram on the Raptors). No one else on the Celtics team is managing that. At the same time given his history with that stat, there’s probably a reason. 

His on/off is still -6.5 when you filter out garbage time.

It’s the fourth consecutive season he’s had a negative on/off.

• 2023: -6.2
• 2024: -8.9
• 2025: -0.8
• 2026: -6.5

Is Brown a negative player? No, of course not. He also has no business being in MVP discussions.

Yeah bro other great players play garbage time specifically to combat this so their on/off looks better

Totally

I am not saying Jaylen is not great or anything, but I mean every team has their garbage time minutes, if anything your team should probably dominate the garbage time lineups more than anyone when fully healthy. For a game or 2, it makes sense, small sample size, maybe a role player decided to hit 7 shots in a row to inflate the stat but this is actually an interesting stat considering we have half a season of sample size

Just watch the game and you can tell your conclusion makes no sense.

The other thing people aren’t considering is Jaylen catches lineup grenades this year because of how thin we are on shot creators, he often gets stuck with the weaker offensive lineups around him because he’s able to carry that, white gets much stronger lineups around him when he’s on/jaylen off because he needs it

All starters would be off the court and all stars could play vs weaker lineups. It’s more likely outlier jump shooting

Tbf its also basically the star suffers because the rest of the team can’t upscale their production enough. Like derrick white always has insane advanced stats but he also can stay like because brown takes the offensive load over him

People will genuinely sit there and tell you they trust an on off advanced stat over a guy top 5 in mvp voting who won finals mvp 2 years ago

The stat shows that the team is still well in the positive while he’s out there, just that they’re beating teams by more when he’s not.

I suspect for this specific year it’s a bit like how Lowry played with bench lineups for the Raptors and would destroy the other team and DeRozan would have lousy on off stats. White is Lowry in this situation (makes sense, they have a similar vibe as players). 

But it did wind up being somewhat meaningful number for the Raptors that DeRozan was always a negative relative on-off. He wasn’t as good as his counting numbers. Same could be said for Brown. 

Brunson and Steph also have a negative On/Off this season. I wonder if they’ll get individual posts too.

They’d be worse but considering how shit the east is, they would probably still make the playins.

It’s pretty easy to explain not “defend”.

Boston are +6.6 net rating, even with Jaylen Brown they have a positive net rating on the floor but way better when he’s off

Meanwhile Lakers last few seasons have had two of the most outlier net ratings you’ll see because they clutch games but get blown out because of their awful defense

They’re negative net rating this season while being 28-18, that’s unheard off, add in that Luka and LeBron are not great fits together with lack of shooting there you go that’s how you explain it

I’ve been told Derozan is a bum ass loser and his on/off is cited why.

Tbf most people thought the Celtics would suck even with Brown so who knows, maybe Mazulla would turn Payton into Brunson and get this team to a top 6 seed

This is a really good point. I’ve always seen Jaylen as a great innings eaters. There really aren’t many games where he’s wow’d me, even this year. But he has been able to the give the Celtics a high floor without having awful nights.

This shows Jaylen Browns inability to make players better though. For example we have a 70% win percentage with him out. Tatum or any other true MVP candidate can shoot poorly and still elevate their team. He’s a bad playmaker and off ball defender so he’s just overall not very impactful.

I don’t think anyone thinks they’d be better without him. Just that he doesn’t really have the statistical profile of previous MVP level players and is a large outlier wrt on/off and net rating stats.

best midrange in the league

Bruhh

Best midrange game in the league?? Come on man. He is shooting 43.6% from midrange this year. At least look up stats before you say shit like this. That ranks 39th in the league for guys shooting at least 1.5 midrange shots per game. When I filtered to 1 midrange shot per game he doesn’t even show up on the list. Filtering by at least 5 midrange shots per game for guys with high attempts, there are only 6 total players, and Brown is dead last on that list, by a significant margin https://imgur.com/a/g9pZVRv

You know ball. JB for Giannis and I might cry.

it’s not. rapm adjusts for teammates and opposition.

I agree. Its very situational. Lebron has worse plus minus running 2nd team while luka and starters rest. Jdub has worse plus minus while shai and starters rest. Or like cade has a worse plus minus when the 2nd team comes in and goes on a run vs the other teams 2nd team. Jarrett Allen has a +16 because he happens to be on the court while the spida goes on a run but Evan mobley has a -12 because he was on the bench during the run. Its all so random.

Saying that about a fmvp is crazy work

Stats are narrative driven?

People that don’t understand the value Tatum adds to the team( beyond scoring) just makes me think they only watch the Celtics during big games and somehow even then don’t realize his importance. 

I like stats and all (I worked for the 76ers and celtics in data analytics during college), but it’s not everything. You need a holistic view of stats and watching the game along with game film. Stats can be interpreted in many ways in anyone who’s studied statistics would know this. In high school, during AP Stats, the correlation between the data and the line of best fit was considered good if it was 0.8 (kinda like 90% of the data can be explained by the LSRL [least squares regression line]), while in AP Chem, it was 0.99 is good and most less than that isn’t great. You need to take everything in context. You can pretty easily twist stats into a lot of things without context.

To have it make even more sense, Hugo Gonzalez is +17.2 in 15 MPG.

That would require providing context which people tend to never do when giving raw on/off numbers. I’m starting to hate that stat more and more every day

What? I think you’re confused about what’s being discussed right now. That’s not what the stat is showing. 

This has to be bait lol

Celtics got a ring out of it