Jaylen Brown can only control so much — and that's OK
“Just breathe and control what you control; it’s simple.”
There is so much wisdom packaged in that pithy, nine-word sentence from one of the NBA’s most fascinating young talents. Jaylen Brown delivered the line to SB Nation's Paul Flannery in a discussion about meditation, but the mantra encapsulates who Brown has been since he became the Boston Celtics’ No. 3 overall pick in the 2016 draft.
Brown has become a major piece in a Boston youth movement that almost no one is talking about. The 76ers, Timberwolves and Lakers receive all of the love about their young cores, but the Celtics may have the most important one as we approach playoff basketball. With Kyrie Irving, Marcus Smart, Marcus Morris, Al Horford and Daniel Theis all out with injuries, Brown, Jayson Tatum and Terry Rozier are tasked with a lot of the heavy lifting down the stretch.
For Brown, these are ostensibly the moments he lives for. The 6-7 swingman out of Cal has been doing it all for the Celtics this year on the court and has been someone for the rookie Tatum to lean on as well. He’s become a plus-defender while shooting better from the floor while improving in nearly every advanced metric from his rookie season. He’s brought a mental toughness that has come to define Celtics basketball, which has put the team in a position to finish the year with the second-best record in the Eastern Conference.
Brown is bigger than basketball, though. He challenges his mind as much as he challenges his physicality. His propensity for sharing his off-court intellect raised some eyebrows before the draft, much of the conversation coming in coded language asking whether a “smart” athlete would be a good thing for the NBA. For the Celtics, he’s been nothing short of excellent.
Brown’s size allows him to body up smaller swingmen, and his speed allows him to blow by bigger guys. It’s his ability to understand what the team needs and produce just that that has made Brad Stevens’ life much easier. With no Irving, Horford or Smart in the Celtics' matchup with the desperate Utah Jazz, Brown stepped up and led the team in scoring with 21 points on 10 shots, including the game-winner with 0.01 left on the clock.
What you should love most about Brown is his unwillingness to be anything other than who he is at his core. His identity means something to him, and it’s important that we understand there is more to him than just basketball. Brown’s intellectual interests come at a time in which he is going to be challenged not by his knowledge, but by those who feel that athletes shouldn’t be more than a means to entertain in sport.
The "stick to sports" mantra may not have reached its peak considering the online backlash from NFL players kneeling during the national anthem and the NBA community’s consistent pressure on the Trump administration to do better to those in marginalized groups. Brown loves having discussions about the social constructs that have created systemic, institutionalized challenges for people of color and uses every opportunity to engage in public discourse about those very things.
He’s been blessed with the physical attributes to become a key contributor on a basketball team with title aspirations and blessed with the mind to take advantage of the platform that comes with that. Brown is simultaneously becoming a complete basketball player and a complete person in a public spotlight at a mere 21 years old. There’s no telling what challenge is next for Brown, but you can rest assured that he’ll be ready for it as long as he continues to breathe and control only what he can control.
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