Did Jaylen Brown get better this year?

Analysis
April 10, 2026



Jayson Tatum went down in the playoffs last year, and then, in the offseason, the Celtics traded Jrue Holiday and Porzingis. Everybody understood the Celtics were punting on the season and trying to reduce their cap hit. To everyone’s surprise, they’ve been one of the best teams in the East this season. Jaylen Brown became their leading scorer, averaging nearly 29 points a game, and he’s been catapulted into MVP conversations.

But what if he didn’t get any better? What if he just had the ball more? Let’s dig into the numbers to see what’s really going on.

Let’s start with his box score numbers. 28.8 Points per game, 5.3 assists, and 7.0 rebounds per game. Those seem like pretty monstrous box score numbers on their surface, and they are career highs for Brown. However, if we look at his efficiency, we can see it’s below league average. He’s posted a 98 True Shooting+ this season. (Two percent worse than league average) That’s not great for a primary option.

You might say, “Well, he’s taking more difficult shots with Tatum out.” We can look at his Shot Quality, and it is lower this season. But if we look at his Shot Making, we can see he’s basically performing at the same level he’s always been as a shot maker. (Shot making looks at actual vs expected Effective FG% based on shot quality)

What about his passing?

He is averaging a career high in assists. This is another case of just having the ball more. We can see that he’s always been a below-average passer relative to how often he gets to run the offense. The graph shows that he hasn’t improved as a passer, he just has more opportunities. 

“Well, he’s asked to do so much. He’s one of the top two-way players in the league, and an elite defender.” He did make that claim. If only we had a way to look into it with analytics. Oh, wait, we do.

Matchup Difficulty looks at how good the players are that you’re being asked to guard, and Guarded On-Ball% looks at how often you are guarding the player with the ball. We can see that Brown is guarding average players at a below-average rate.

His overall defensive impact metrics have been fine over his career, but nothing special. Here are his career D-LEBRON numbers.

By everything I can measure, Jaylen Brown has not improved this year. He just has the ball more. That he is in the MVP race is absurd. That is the power of the Boston Media machine. The same machine that convinced the public that Marcus Smart should win DPOY a few years ago. LEBRON and EPM WAR are metrics that estimate a player’s overall value over a season. They work by combining their impact per 100 possessions and their total minutes played. This produces their WAR, or Wins Above Replacement. I averaged the two stats together and compared Brown’s average WAR to the other MVP candidates.

SGA – 17.7 (1st)

Jokic – 15.73 (2nd)
Luka – 15.2 (3rd)

Wemby – 13.6 (4th)

Brown – 7.0 (26th)

Brown is not in the same stratosphere as the other MVP candidates. The point of the article isn’t to tell you Jaylen Brown is secretly a bad player, he’s not. But when we look into advanced analytics, he has not improved in a meaningful way. He’s the same player he’s been for years. A low-end All-Star who is very good, just not great. 

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