The Celtics are good enough

Even if Jayson Tatum can't return this season and perform at a high level, Boston is capable of making a deep playoff run. Jaylen Brown and the team's margin game are that good.

Good morning. This is the 1,501st issue of the newsletter. Let's basketball.

It's been clear since the earliest days of the 2025-26 season that Jaylen Brown was attacking a campaign without his co-star Jayson Tatum with vigor and with something to prove. Brown has kept that energy and excellence as we near the midway mark: the senior Jay is averaging 30 points per game on 60% True Shooting. It's the best mark of his career in both categories. That's not how this is supposed to work: most of the time, when a player greatly increases their shot volume – Brown's volume is up about 25% on a per-minute basis – their efficiency goes down.

Not for Brown: he's way more responsible for Boston's offense on a possession by possession basis, and he's been more efficient than ever with the duty. In an interesting wrinkle, all of the "extra" shooting possessions are coming inside the arc and at the line. He has not increased his volume of three-point attempts at all despite the role change, and in fact the percentage of his attempts that come from beyond the arc is at an all-time low. That's awesome because he's a career 36% deep shooter and has tended to be a great finisher and solid mid-range shooter. Shot diets usually get ugly when second options become the main event. That just has not been the case for Brown. It helps, too, that he is shooting more efficiently than last year from basically every spot on the floor.

It also helps that Brown is taking on important defensive assignments and slouching not one bit on that end despite the new offensive role.

All of that is adding up to not just an All-NBA season, but an MVP ballot season. All of that is adding up to a 50-point night against a sizzling Clippers team while guarding the smoking hot Kawhi Leonard.

If you'd been told the Boston Celtics, without Tatum and having traded Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis for cap relief and a bench scorer, were a half-game out of the No. 2 seed in January, you'd probably have guessed that the team had an elite defense and was getting by with a 15th- to 20th-ranked offense with Brown, Derrick White and Payton Pritchard doing whatever they could to get to 110 points a night. Instead, Boston has the No. 2 offense in the league behind Brown's brilliance and a smart "possession game" offense reliant on not turning the ball over and gobbling up offensive rebounds. The defense has actually been mediocre – the shot defense with White, Jordan Walsh and Brown defending wings and guards has been excellent, but Boston can't control the defensive glass and fouls too much. The sustained excellence of the offense has negated those deficiencies for now.

It's becoming more widely accepted that if Tatum returns to the team in March and looks functional heading into the postseason, Boston could be really dangerous. What I'd propose is that even if Tatum doesn't come back before next fall, or if he comes back and is quite limited on the court, Boston is still dangerous. Offense gets harder in the playoffs, but the Celtics' offense is absurdly good right now. Opponents have license to focus their defensive attention on Brown, and are doing it, and it's not working. His superlative work is freeing up space for the other Celtics, who are taking advantage. And Joe Mazzulla's focus on the margins – turnovers, rebounds, fouls – is giving Boston an advantage just about every night.

In other words, the circumstances are such that these Celtics could beat the Pistons, the Knicks, the Sixers, the Raptors, whoever in the East bracket. These Celtics, without Tatum or with a hobbled Tatum, could get themselves back into the Finals. It's plausible. And we've seen Brown's performance in the playoffs. He has a Finals MVP to his name. There's one other active player in the Eastern Conference with one of those to his name: Giannis Antetokounmpo, whose team is currently 16-20 and struggling just to make the postseason.