Ramona Shelburne
Multiple Authors
FRIENDS AND FAMILY had been calling him. Teammates had been checking in with texts and messages. He knew everybody meant effectively, however he did not need their assist. Their pick-me-ups. Their empathy.
All Jaylen Brown needed was house.
Three weeks earlier, the Celtics‘ swingman had undergone surgical procedure to restore a torn meniscus — and he was alone in his home in Boston.
“One of my toxic traits is that I have a hard time letting people see me weak,” Brown advised ESPN.
On the courtroom, Brown was going through a season of unknowns. Three starters from the Celtics’ 2024 championship workforce had left — Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis had been traded in financially motivated offers, and Al Horford had been left unsigned in free company. Longtime teammate Jayson Tatum had collapsed in the center of Madison Square Garden after rupturing his Achilles’ tendon in the second spherical of the playoffs.
Now Brown was alone, with solely his ideas.
Alone with the doubts that had seeped into his thoughts and stayed there. How may he be the Finals MVP and never chosen to the Olympic workforce? Why was he at all times the one in commerce rumors for a “superstar”? Why was there even a query about his All-NBA workforce standing annually? Why was everybody speaking about this being a niche yr with out Tatum?
“I was questioning everything,” he stated. “Mentally, am I going to be the same? Is my athleticism going to be the same? Am I going to be able to lead this group?”
Brown had studied and practiced meditation for years. He’d used martial arts and oxygen deprivation coaching to construct the psychological instruments to cope with moments akin to these.
But this was actual, not a coaching train, and each his legacy and the Celtics’ future had been on the line.
“I feel like when my back is against the wall and the world is against [me], that’s when you get the best version of me,” he stated. “That’s where you get the chance to see what you’re made of.
“Even if it is not likely true. Even if the world is not actually in opposition to you. If you’re feeling like that and also you isolate your self, that is the place development takes place. One of my favourite quotes is, ‘If you need to make a person nice, isolate him.'”
Brown leaned all the way into the isolation. He rose with the sun each day and went to bed when it set, trying to align his body to its natural circadian rhythms.
He read and meditated. He studied his teammates’ astrological charts and numerology in an attempt to tailor his leadership to each of them. He did red light therapy on his knee multiple times a day to speed up his recovery.
“My harm wasn’t even that dangerous, but it surely nonetheless makes you query your self,” Brown said. “Whether you’ll nonetheless have your superpowers. You cannot battle these ideas. They’re going to pop up. You simply observe them and allow them to float down the river.”
This season has been Brown’s answer.
Not only has he silenced his inner doubts and all those real — or imagined — slights that make up his ever-expanding burn book, he has turned into a bona fide MVP candidate and pushed the Celtics back to where no one thought they’d be this season: legitimate contention.
The Celtics are locked into the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference, fueled by Brown’s career-high averages in points (28.8), rebounds (7.0) and assists (5.2), with a career-high usage rate of 36.2%, which ranks second in the NBA, behind only Luka Doncic.
“From a monetary standpoint, this was a rebuild, proper?” he said. “But I did not take a look at it like that. … I checked out it as a chance to present the world who I’m and what I may do.”
MECHALLE BROWN CHUCKLES when she hears her son talk about his “poisonous trait.”
“That’s what males suppose,” she said, laughing. “You’re not weak. You’re simply getting higher after surgical procedure. It’s similar to a automotive. You have to go get upkeep to get higher. So get your tune-up, get your upkeep and are available back even higher and stronger.”
She said that to her son last summer when he told her he didn’t want company or need anything. She dropped by once anyway, she said — moms are allowed to do that — but very quickly she could tell there was no reason to worry.
“He was strategizing,” she said. “He’s at all times wanted house to suppose issues by means of.”
Mechalle loves to tell the story of when Jaylen walked at 9 months old so he could play with his older brother’s basketball. Jaylen took that basketball everywhere, even his daycare in Norcross, Georgia.
At first, the daycare told her that he couldn’t bring the ball because the other kids would get jealous. But then Jaylen started sharing the ball, so they let him keep bringing it.
“He found out he wanted to be a workforce participant,” she stated.
This past summer Brown had a different problem to solve. All those doubts that kept popping up. The walls he felt backed up against. Every time she’d call, Mechalle would tell Jaylen that he wasn’t the only one in this situation. It might feel as if it were all on his shoulders, but there also was a whole team to lean on.
“In his thoughts, all the things was taken away from him, which means the workforce,” she said. “But what I stored saying to him was, ‘These guys are all already in the league, which implies they’ll play ball. They have been drafted, so they’re gifted. You simply have to lead them.”
After Brown’s isolation period, which he says lasted about six weeks, Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens caught him in the weight room at the team’s training facility and told him the same. Boston was still beginning to form the answers to the massive questions looming over its season, Stevens told him.
“Plenty of guys would have misconstrued that and never carried out what he is carried out,” Stevens told ESPN. “And what he is carried out is he is performed nice, and he is empowered others. We wanted him to do each for our workforce to be actually good.”
The Celtics didn’t need a hero, or for Brown to play hero ball and try to drop 50 every night. They needed him to lead.
Stevens reminded him that the Celtics had turned the roster over several times since Brown had joined them in 2017 as the No. 3 pick. He gave him assurances that Boston still intended to compete this season, despite the injury to Tatum, roster turnover and financial realignment.
“The solely factor that lots of these guys had been, was unproven,” Stevens said. “I believe [Brown] knew Jordan Walsh may play. That Baylor Scheierman may play. That [Neemias Queta], and Luka Garza may play. But he additionally knew that by displaying perception in them, he would get so much out of them.”
And he has.
The Celtics have an effective field goal percentage of 65.2% off passes from Brown this season. That’s the fifth-highest rate among players to record 500 or more assists this season, per GeniusIQ. Teammates Payton Pritchard, Sam Hauser, Derrick White and Queta are all averaging profession highs in factors per recreation.
“Jaylen has believed on this group from the get-go, and that features the summer season and that features after we had been 0-3, and I believe that is helped deliver out the greatest in all of these guys,” Stevens said.
“He has appeared to discover lots of pleasure in serving to them show themselves.”
50 wins in a gap year
— Jaylen Brown (@FCHWPO) March 30, 2026
ON HIS FIRST trip to Boston as a member of the Celtics nine years ago, Brown proclaimed he was willing to “go to battle” for the city. It was a bold statement, and especially so for a 19-year-old set to join such a storied franchise.
“I’ve at all times carried myself that method,” Brown said. “If you’ve gotten me in your life, you’ve gotten somebody that’s going to go to battle for you. Maybe in one other life, I used to be a warrior.”
Brown had grown up idolizing Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, players who carried themselves with a certain kind of code. He had been inspired by their work ethic and legendary competitiveness, but also how consistently they were able to live at that mental and physical level. He wondered if he could exist that way every day. Or if there also was room for some normalcy in his life.
“I might be mendacity if I stated I had it to their degree,” Brown said. “Like, I believe Kobe and Jordan had been on a distinct degree, mentally. But I do have these phases of my life and moments the place, like, I am going into that mode, and the folks round me can undoubtedly really feel it.”
Last summer was one of those times.
Brown said he knew he needed to grow into the role for the Celtics to compete and believed he needed to isolate himself and look inward.
To do so, he continued staring at his doubts and questions — and looking at different systems of thought and perspectives.
“I really like to study. That’s one factor about me. I do not shut my thoughts off to something,” Brown said. “Even if I disagree or I do not perceive, I nonetheless maintain an open thoughts. I believe that may be a signal of intelligence, that folks ought to endure a bit bit extra.
“So this season when we lost half of our roster, damn near half of our starting group — I’m desperate, basically. I want to win. How are we going to win? How am I going to galvanize this group, communicate with this group? Build chemistry in a short amount of time?”
In his one yr at the University of California, Berkeley, Brown studied astronomy and stated he would’ve pursued a sophisticated diploma in astrophysics if he’d stayed. He’s at all times felt that the planets and celestial objects have an affect on people that we’re simply starting to perceive.
“Astrology is just constellations, right?” he stated. “The sun is a star. The sun provides nutrients, vitamins, minerals, all these different — red light. So other stars provide similar things as well. Ancient civilizations knew that. And it was a more common practice in the old world than it is in this new world. Now today, they make you sound all kooky if you speak about it.
“But, you recognize tens of millions of individuals, billionaires, CEOs — they use these data programs to their benefit all the time. They simply do not communicate on it publicly.”
Brown was born Oct. 24, 1996, which makes him a Scorpio, born in the Year of the Rat, according to Chinese Zodiac, and his life path number is a five. Rats, Brown explains, have an obsession with winning. Fives are typically adventurers and visionaries. Scorpios are intense, determined and strategic.
Coach Joe Mazzulla was born June 30, 1988, which makes him a Cancer with a Capricorn moon, born in the Year of the Dragon with a life path number of eight.
Individuals with an eight life path are associated with authority and intense discipline. Cancers with a Capricorn moon are associated with high-achieving leaders who are disciplined and deeply focused on family (or team).
Brown has committed all of these numbers, for each player and coach on the Celtics, to memory and uses the background to inform the way he communicates with each person.
“If it solely labored 10%, it is value it to me. I believe it’s much more efficient than 10%, although,” he said. “I realized extra about Chinese astrology. I realized extra about numerology, life path numbers. I made a chart of all my teammates. I do know it sounds bizarre, and it is in all probability a bit controversial as a result of folks have their beliefs. But the s— labored.”
His teammates can only take his word for it.
Walsh said he has a close relationship with Brown — he calls him “Unc” because of the mentoring kind of relationship they’ve built — but doesn’t remember Brown giving him any kind of readout of his numerology or astrological chart.
Neither does center Queta, whom Brown has advocated for this season — most recently pushing him for Most Improved Player and the All-Defensive Team. Queta speaks in great detail about the team dinner Brown hosts at the beginning of the season and the advice Brown has given him. But he also doesn’t recall Brown using numerology or astrology to connect with him.
“I obtained to talk with everyone. I obtained to deliver everyone on the identical web page so I obtained to perceive [them],” Brown said. “This had to be my greatest management yr. So if I’m being sincere, these things that I’m talking of, it helped.”
THREE YEARS AGO, Brown found himself in a different, dark place. The Celtics had just flamed out in the Eastern Conference finals, losing to the Miami Heat after climbing back from an 0-3 deficit to force a Game 7. It was a stunning fall, a regression after Tatum and Brown had come so close to a title in 2022, falling to the Golden State Warriors in the Finals.
It was the kind of devastating loss that could spur a franchise to lose patience and, after years of rumors about fit and ceiling, admit defeat and break apart a superstar duo that hadn’t yet borne championship fruit.
Especially when one of those stars, Brown, was about to become the highest-paid player in NBA history and the other, Tatum, would top him the following year.
The pressure was immense. After calling Tatum and suggesting they train together in the offseason for the first time, Brown said he decided to channel that pressure in one of the most unexpected, unorthodox ways imaginable.
“I do not know the way to describe it,” Brown said. “It’s like mainly coaching your self to drown.”
He’d known as big-wave browsing legend Laird Hamilton and requested him to train him how to prepare underneath excessive oxygen deprivation so he may strengthen his thoughts to carry out at optimum ranges underneath stress and nervousness.
“It’s a way to mentally learn how to deal with anxiety,” Brown stated. “You get comfortable with it. … The worst thing you can do is panic. That’s in the water, but that’s also in life.
“If you panic in the water, you drown quicker. So the water teaches you to calm down if you’re in that battle or flight, to simply calm down.”
Laird and his wife, former volleyball star Gabrielle Reece, have trained dozens of professional athletes at their facility in Los Angeles. They use heavy weights to help sink you under the water, simulating the conditions of getting sucked under a wave. The goal is to learn how to release as much air as efficiently as possible as you sink, so you have energy to jump back up out of the water and fill with as much air as possible.
“Our factor is to prepare the organism, which on this case is the physique and the thoughts, to be extra environment friendly,” Reece told ESPN. “So what does that imply? ‘Oh, I’m uncomfortable. I really feel pressured, however I truly cannot afford to react as a result of I’m going to waste extra vitality.'”
Over time, the athlete learns just how much time they have under the water before they need to breathe again. They learn how to let out sips of air to decrease their CO2 levels and buy more time. And they learn how to control their mind and conserve energy when every particle of their being is screaming at them to get out of the situation as soon as possible.
Brown, Reece said, was a quick study.
“Jaylen is a psychological big so he obtained it in a short time,” she said. “He would not yield to his discomfort or be like, ‘I am unable to or, ‘That’s scary.'”
Brown trained with Laird and Reece for several months in the summer of 2023 and has kept in close touch. Now and then, he’ll invite a teammate or coach to try one of his pool workouts. So far no one has accepted his challenge — although Mazzulla said he was intrigued.
“I’ve seen him in the pool doing his exercise and he type of appears like a dolphin,” Walsh told ESPN. “He goes straight up and down to the deep finish with the weights. He suggested that I attempt it a couple of instances and I’m like, ‘JB, that appears like torture. I’m unsure that is for me.’ But perhaps I ought to as a result of clearly it is working for him.”
Brown says he thrives on discipline and structure like this. It gives him strength and a sense of control. And that’s something he has been working on for a long time.
2:15
Stephen A.: ‘Boston looks like the most formidable team in the Eastern Conference’
Stephen A. Smith explains why the Boston Celtics are the team to beat in the Eastern Conference.
THE CELTICS’ LOCKER room on the night of April 1 was as happy a place as you’ll find in the NBA this time of year. Brown had led them with 43 points on 17-of-29 shooting. Tatum notched his sixth career triple-double and first since he’d come back from his Achilles’ injury on March 6.
Boston had led basically the entire game, scoring 53 points in the first quarter on 11 3-pointers, beating Miami for the fourth straight time — the same franchise that had sent the the Celtics to such an existential reckoning in the spring of 2023.
About the only sign of everything they’d all been through in the past year was the size of Tatum’s right calf.
It’s still noticeably smaller than his left calf, a telltale sign of someone who is recovering from a recent Achilles’ injury.
Brown’s presence is larger than it has ever been before — both in respect and standing around the league for leading the Celtics where only they believed possible.
Tatum attended as many practices and games as he could while he was out. He did it to show support but also to stay connected to the team as he trudged through his own arduous, monotonous rehab process.
Tatum had surgery the morning after he tore his Achilles to give himself a chance to return in time for the playoffs this season. He pushed himself six days a week so that he could potentially contribute if the team was still in position for that to matter.
Brown’s leadership — and play — made it matter.
“Obviously [Brown’s] any individual that is at all times been succesful,” Tatum told ESPN. “This was simply a chance the place extra was required from everyone, however particularly him. The NBA is all about alternative and the guys who actually make the most out of it. The particular ones do, and that is precisely what he is been in a position to do that yr.”
In the past, so much of Brown’s motivation has come from channeling slights, he said, and internal doubts into fuel.
But one thing has modified this season, and he is nonetheless getting used to it. It’s totally different to really feel revered and seen, as an alternative of working for revenge.
“At times, I think I would make myself small, for other people to feel comfortable,” Brown stated. “I feel like leadership is about leading to a common goal. So the goal, so however we get there, you know, if I can play my role, then I don’t mind. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s a difference between that and making yourself small and dimming your light.”
Brown and his mother talked for hours about that just lately. She noticed the identical tendency in him and had an thought of how he may break the sample.
Let folks see and know him. Don’t be afraid to name himself the greatest two-way participant in the recreation. Call consideration to the issues he has carried out that had been exhausting and he is pleased with.
“Your light is meant to shine. So let it shine,'” Brown stated she advised him.
“And I’ve made a promise to myself to do that. I’ve got in my own head about millions of things for no reason. But I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m not going to make myself small ever again.”
