SAN FRANCISCO - Before Thursday night’s game between the Celtics and Warriors, old friend Al Horford, who played 519 games (including playoffs) across seven seasons with Jaylen Brown, shared his assessment of the First-Team All-NBA-caliber season that Brown has put together this year.
“I’ve just seen him really wanting to embrace this,” Horford said. “From afar, I haven’t watched enough, but from what I can tell, is that he seems willing to embrace the responsibility, the pressure, the burden that comes with being that top option for the team. And he’s just playing with a lot of confidence and getting to his spots where he wants to get to, and just making winning plays.”
Horford didn’t need a full scouting report. Thursday was the example.
In Boston’s 121-110 win over Golden State, Brown delivered one of his most complete performances of the season, scoring 23 points on 10-of-18 (55.6%) shooting, while adding 15 rebounds (tying a career high) and 13 assists (a career high). He secured the triple-double by the 2:55 mark of the third quarter, compiling 17 points, 11 rebounds, and 10 assists in just 27 minutes.
The 29-year-old became the first Celtic not named Larry Bird to record at least 15 rebounds and 13 assists in a 20-point triple-double, and the first player in franchise history to hit those numbers in fewer than 40 minutes.
The performance also marked Brown’s third triple-double of the season, the most by a Celtic in a single year since Rajon Rondo in 2014-15, and it matched the total he recorded across his first nine NBA seasons combined.
“Unbelievable,” Payton Pritchard said. “He’s just getting better and better at just – obviously, his scoring ability is the best, but like, his ability to now, like, create advantages for us and create double teams and kick out. And you see nights like this.”
The scoring is what jumps out the most when watching Brown this season. He is averaging 29.2 points per game, trailing only Jayson Tatum (30.1) and Bird (29.9) for the highest single-season average in franchise history. But the biggest shift has been in how he dictates the game.
A 2025 All-Star Game starter, Brown has led the team in assists 17 times and rebounds 18 times this season while continuing to defend at a high level. His career-high 7.0 rebounds and 4.8 assists per game reflect sharper reads, quicker decisions, and a greater commitment to impacting games on the glass.
“We’re at our best when he defends at a high level and takes accountability in his rebounding. I thought his rebounding was great tonight defensively,” head coach Joe Mazzulla said. “Offensively, again, this team challenges your ability to make rim reads or challenges your ability to play two-on-one, and tonight, he just did a great job of finding that. Whether it was for himself or for others. I thought the pace and the poise with which he played at a high level. And you can see in real time where the game just completely slowed down for him. And he was able to just recognize where the two-on-one was every single time. And so he takes a ton of pride in that, and I thought he did a great job tonight.”
That ability to read the floor and make the right play, creating for himself and others at such an elite level, is what separates this version of Brown from earlier ones.
Brown has long maintained that he belongs in the conversation among the league’s elite two-way players. Nights like Thursday make that argument harder to dismiss. He may rank fourth in the NBA in scoring, but his influence extends far beyond the points column, and when he impacts the game in other ways, as he often has this season, the Celtics are simply a better team.
Related
