'50 wins in a gap year': How Jaylen Brown turbocharged the Celtics back to title contention

FRIENDS AND FAMILY were calling him. Teammates were checking in with texts and messages. He knew everyone meant well, but he didn't want their help. Their pick-me-ups. Their empathy.

All Jaylen Brown wanted was space.

Three weeks earlier, the Celtics' swingman had undergone surgery to repair a torn meniscus -- and he was alone in his house in Boston.

"One of my toxic traits is that I have a hard time letting people see me weak," Brown told ESPN.

On the court, Brown was facing a season of unknowns. Three starters from the Celtics' 2024 championship team had left -- Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis had been traded in financially motivated deals, and Al Horford had been left unsigned in free agency. Longtime teammate Jayson Tatum had collapsed in the middle of Madison Square Garden after rupturing his Achilles' tendon in the second round of the playoffs.

Now Brown was alone, with only his thoughts.

Alone with the doubts that had seeped into his mind and stayed there. How could he be the Finals MVP and not selected to the Olympic team? Why was he always the one in trade rumors for a "superstar"? Why was there even a question about his All-NBA team status each year? Why was everyone talking about this being a gap year without Tatum?

"I was questioning everything," he said. "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 training to build the mental tools to deal with moments such as these.

But this was real, not a training exercise, and both his legacy and the Celtics' future were 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 said. "That's where you get the chance to see what you're made of.

"Even if it's not really true. Even if the world isn't really against you. If you feel like that and you isolate yourself, that's where growth takes place. One of my favorite quotes is, 'If you want to make a man great, 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 injury wasn't even that bad, but it still makes you question yourself," Brown said. "Whether you will still have your superpowers. You can't fight those thoughts. They're going to pop up. You just observe them and let them 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 financial standpoint, this was a rebuild, right?" he said. "But I didn't look at it like that. ... I looked at it as an opportunity to show the world who I am and what I could do."

MECHELLE BROWN CHUCKLES when she hears her son talk about his "toxic trait."

"That's what men think," she said, laughing. "You're not weak. You're just getting better after surgery. It's just like a car. You have to go get maintenance to get better. So get your tune-up, get your maintenance and come back even better 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 always needed space to think things through."

Mechelle 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 figured out he needed to be a team player," she said.

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, Mechelle 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 mind, everything was taken away from him, meaning the team," she said. "But what I kept saying to him was, 'These guys are all already in the league, which means they can play ball. They have been drafted, so they are talented. You just 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.

"A lot of guys would have misconstrued that and not done what he's done," Stevens told ESPN. "And what he's done is he's played great, and he's empowered others. We needed him to do both for our team to be really 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 only thing that a lot of these guys were, was unproven," Stevens said. "I think [Brown] knew Jordan Walsh could play. That Baylor Scheierman could play. That [Neemias Queta], and Luka Garza could play. But he also knew that by showing belief in them, he would get a lot 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 career highs in points per game.

"Jaylen has believed in this group from the get-go, and that includes the summer and that includes when we were 0-3, and I think that's helped bring out the best in all of those guys," Stevens said.

"He has seemed to find a lot of joy in helping them prove themselves."

50 wins in a gap year ☘️

ON HIS FIRST trip to Boston as a member of the Celtics nine years ago, Brown proclaimed he was willing to "go to war" 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 always carried myself that way," Brown said. "If you have me in your life, you have someone that is going to go to war for you. Maybe in another life, I was 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 would be lying if I said I had it to their level," Brown said. "Like, I think Kobe and Jordan were on a different level, mentally. But I do have these phases of my life and moments where, like, I go into that mode, and the people around me can definitely 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 love to learn. That's one thing about me. I don't close my mind off to anything," Brown said. "Even if I disagree or I don't understand, I still keep an open mind. I think that is a sign of intelligence, that people should endure a little bit more.

"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 year at the University of California, Berkeley, Brown studied astronomy and said he would've pursued an advanced degree in astrophysics if he'd stayed. He's always felt that the planets and celestial objects have effects on individuals that we're just beginning to understand.

"Astrology is just constellations, right?" he said. "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 know millions of people, billionaires, CEOs -- they use these knowledge systems to their advantage all the time. They just don't speak 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 only worked 10%, it's worth it to me. I think it is a lot more effective than 10%, though," he said. "I learned more about Chinese astrology. I learned more about numerology, life path numbers. I made a chart of all my teammates. I know it sounds weird, and it's probably a little controversial because people have their beliefs. But the s--- worked."

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 got to communicate with everybody. I got to bring everybody on the same page so I got to understand [them]," Brown said. "This had to be my best leadership year. So if I'm being honest, this stuff that I'm speaking 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 don't know how to describe it," Brown said. "It's like basically training yourself to drown."

He'd called big-wave surfing legend Laird Hamilton and asked him to teach him how to train under extreme oxygen deprivation so he could strengthen his mind to perform at optimal levels under stress and anxiety.

"It's a way to mentally learn how to deal with anxiety," Brown said. "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 faster. So the water teaches you to relax when you're in that fight or flight, to just relax."

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 thing is to train the organism, which in this case is the body and the mind, to be more efficient," Reece told ESPN. "So what does that mean? 'Oh, I'm uncomfortable. I feel stressed, but I actually can't afford to react because I'm going to waste more energy.'"

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 mental giant so he got it very quickly," she said. "He doesn't yield to his discomfort or be like, 'I can't 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 workout and he kind of sounds like a dolphin," Walsh told ESPN. "He goes straight up and down to the deep end with the weights. He advised that I try it a few times and I'm like, 'JB, that looks like torture. I'm not sure that's for me.' But maybe I should because clearly it's 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.

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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] somebody that's always been capable," Tatum told ESPN. "This was just an opportunity where more was required from everybody, but especially him. The NBA is all about opportunity and the guys who really make the most out of it. The special ones do, and that's exactly what he's been able to do this year."

In the past, so much of Brown's motivation has come from channeling slights, he said, and internal doubts into fuel.

But something has changed this season, and he's still getting used to it. It's different to feel respected and seen, instead of working for revenge.

"At times, I think I would make myself small, for other people to feel comfortable," Brown said. "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 mom talked for hours about that recently. She saw the same tendency in him and had an idea of how he could break the pattern.

Let people see and know him. Don't be afraid to call himself the best two-way player in the game. Call attention to the things he has done that were hard and he's proud of.

"Your light is meant to shine. So let it shine,'" Brown said she told 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."