Jaylen Brown shrugs off notion that Celtics need to “look in the mirror”

With Jayson Tatum in the league’s health and safety protocols, the Boston Celtics were expecting their best players to step up on Monday against the Minnesota Timberwolves. That, unfortunately, didn’t play into fruition against a disassembled T-Wolves team.

We’ve seen countless times over the last five years where Tatum has carried the Celtics regardless of who’s available to run the court with him. However, on the other hand, the same cannot be said for his franchise partner, Jaylen Brown. On a night where he needed to get the Celtics a victory, he wasn’t able to do so.

In his first game without Jayson Tatum this season, Jaylen Brown was unable to get the Boston Celtics a victory over the depleted Minnesota Timberwolves

A trend surrounding Brown is that he starts the game on fire in the first quarter, but then cools off throughout the rest of the game. And it’s great for Brown to have this feature in his game, as it can take the Celtics a bit to get started offensively. But he needs to be able to produce throughout the entire game.

This was by far one of Brown’s worst games of the season. He made eight of his 24 shots – scoring 26 points – and missed five of his 13 free throws. He also committed six turnovers on the night. After the game, Brown acknowledged that he didn’t play well enough to get his team the win.

"“I think that was probably one of the worst losses of the season, for sure. That was probably one of my worst games of the season as well. My team needed me to make plays and step up and I turned the ball over too much. I missed easy shots, easy reads, and we lost.”"

The Boston Celtics had an 11-point lead heading into halftime. This led to them getting outscored by 16 points in the second half – a common trend that has followed the Celtics all season and has occurred twice in their last two games.

Furthermore, the Celtics have lost seven of their last 10 games. Brown spoke to those issues and said that they are a result of miscommunication and chemistry more than anything.

"“A lot of those turnovers came from miscommunications. A lot of those defensive lapses came from miscommunications. That’s just what it comes down to is chemistry and things like that. We didn’t play well today. I didn’t play well today. I let my team down for sure.”"

Al Horford returned to the court for Boston after he cleared health and safety protocols. He finished the game having scored 16 points, nine rebounds, and six assists in his first game since Dec. 17. After the game,  Horford made a few comments directed towards his team.

"“More often than not, especially that second half, we weren’t as engaged for whatever reason. And that goes to speak to the discipline aspect of it. It’s something that we address it, we’re talking about it. We’re talking about things in timeouts. I don’t know why, for whatever reason, things are not translating for our group. We don’t want to be in this position. Right now it’s tough. It’s not good enough, what we’re doing. The things that we want to accomplish, we can’t do it playing like this. We just can’t. At the end of the day, we kind of have to look in the mirror at ourselves individually and as a team.”"

However, not all of his teammates agreed with them.

Horford’s comments seem likely of a veteran in his position. However, when Brown was asked what he thought of Horford’s comments, he not only turned down the opportunity to not only agree with Horford, but also the potential to give his team the reality check it needs.

Brown’s comments prove that he’s not on the same page.

"“Searching and looking in the mirror? Nah. No comment.”"

There’s definitely truth to Horford’s criticisms of his teammates and coaches. For Brown to shrug it off as if it doesn’t matter isn’t what you want to see from one of the leaders of the team.

Perhaps another team meeting needs to be held…

All in all, health is the biggest factor for the Boston Celtics right now. However, it was even more so for the Timberwolves who put together a second-half rally to defeat the Celtics.

Which leads me to start asking head coach Ime Udoka and President of Basketball Operations Brad Stevens “what are we doing here?”