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News flash, Jaylen Brown is in the midst of a breakout season. Yes, the Boston Celtics wing was already an All-Star caliber player a season ago. Yet, through the early parts of the 2020-21 regular season, the fifth-year pro has taken his game to new heights, ascending into the upper-echelon of players in all of basketball.
In fact, Brown’s current trajectory has led many to even attach MVP chatter to his name. Albeit some voice their backing of the Celtics guard louder than others.
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Brown’s Placement on ‘Way-Too-Soon NBA MVP Rankings’
Bleacher Report’s Grant Hughes recently compiled a top-five “Way-Too-Soon NBA MVP Rankings,” of which Brown failed to crack. However, the former Cal-Berkeley standout’s stellar play didn’t go completely unnoticed.
Brown joined the likes of Atlanta’s Trae Young, Indiana’s Domantas Sabonis and Giannis Antetokounmpo, the league’s reigning back-to-back MVP, as “honorable mentions” on the list.
Here’s what Hughes had to say about the rising Celtics star:
Jaylen Brown, Boston Celtics
Jaylen Brown is fifth in the league in player efficiency rating (without spoiling it, that’s ahead of the guy we’re going to rank first) and is averaging a career-high 26.9 points per game on 58.1 percent shooting from the field. Even if Jayson Tatum remains Boston’s alpha, Brown has been better than his teammate through the early part of the season.
Hughes’ top-five MVP candidates consisted of your typical faces, including three former recipients of the award in Golden State’s Steph Curry, Brooklyn’s Kevin Durant and Los Angeles’ LeBron James. Denver big man Nikola Jokic checked in at third, while Joel Embiid’s brilliant early-season campaign earned him the top spot.
Examining Jaylen Brown’s Early Season Brillance
While teammate Jayson Tatum may be creeping up on him thanks in large part to a brilliant 40 point outing against the Toronto Raptors (26.3 ppg), Jaylen Brown’s 26.9 ppg still leads the way for the Celtics.
In fact, Brown’s scoring prowess this season is good enough to place him second in the entire NBA in total points scored with 215. The aforementioned Steph Curry is the only player to outpace Brown in the category, as his 62 point explosion a few nights ago helped pull his total up to an absurd 224 points scored over seven games this year.
Brown has grown leaps and bounds on the offensive end. His current average of 3.1 assists per game checks in as a career-high. While his 57.7% field goal percentage is the highest in the NBA amongst players who average at least 31.4 minutes per game.
It’s these types of numbers that have catapulted Brown into the MVP conversation and into the top-five of ex-Celtic Kendrick Perkins’ personal top-five rankings.
“If you had to do a sample size of who was in the MVP conversation, Jaylen Brown’s a top-five player as far as MVP conversation just from his production on the court.” Perkins said during Celtics Pregame Live earlier this week.
“Right now if you had to pick one player, one wing or guard that’s been playing phenomenal basketball, you can’t name me one guy that has been better than Jaylen Brown,” Perkins said. “Jaylen Brown has been phenomenal.”
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