Deep Dive: How Do the Boston Celtics Make Up For Jaylen Brown's Lost Production

Jaylen Brown had, by just about any measure, the best year of his career. He got legitimate MVP votes for the first time and just barely missed making first-team All-NBA. He scored more than two thousand points for the first time in his career, leaving behind a big hole for the Celtics to fill.

That's not to say he was perfect. If he was, he’d still be a member of the Boston Celtics. So as we explore how the Celtics can make up for his lost production, we’re going to try to look at the whole picture to see if Brad Stevens and crew were truly onto something.

“We're going to have to lean on our depth. This is a big part of this,” Stevens said when he explained the trade. He later added, “And then obviously we have to continue to work on ways to diversify our attack overall.”

Because the Celtics brought in Paul George, Mitchell Robinson, and Mike Conley, I don’t think there's much use in trying to match up per-game averages. None of these guys is playing the 71 games Brown played last season, so I’m going to use totals to see how the Celtics, as a group, can hit the statistical impact Brown made last season.

Again, I’m choosing his best season, not his averages, to see if that production can be matched. Also, I’m not comparing this year to last year in terms of the Celtics with Jayson Tatum versus the Celtics with Jaylen Brown. This is about this upcoming season, which we initially expected to be Tatum and Brown together, and now it’s Tatum and George, Mitchell, Conley, and whichever younger players develop into bigger contributors.

There's no clean way to look at this, but at least it will point us in a direction of what needs to happen to accomplish what the Celtics hope to accomplish.

Here are the contestants in this game: Paul George, Mitchell Robinson, Derrick White, Payton Pritchard, Baylor Scheierman, Hugo Gonzalez, Jordan Walsh, Neemias Queta, Luka Garza, Mike Conley.

Some combination of production from these players is where a vast majority of the production will come from. It’s the new guys, some established players, and the “internal development” guys.

Guys not included: Jayson Tatum, Sam Hauser, Chris Cenac Jr., Dillon Mitchell, Amari Williams, Other two-way guys to be named later.

Tatum’s production is generally so high that I’m not going to realistically ask him to do more. Maybe he goes from 27 points to 30, which will help, but that's not really the point of this exercise. It’s more about finding production outside of Tatum.

Hauser is who he is, so I’m not going to ask for more from him either. And I don’t expect the rookies or two-ways to do much, though we might see them from time to time. Whatever they give this year is what that group of similar players gave them last season.

Diving into some numbers

Brown’s totals last season:
Points: 2038
Rebounds: 492 (81 offensive)
Assists: 364
Steals: 72
Blocks: 27
Turnovers: 259

Paul George

He’s 36 years old and injury prone. He’s averaged 44 games a season since leaving Oklahoma City, a total that includes both a 74 game season a couple of seasons ago and a 37-game season last year shortened by a 25-game suspension. As far as I’m concerned, those cancel each other out.

I’m going to guess he gets some of the Kristaps Porzingis treatment, meaning no back-to-backs and a lot of extra time to make sure any injuries are healed. Porzingis played 42 games in his final season with the Celtics, so we’ll stick with the average played with George.

His averages over two years in Philadelphia are 16.7 points, 5.3 rebounds, 4 assists, 1.8 steals, and 0.5 blocks. I’m going to be super-conservative here for the sake of this exercise because I’d rather he beat low expectations than try to live up to ones that are too lofty, so I’m rounding down.

If he averages 15/5/4, that's 660 points, 220 rebounds (20 offensive), and 176 assists. I’ll go with 1.5 steals for a total of 66, 0.5 blocks for a total of 22, and 2 turnovers for a total of 88.

Let’s subtract all these to see how much we have left to make up.

Points: 1378
Rebounds: 272 (61 offensive)
Assists: 188
Steals: 6
Blocks: 5
Turnovers: 171

One notable thing we see already is that Paul George can pile up some of the defensive stats himself. He’s still capable of getting steals and blocks, so even in 44 games, he has the potential to make up for a lot.

Keep in mind these are only certain, surface-level defensive metrics. I’m not going to say George is a better defender than Brown right now, but the possibility of him being good enough when he plays is noteworthy.

The Centers

The Celtics pieced together a center rotation last season, so comparing them to what we think this season could be is a little tricky. So I’m going to roll all Queta, Garza, and Nikola Vučević totals into one.

Points: 1488
Rebounds: 1023 (411 offensive)
Assists: 224
Steals: 94
Blocks: 138
Turnovers: 137

Now, let’s look at what the center rotation will look like with Mitchell Robinson. He has averaged about 50 games a season, but his total games played is a bit more haphazard than that. Working backwards, he’s played 60, 17, 31, 59, 72, 31, 61, and 66 regular season games in his career.

I think he falls into the category of a guy who gets injured a lot, but isn’t prone to one specific injury. If anything, he tends to suffer a bunch of fractures (including one when he punched his truck before the NBA Finals). So maybe Boston will get lucky.

Still I can’t, in good faith, project out too many games. I’ll stick to the average of 50 because it feels like the right mix of optimistic and realistic. It could be 30, it could be 60.

His career averages have been pretty steady: 7.5 points, 8 rebounds (4.2 offensive), 0.7 assists, 0.9 steals, 1.2 blocks, 0.7 turnover in about 23 minutes of play. I think about 23 minutes is the max he can go, so let’s work with most of those numbers. I’m going to scale the points down to six, which is more than his past three seasons but less than his career average. I think a couple of lobs and a putback per game is a fair thing to expect.

That would bring his totals to 300 points, 400 rebounds (210 offensive), 35 assists, 45 steals, 60 blocks, and 35 turnovers.

As for Neemias Queta, I’m not sure how much more we can expect from him. He averaged 10.2 points, 8.4 rebounds (3 offensive), 1.7 assists, 0.8 steals, 1.3 blocks, and 1 turnover over 76 games. That said, he finished the season as a much better player than he was when he started. And I think he’ll be playing a few more minutes now because (a) he should be a little better than he was last season, and (b) Robinson can’t handle a big workload.

So how do you handle this in projections? First, I’m going to scale his per-36 minutes production down to 28 minutes, figuring Robinson will play 20, and then round up the numbers to account for improvements in his game. That brings me to 12 points, 10 rebounds (3.5 offensive), 2 assists, 1 steal, 1.7 blocks, 1.2 turnovers.

He’s durable, so let’s give him 75 games again. Now his totals are 900 points, 750 rebounds (263 offensive), 150 assists, 75 steals, 128 blocks, 76 turnovers.

Luka Garza will be the fill-in for either of these guys, so let’s just give him the 30 games Robinson doesn’t play and the seven Queta doesn’t play right off the bat. Of course, there will be games where one of the other centers gets into foul trouble, or maybe the matchup requires more of a floor spacer. So there will likely be another 10 in there somewhere for him.

That brings Garza to 47 games next season. With Robinson and Queta in the mix, it’s hard to think Garza will get a ton of time, so his production will be reduced to a degree. It’s entirely possible I’m off right now about how many games he’ll play, but again, I’m erring on the side of conservative here.

One thing that impressed me about Garza is how he produced no matter how long he sat, so I’m not going to even pull down his averages. I think he’ll do what he did last season, just over a smaller sample.

That brings his totals to 380 points, 193 rebounds (108 offensive), 47 assists, 19 steals, 19 blocks, 33 turnovers.

And now our grand total center projections for next season: 1,580 points, 1,343 rebounds (581 offensive), 232 assists, 139 steals, 207 blocks, and 144 turnovers.

That represents increased production across the board, and differences of +92 points, +320 rebounds (+170 offensive), +8 assists, +45 steals, +69 blocks, +7 turnovers. So let’s subtract those difference from the running totals to see how many stats we have to make up:

Points: 1286
Rebounds: +48 rebounds (+109 offensive)
Assists: 180
Steals: +39
Blocks: +64
Turnovers: 164

This suggests that Paul George and Mitchell Robinson can make up for the difference in Brown’s lost rebounding, steals, and blocks. This shouldn’t really be much of a surprise, because it’s mostly Brown’s offense that we’re looking to make up for. Still, in general, it’s good to get some of this stuff out of the way, because guys like Scheierman, Walsh, and Gonzalez are going to add rebounds, steals, and blocks. That's encouraging.

The perimeter guys

We still have Derrick White, Payton Pritchard, Baylor Scheierman, Hugo Gonzalez, Jordan Walsh, and Mike Conley to account for. We need to find an additional 15.7 points, and 2.2 assists per game.

Let’s knock the Pritchard discussion off the board here, because there's a lot of chatter about how much more he’s going to do this season and I just don’t see it. He played 32.4 minutes per game last season and had a career-high usage rate of 21.4%. Even if he plays a few more minutes per game, what more is he going to do?

Let me be clear here: Pritchard is a really good player, but I think he’s at his ceiling. He turns 29 in January, so he’s at the crest of his athletic peak. His three-point shooting took a dip, so maybe he hits a few more along the way this year if he gets back up to 40%. But his scoring would have only gone from 17 points to 17.5 if he shot 40% from three instead of 37.7%. I’m expecting Pritchard to be Pritchard, not anything more than that.

White is an interesting case because his shooting went in the toilet for a lot of last season. If everything was equal and he just hit, say, 38% of his three and 55% of his twos (he shot 32.7% and 48.7% last season), he would have scored 161 more points, bringing his season average up from 16.5 points to 18.6.

We can argue that the missing 2.2 assists per game can be made up just by White hitting shots close to where he used to.

Conley’s potential impact has been very under-discussed. He played 54 games for the Wolves last year and chipped in 4.5 points, 1.4 rebounds, and 2.9 assists. He scored 245 points in total, with 157 assists.

I don’t think he’ll add that much to the Celtics, but I think we can start whittling down the leftover assists.

Let’s allow for a little bit of optimism here because historically, the White/Tatum pairing is a little more productive than the Brown/White pairing. Even if we allow for White making ONE more assisted shot per game, that's 77 more assists.

If we get really granular with Conley’s numbers, he averaged 0.2 assists per minute played in four years in Minnesota, and 0.16 per minute last season. If he can match that in Boston, then he can average 1.6 to 2 assists every 10 minutes he plays for the Celtics.

So let’s stay conservative and say he plays 50 games at 10-12 minutes a game, the Celtics can probably get 100 assists out of Conley next season. I’ll assume he’s one of the guys assisting White on that one more bucket per game, and round it to about 150 assist total.

Even though I’m scaling Conley way down in his other stats, I’ll use his actual turnover numbers from last season, because it was only 34. Since our rebounds, steals, and blocks are already accounted for, all we have to focus on is points, assists, and turnovers.

I think we can find 286 additional points between Pritchard, White, and Conley next season. That's 3.5 points per game over 82.

Points: 1,000
Assists: 30
Turnovers: 130

The home stretch

This is truly how the Celtics can use their depth to account for Brown’s stats. Baylor Scheierman, Hugo Gonzalez, and Jordan Walsh are on the clock to step up for the Celtics this upcoming season. Here are their individual stats from last season:

Scheierman: 77 games, 5.5 ppg, 1.5 apg, 0.6 to
Walsh: 68 games, 5.4 ppg. 0.8 apg, 0.5 to
Gonzalez: 74 games, 3.9 ppg, 0.5 apg, 0.5 to

After all this, I think it comes down to whether one or more of these guys can average double-digits per game.

Frankly, I’m not worried about finding 30 assists per game. Tatum might make that up himself. All three of these guys can combine to find 30 assists next season, so at this point it’s all about the points and turnovers.

If Scheierman and Walsh can average 10 points per game in the same amount of playing time, 343, that's 659 points, leaving 341left. If Gonzalez could average 8.5 per game, that would get Boston to the thousand.

If they can do that without going past an additional 1.6 turnovers per game, then the Celtics could match Brown’s production completely.

The Final Word

First, I think it’s clear that it will take everyone to chip in to make up for the loss of Brown, which shows you what kind of player he is.

Second, this is nowhere close to an exact science, but it is at least a starting point for where to look for added production. George and Mitchell make up for a lot in terms of defense and rebounding. The scoring load can be spread throughout the roster, but mostly it’s going to take a bit of a leap from at least one of Scheierman, Walsh, and Gonzalez. If one of them averages 12 instead of 10, then that lessens the burden on someone else.

Also, if White has a great shooting season, Conley has a solid year, or someone like Hauser or Pritchard surprises with additional production, then they’ll end up being alright. I stayed conservative on this for a reason. There's room in some of these projections for the optimists.

Of course, this also shows the baseline of where certain guys need to be. If they can’t produce to some of these levels, then the Celtics will have to reconsider some things.

In the end, there's a realistic path to making up for Brown’s lost production, but it’s not a guarantee. The pressure is on for some guys to take big steps forward next season, or risk losing their spots.

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