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CHAD FINN

Playing on a much more talented roster, Jaylen Brown is struggling to shine

Jaylen Brown is shooting 40.9 percent from the field, 28 percent from 3, and 66.7 percent from the line.Matthew J. Lee/Globe staff

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Jaylen Brown should be one of the most popular Celtics right now. Consider all that he has going for him, and all that he has achieved:

He’s 22 years old, was taken with the No. 3 pick in the 2016 NBA Draft, and has justified it by emerging as a core player on a winning team.

Brown bounded forward last season, providing highlights such as a 22-point performance in a November win over the Warriors and eight games of 20 or more points in the postseason.

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Brown is intelligent, hard-working, jumps so high he can almost high-five the championship banners, and has more improvement in his future once he tightens up his ballhandling, learns to finish with more finesse, and sees the periphery of the court better under pressure.

Related: Seven things the Celtics should still be concerned about

With further improvement, I’d suggest the sky is the limit, but then he has already been pretty adept at navigating the sky.

However, Brown has struggled to navigate just about everything this season,in particular an altered role brought on by the return of Gordon Hayward and Kyrie Irving. Figuratively and literally — he missed three games after landing on his tailbone while trying to block a shot against the Mavericks on Nov. 24 — he has come crashing down.

The Celtics won the three games he missed, the start of an eight-game winning streak. While Brown had some encouraging moments after returning — he shot a combined 15 for 21 from the field in blowout victories over the Knicks and Bulls — inconsistency still plagues him, and he has been abysmal in the last two games. In 43 total minutes against the Hawks and Pistons, he went 3 of 16 from the field, missing all six of his 3-point attempts. He had as many fouls in the two games (six) as points, with more turnovers (five) than assists (four).

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Perhaps some of that can be attributed to rust — he sat out the preceding game against the Wizards on Dec. 12 — but that requires some generosity in evaluation. The truth is it’s not much worse than he has played all season. Brown is averaging 1.5 assists and 1.5 turnovers per game while shooting 40.9 percent from the field, 28 percent from 3-point range, and 67.7 percent from the line. That’s quite a comedown from his encouraging sophomore season, when he shot .465/.395/.644.

It’s easy to attribute his early-season struggles to a change in role, but his role really hadn’t changed much before the poor performances began. With Irving and Hayward healthy and Marcus Morris have an outstanding season, Brown is not getting as many scoring opportunities as he did in 2017-18, but he’s playing just three fewer minutes per game. For some reason Brown has had issues clicking with Hayward, who was shoehorned back into the starting lineup before he was ready, but he remained a starter until he got hurt against Dallas.

When Brown was sidelined, Marcus Smart got the start at shooting guard, and he has seized it. Along with Morris, who is starting over Hayward, Smart has added a tenacity to the lineup that the Celtics were missing. They have won 8 of 9 and the offense has been the best in the league since the change, and Irving in particular has been effusive about what Smart brings to the starting five. Brown, who started all 70 games he played last season, is now basically the seventh man.

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That can’t be easy for him, but he’s saying all the right things. “So here’s my reality,’’ he told ESPN’s Jackie MacMullen this week, “I’m an NBA player on the Boston Celtics, a team that has a chance to compete for the NBA championship. Nothing else really matters.”

It’s an encouraging sentiment, one that suggests his priorities are in the right order. But it will truly be reassuring only when that apparently selfless mind-set transfers into success on the court.

Last season, Brown became the youngest Celtics player to score 30 points in a playoff game for a team that leaned on him during its postseason run, which fell one win short of the NBA Finals.

Now he’s playing on a more talented roster, and his talent is struggling to shine through. Brown has too much going for him not to soar again.

But until he does, he remains the biggest enigma on a Celtics team that is now succeeding in spite of him or without him more than it does because of him.


Chad Finn can be reached at finn@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeChadFinn.