There's no such thing as a free point (Pt II)
Jaylen Brown is struggling at the line
I’m going to hold off on the Heat’s “have a good summer” post until tomorrow, just in case one or both of the Bucks and Sixers get eliminated tonight. In the meantime, I want to touch on Jaylen Brown’s free-throw shooting.
After going 2 of 5 from the line on Wednesday night against the Heat, Brown is now just 9 of 20 from the stripe during the postseason. And he’s been in a downward spiral for a while.
I’m going to do something you might recognize from when I tracked Giannis Antetokounmpo’s decline in free-throw shooting a couple years ago. Consider the chart below. It shows two things:
Brown'’s career free-throw percentage, regular season and playoffs, up to and including the most recent game (black dots)
Brown’s 50-game rolling average free-throw percentage, regular season and playoffs, up to and including the most recent game (green)
Brown shot just 65.8% on free-throws through his first three seasons, and never better than 68.5%. Slowly but surely, though, he worked his way into being essentially a league-average shooter from the line. Between 2021 and 2023, he shot between 75.8% and 76.4% on free throws. The league average during that time was 77.8%. So, Brown went from being wildly below-average to ever-so-slightly below it. He was, in essence, fine from the line.
But as you can see, his recent free-throw shooting has been in steep decline since December of 2022. The high-water mark for his 50-game rolling free-throw percentage came on December 10, when he went 2 of 2 from the line against the Warriors. Two nights late, Brown went 2 of 6 at the stripe against the Clippers in a 20-point blowout loss, including 1 of 4 in the fourth quarter.
To that point in the season, he had connected on 84.1% of his free throws. Through the rest of the season, he dipped to 71.7%. And in the playoffs, he dipped further to 68.9%. During the 2023-24 regular season, he was at 70.3%, but he had made 74.4%, culminating with a 13 of 13 performance, through January 10. Then, he went 6 of 10 during a blowout win over the Rockets, and shot just 66% the rest of the way. In his last 20 games (including playoffs), he is down to just 59.7%. (Perhaps not coincidentally, that 20-game stretch includes a 7 of 14 game against the defending champion Nuggets.)
His struggles have been especially pronounced in playoff games during this stretch. Through the 2022 NBA Finals against the Warriors, Brown made 75.3% of his career playoff free throws. In the Celtics’ two runs since then, he is down to 63.8% from the line. I’m not necessarily saying that Boston’s Finals loss, or even Brown’s performance during said loss, is why his free-throw shooting has tanked. He shot really well from the line during that series (80.6%), after all.
But it’s definitely interesting that the rolling free-throw percentage began dropping off almost immediately after you’d expect it to given enough time removed from said Finals loss.
The Celtics have looked like a juggernaut for most of this season. With the exception of a preposterous Game 2, they looked like a juggernaut dispatching of the shorthanded Heat in five games. But it doesn’t take many cracks to create an opening. Kristaps Porzingis is likely out for the entirety of Round 2. Who knows if he’ll be able to make it back for the conference finals, assuming Boston makes it there. If he doesn’t, the Celtics are a bit more vulnerable. And that’s the kind of vulnerability that could make something like “one of our two best players can’t make free throws right now” into a much bigger deal that it might initially seem.