With the news that Jaylen Brown’s hip flexor injury will keep him out at least one more game, I wanted to explore how the team’s offense changes without him on the floor. Brown’s injury has clearly affected his play (his field goals are much worse than almost anywhere else on the field), so hopefully some rest will do him some good.

However, the show goes on. If you include last year, we have a pretty good example of how the team’s style is changing without Brown, so let’s break it down.

Less rim pressure and fewer freebies

Jaylen Brown leads the Celtics in drives per game this season with nearly 13.3 twice the same as Jayson Tatum’s second-place finish (7.6) (the gap wasn’t as big last year, but Brown still led with 10.1 to Tatum’s 9.1).

In a related note, Synergy says Boston as a team has only completed eight isolations in each of the Atlanta and Charlotte games; in the six previous matches they had achieved an average of 15.8.

And of course, fewer drives means fewer free throws. It’s much more likely that the Celtics will whistle when Brown is on the court. He generates a lot of free throws himself, but forcing the defense into rotation also makes it easier for other Celtics to attack out-of-position defenders and make free throws as well.

More passing

If you have fewer insulations, it makes sense that you have more passes, right? This is perhaps the change most visible to the naked eye.

Overall, Boston’s offense isn’t particularly tough, ranking in the bottom half of the league every year during coach Joe Mazzulla’s tenure. Of course, that’s not an indictment of the record-breaking offensive system; the Celtics simply don’t have to work as hard as other teams to get a good shot!

Brown’s role is much more of a finisher than a playmaker, and he has the lowest net pass rate on the team (he catches 46 passes per game, but only makes 31). But without Brown’s ability to get to the rim, the team do need to create more openings by passing rather than by creating the ball. In the previous two games without Brown, the team averaged almost 15 passes per game. That’s neither good nor bad, but it is remarkable.

An increase in threes

To compensate for the lack of Brown’s on-ball creation, the team is shooting even more threes – this year the Celtics’ three-point attempts are up 9.9% when Brown is off the floor, a massive change in shot diet. Last year there was a change of more than 5%. (This also partially explains Boston’s fewer free throw attempts even without Brown).

Losing Brown redistributes his shots among the Celtics’ other capable players, each of whom (minus Luke Kornet and Neemias Queta) has shot more than half of their attempts from three (compared to Brown’s relatively low 30%). Sixth Man of the Year candidate Payton Pritchard has seen his scoring jump from 14.7 points with Brown to 20 in the two games without him despite playing an identical number of minutes, and last year it was an even bigger jump!

In short, the Celtics are leaning even more on their long-range shooting ability, although it will require a bit more passing to get there. The team’s offense has never struggled with or without Brown (they went 12-0 without him last year and are undefeated in two games this year), but it looks a little different.

Brown’s head-down drives to the basket are a vital source of Celtics offense, especially on the rare nights when the three-pointer doesn’t fall. In the play-offs it remains paramount to have as many ways to score as possible. But for the regular season, we have plenty of evidence to suggest the team can survive short periods without him.