By Ian Levy

Nylon Calculus, brought to you by The Step Back

Every year, the playoffs and myriad circumstances offer players the opportunity to step forward, fill larger roles and develop under pressure. More than a few players have done that this season but no one has done it quite as dramatically as the Celtics Jaylen Brown.

In five games against the Milwaukee Bucks, Brown is leading the team in scoring, averaging 21.8 points, 5.4 rebounds and 1.8 assists, shooting 49.4 percent from the floor and 44.4 percent on 3-pointers. The most notable leaps from his regular season performance are in the areas of scoring efficiency and volume.

The context for the Celtics is obviously the absence of Kyrie Irving, who led the team in scoring and usage during the regular season but underwent knee surgery in the middle of March. Originally his timeline was a bit murky, but just before the playoffs began Boston announced that Irving’s recovery would hold him out for the entire postseason.

Brown assumed more on-ball offensive responsibility when Irving went out in March, averaging a few more touches and being much aggressive about attacking off-the-dribble when he did have the ball. However, he’s taken it to another level in this postseason series.

Brown is averaging roughly the same number of drives per 36 minutes (and scoring roughly as often on those drives) as he did during the stretch at the end of the regular season when Irving was out. However, he’s getting more opportunities to drive as the primary initiator, seeing about 10 more touches per game than he did during that stretch, with an increase in his time of possession.

In the playoffs, Brown is using nearly twice as many possessions per game as the ball-handler in the pick-and-roll as he did during the regular season. He’s also scoring 1.11 points per possession in those scenarios, a mark that’s comparable to the regular numbers of Stephen Curry or Kyrie. One of the reasons he’s been so effective out of the pick-and-roll is his pull-up jumper has been flaming hot.

Objectively, taking more pull-up jumpers relative to drives is not necessarily a good thing. However, it’s the next stage in Brown’s development as a primary scorer -- moving from a finisher and catch-and-shoot threat to a legitimate three-level scorer. Obviously, this is a very small sample size (just 16 pull-up attempts so far in the playoffs) but it’s exactly what you would want to see from Brown if he was going to become a more diverse offensive player.

Watch here, as Brown probes with the dribble and then retreats into the space the Bucks give him to nail the 3-pointer. Later in Game 1, he uses a hesitation dribble and the threat of a pull-up jumper to freeze the big man defender on the baseline and slide past for a layup. This is what the, until-now hypothetical, Jaylen Brown No. 1 scoring option looks like. Able to make plays off others. Able to make scoring plays with the ball in his hands.

Brown is not the only player who has benefited from the opportunity to attack more with Irving out of the lineup -- both Terry Rozier and Jayson Tatum are getting similar, incredibly important reps. But Brown has been, arguably, the most successful and his deviation from his regular season role is, arguably, the biggest of the three players.

When Brown has been on the floor in this first round series, the Celtics have been outscoring the Bucks by an average of 10.1 points per 100 possessions with an offensive efficiency (113.5) that would have ranked first in the NBA across the entire season. Moreover, Boston’s offense has fallen off dramatically with Brown off the floor, posting an offensive rating of 84.5 in the 58 minutes he’s been on the bench in this series.

If the Celtics do make good on their 3-2 series lead and advance past Milwaukee, they can point to Brown as one of the major reasons why. If they hit their ceiling in future seasons as a deep and versatile team capable of elite performance at both ends of the floor, they’ll likely be able to point to Brown and the experience he gained in this series as one of the major reasons why.