Jaylen Brown and the Celtics are heading back to Boston after sweeping their three-game road trip following Thursday’s victory over the short-handed Los Angeles Lakers.
The Celtics have won five straight games and seven of their last eight. Brown expressed how it has the group feeling good after an extended stretch in which Boston was constantly at or below .500.
“We came out here on the West Coast and we wanted to leave back home feeling good about ourselves, and we do,” Brown said on the TNT broadcast after Boston’s 121-113 win at Staples Center. “That’s big for us. We’ve been struggling up and down. Second half of the season we look to be better than the first half, so we’re trying to ramp it up a little bit.”
Boston’s win over LA comes after the C’s came back to defeat the Denver Nuggets and held on to beat the Portland Trail Blazers, both who are among the top six seeds in the Western Conference playoff picture.
And the Celtics couldn’t have done so without Brown. Celtics head coach Brad Stevens probably put it best on a postgame video conference.
“Jaylen was just unreal tonight,” Stevens said.
Brown finished with a game-high 40 points on an incredibly efficient 17-for-20 from the field. He made three of his five 3-point attempts and added nine rebounds and three assists in the effort. Brown was a team-best plus-36 on the night.
“Tonight he was really dialed in scoring the ball,” Stevens said. “You’re not going to always shoot as efficiently as he did tonight. Obviously, that’s like once-a-season type of numbers, usually. But he’s had a great year and he continues to get better and tonight was the night he got going and we tried to ride that as much as possible.
“So, I thought him with the second unit separated the game. It allowed us to get some rest for those other guys,” Stevens continued. “He was great tonight, can’t say enough good things.”
Brown now has three 40-point games in his career, all of which have come this season. He is the first Celtics player in franchise history to score 40-plus points while shooting at least 85 percent from the field, per Celtics Stats.
Both Brown and the Celtics will look to keep it going Saturday as they welcome the Golden State Warriors to TD Garden.
