How Jaylen Brown Became the NBA’s Most Interesting Player

This profile is published as part of our TIME100 Next list, recognizing 100 emerging leaders from across the world who are shaping the future.

A few days before the start of the 2024 NBA Finals in June, Brad Stevens, the coach turned executive of the Boston Celtics, joined one of his star players, Jaylen Brown, for breakfast at the team’s practice facility. The Celtics had quickly disposed of the Indiana Pacers in the Eastern Conference Finals—a series sweep in which Brown was named MVP—so the team enjoyed a near week and a half gap before the start of the championship round against the Dallas Mavericks.

It was a quiet moment during pre-finals downtime. But Brown suddenly looked Stevens dead in the eye.  

“Big f-cking two weeks,” Brown told his boss. 

‘I was like, ‘Oh man, we’re going to be hard to beat,’” Stevens tells TIME in a phone interview. “He knew what was coming, and he was ready to take advantage of it. Our whole team was like that. He spoke that confidence loudly. It was not arrogant. It was, ‘This is what it takes. And we're going to do everything we can to do it.’”

The Celtics crushed the Mavs in a five-game series, and Brown was named Finals MVP, thanks to his output of 20.8 points, 5.4 rebounds, five assists, and nearly two steals per game, but most crucially, his relentless defense on Dallas standout Luka Doncic. The victory marked the Celtics’ 18th title, and the franchise’s first in 16 years, breaking a tie with Boston’s historical rival, the Los Angeles Lakers, for the most championships in NBA history.

It was thrilling for the city, but it was also, at least in some sense, foretold. Brown is a fan of journaling, in a notebook rather than his Notes app. “Usually when people journal, they journal past experiences,” Brown tells TIME during an early-September conversation in New York City while he’s in town for Fashion Week. “I journal my future experiences. The concept of manifestation. What I want my experience to be before it happens.” A few years back, he wrote that he was going to win an NBA title.

“Fast-forward,” Brown says, “here we are.”  

But while many of the leagues’ other top players headed to Paris for the Summer Games, Brown, a three-time All-Star who’s entering his ninth NBA season this fall, stayed back—and not by choice. In July, the U.S. Olympic basketball team announced it had selected Brown’s Boston teammate, Derrick White, over him to replace the injured Kawhi Leonard for Team USA. Brown did not hide his displeasure, insinuating the decision was not purely about the best person for the team and perhaps other interests were at play. 

Still, Brown did not spend his offseason sulking. Ten days before the gold-medal game in France, he launched his new nonprofit, Boston XChange, which aims to “build generational wealth and foster cultural innovation in underserved and underrepresented communities,” according to the organization’s announcement. His goal is to bring “Black Wall Street” – a thriving African American residential and business community like the Tulsa, Okla., neighborhood that was subject to white-supremacist terrorism a century ago – to Boston and then replicate the model in cities around the country. About a week later, Brown announced a similar program in Oakland with Mavericks coach Jason Kidd, an Oakland native who, like Brown, attended UC Berkeley.

“This is not something that will happen overnight,” Brown says. “My goal is to be able to use all the resources I can, at 27 years old, and align with like-minded individuals to throw everything we’ve got at this thing.”

As a first step, the Boston nonprofit is partnering with local institutions like MIT and Harvard, plus the social-impact fund founded by Brown’s Celtics teammate Jrue Holiday and his wife, Lauren, the former U.S. women’s national soccer player, to create a business incubator for young entrepreneurs in fields like design, fashion, and culinary arts. Ultimately, the XChange is aiming to generate $5 billion in net wealth for underserved communities, which would help alleviate the racial wealth gap that has plagued the United States throughout its history.

“Jalen knows he has a position of power, and he chooses to invest that power,” says Danielle Wood, associate professor of media arts and sciences—and aeronautics and astronautics—at MIT, who has worked with Brown’s 7uice Foundation (Brown wears No. 7 for the Cs) on STEAM education initiatives. “Bringing together networks of people with great ideas and resources is a way to start movements. Jaylen can be at the center of movements.”

Given his off-court ambitions to deliver real social change, leadership status on the executive committee of the NBA players union, and drive to deliver another title to one of the NBA’s signature franchises, proving in the process that he might have made Team USA’s path to a gold just a bit easier, Brown might just be the most consequential player in the NBA. 

“When it’s all said and done,” says Stevens, “I think his impact will be greater off the court than on.” 

Jaylen Brown learned to walk by chasing after a basketball. He and his older brother were raised in Marietta, Ga., just outside of Atlanta, by his mom, Mechalle, and he’d throw a tantrum whenever she made him take off his favorite shirt with a basketball on it. To prevent a stream of tears, Mechalle would let him wear the shirt for days on end. But she then worried neighbors would think she was neglecting her son. So she threw it out. Jaylen cried for a day straight.

While Brown, whose father Marselles is a 7-ft. former professional boxer, took to basketball early, his mother also stressed education. He grew into a star student, captained his middle-school chess team, volunteered for Habitat for Humanity, and started a recycling program at his high school. Brown could have played for any college basketball power in the country. But he chose Berkeley. “Cal is known for people who share their opinions and how they feel and dedicate their lives to causes and use their platforms to try to make the world a better place,” says Brown. “It just kind of attracted me.”

Before the start of his freshman year, Brown met with a Cal education professor, Derek Van Rheenen, to discuss his academic plans. Everyone knew Brown would likely leave for the NBA after the requisite one year in college. “I was basically saying, ‘Listen, Jaylen, you need to wring this place out like a sponge and get the most out of this while you're here,’” says Van Rheenen. Brown agreed and said he wanted to take Van Rheenen’s graduate-level course, Education 257: Theoretical Foundations for the Cultural Study of Sport in Education. But freshmen, Van Rheenen told him, weren’t permitted to take such an advanced class. “And he said, ‘Well, you just told me that I should wring this experience out like a sponge and I want to take your course,’” says Van Rheenen.

Touché. Brown got his waiver and earned an A. “I gave him no breaks,” says Van Rheenen. “He was held to the same standard as everyone else in the class, and he lived up to it.” Brown focused his final paper on chess as a metaphor for engagement with the world. “I learned about the word hegemony,” he says. “It’s subliminal. Hegemonic structures exist, but beneath the surface. There’s a lot of hegemony in education. Standardized testing, social stratification, there's these things that are underneath the surface that have determinants on outcomes.” 

He also took classes on global poverty and student activism while winning 2016 Pac-12 Freshman of the Year honors for basketball. “Jaylen actually took his classes seriously,” says Ameer Hasan Loggins, a lecturer in Berkeley's African American studies program who has grown close to Brown; Loggins joined Brown on a pilgrimage to Mecca in July. “That’s a testament to what his vibe was. His vibe was, ‘I am a student-athlete. Not trademarked by the NCAA. I am a scholar.’ That was what his intention was as he walked through the campus.” 

In the summer after his rookie season in the NBA, Brown audited Loggins’ class on Black representation in new media. “The offseason for him isn't just dedicated to advancing his skills as a basketball player,” says Loggins. “It’s also dedicated to advancing his development as a human being.” 

Brown has taught himself Spanish and Arabic. He’s studied philosophy and meditations. He plays acoustic guitar and piano. He lectured at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education during the 2018 basketball season, and he returned to Cal three years ago to deliver a talk on panopticism.

Panopticism? Come again? Brown begins an explanation of the social theory put forth by French philosopher Michel Foucault but seems unhappy with where it’s headed. A friend sitting nearby asks me to stop recording. He and Brown review some talking points, before Brown is ready to continue. He asks me to ask the question again. 

What is panopticism? “It’s a structure that creates dynamic normalization, basically that people are underneath the fear of being observed constantly, all the time by either society, social media, or their peers,” Brown says. “When you go to work, there's business performative measures where you have to act, talk, and think and be a certain way, and that stifles individuality and stifles creativity, because everybody is trying to be and fit into this idea of corporate entity. Sometimes it creates that fear that if I act outside of that structure, I will lose my job, or I will be judged. For example, in athletics, you lose your endorsements or opportunities. So it causes everybody to code switch, to kind of speak the same, think the same, be the same.”

Some NBA scouts fretted that Brown’s intellect and outside passions could negatively influence his basketball performance. That he was, in essence, too smart for the NBA. Brown heard these whispers before Boston took him with the No. 3 overall pick in the 2016 draft. “I was confused,” he says. “Part of me was maybe flattered. But at the same time, I didn't understand what it meant.”

Brown’s road to NBA supremacy has not always come with commensurate recognition, or appreciation, of his skills. In his second NBA season, in 2018, Brown helped lead the Celtics to Game 7 of the Eastern Conference Finals, where Boston nearly denied LeBron James’ Cleveland Cavaliers a fourth straight NBA Finals appearance. He led the team in scoring that series. The next year, James decamped to L.A., and Kyrie Irving returned to the Celtics from a knee injury. The Celtics were favored to contend that season. But Irving and Brown butted heads. Brown came off the bench most games. “Political decisions were made,” he says. “We’ve got guys making more money, we’ve got guys they want to highlight more. I had to get put on the back burner a little bit. That’s just business.” Boston’s season ended with a second-round playoff loss to the Milwaukee Bucks. “I could have complained,” says Brown. “But also those moments actually turned me into who I am today.”

(As a vice president of the National Basketball Players Association, Brown later came to Irving’s defense, criticizing the severity of the punishment Irving received from his next team, the Brooklyn Nets, for promoting an antisemitic film on social media in 2022. Brown also tweeted support of a group that rallied at Barclays Center upon Irving’s return. He later clarified that he thought the group—which was associated with the Black Hebrew Israelites, some of whom promote antisemitic views—were members of a known Black fraternity. “I didn’t know who that group was,” he said at the time.)

Ever since Irving signed with Brooklyn in the summer of 2019, Brown has averaged north of 20 points per game. He made his first All-Star Game in 2021. Internet critics say he can’t dribble with his left hand. Brown wore a white glove on his left hand during the 2024 Slam Dunk Contest, and flushed the ball with his weak hand. 

“Jaylen Brown is playing a different game,” says former Celtics player and current TV analyst Brian Scalabrine. “It's almost like, ‘Cool, I know I can't snap that right-to-left crossover, but I'm going to keep trying it.’ As human beings, don’t we wish we all were like that? No fear, no inhibition at all? More than anything that he does, it's his unwavering confidence in his work and his ability to not let the media or fans or anybody dictate what kind of player he's going to be that is the most redeeming quality I find in him.” 

Many fans and pundits openly wondered whether Brown and Jayson Tatum, whom Boston selected No. 3 in 2017 and has emerged as a three-time first-team All-NBA superstar, could produce a winning partnership. They’re both wing players who like to score. Brown was often the subject of trade rumors. But in Game 2 of the NBA Finals, for example, the pair combined for 19 assists during a 105-98 win over Dallas. Scalabrine said that at one time, he would have bet his mortgage that Tatum and Brown would never have that many assists in an important game. “These guys are connected,” he says. “I couldn’t say that two years ago, definitely couldn’t say that three years ago. But now I watch those guys, and they have that perfect balance.”

Brown once proffered that Celtics fans who’ve retreated into Team Tatum and Team Brown camps “have more of a hard time coexisting than me and him do.” 

“We have a championship-level relationship,” Brown tells TIME. “History is going to remember us both for what we accomplished this past season. And I think we have a lot more in store for people.”

He thought, in fact, that they might play together the month after the championship. Though Brown wasn’t originally set to join Tatum and Holiday, veterans of the 2021 Olympic team that won gold in Tokyo, in Paris, he seemed like the obvious addition to the roster when Leonard’s knee issues flared up. When Team USA instead selected a less explosive Celtics player—White—Brown, who was also left off the All-NBA and All-Defensive teams last season, sent out a tweet with three monocle emojis. A few hours later, he wrote on X, “@nike this what we doing?” The next day Brown wrote: “Im not afraid of you or your resources.” Brown has criticized Nike, the apparel provider for the USA Olympic basketball team, in the past: after Nike dropped Irving as a sponsor following his tweet promoting the film, Brown wondered on X, “since when did Nike care about ethics?” White is a Nike-sponsored athlete; Irving, the ex-Nike athlete, was also not named to the Olympic team. Brown told reporters at a summer-league game in July that he “for sure” believes Nike had a role in leaving him off the team. He did stress that he was happy for, and bore no ill will toward, White. (Nike did not reply to a request for comment.) 

Team USA men’s basketball managing director Grant Hill dismissed Brown’s accusation. “I always love a good conspiracy theory, but it was really truly a basketball decision and these are tough decisions,” Hill said on The Dan Patrick Show. Brown took exception to Hill’s remarks. “grant hill calling me a conspiracy theorist is disappointing,” Brown wrote on X. “I’ve been a VP since I was 21 years old I have a great understanding.” Brown launched his own sneaker brand, called 741, in September, turning down more than $50 million in endorsement officers from major companies to retain full ownership and creative control of his product.

In his interview with TIME, Brown declined to talk about the Olympics or Nike. Hill, through a USA Basketball spokesperson, declined to comment, pointing to what he had previously said on this issue. “One of the hardest things is leaving people off the roster that I'm a fan of,” Hill said after the decision was announced. “But the responsibility that I have is to put together a team and a team that complements each other, a team that fits, a team that will give us the best opportunity for success." Hill indicated Brown would be a candidate for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. 

The snub could ultimately benefit the Celtics this season. Not only did officials exclude Brown from the roster, but coach Steve Kerr benched Tatum for two Olympic games and gave him limited minutes in the gold-medal contest. The Brown-Tatum vengeance tour could be something to behold.

“The thing I most look to is, ‘How do you respond?’” Stevens says of Brown. “Where do you go from here? He’s not a guy that needs much motivation to work. But I do know he is the ultimate competitor. And he will take any motivation he can get to put his best foot forward this coming year.”   

In the summer of 2023, Brown was in the final stages of negotiating his five-year, then-record $304 million contract extension with the Celtics. At the same time he was running the “Bridge Program,” his 7uice Foundation’s five-day camp that brings more than 100 Black and brown high school students from Boston to MIT, where they learn about AI, robotics, leadership, and other subjects. “He’d put his phone down and be totally engaged with those kids,” says Dava Newman, director of the MIT Media Lab. The contract was finalized after Brown helped lead a session on robotics engineering. Students from the program joined Brown for the Celtics championship parade in June.

“I think the most powerful thing Jaylen has ever done is not be performative,” says Cory McCarthy, chief of student support for Boston Public Schools. “He was interacting with the students every day.”

For Brown, who drove 15 hours from Boston to Atlanta to attend a protest after the murder of George Floyd, it’s another way to work toward a more just society. “The idea of America is that some people are going to win, some people are going to lose,” he says. “The people that are choreographed to lose are the ones who I'm betting on to win. These students are those types of kids who have the ambition and will to create and make the world a better place. We try to bridge them and get them all the opportunities that they possibly can.” 

The XChange marks the next evolution of Brown’s philanthropic and social-justice efforts. Tackling the racial wealth gap is a daunting task: according to a 2015 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Duke University, and the New School, the median net worth for non-immigrant African American households in the Greater Boston region was $8. For white households, it was $247,500. While Brown knows he can’t attack the problem alone, he’s promising an announcement about his own financial commitment soon. “I plan on allocating a significant amount of resources in order to see one, a better Boston and two, a better America,” says Brown.

“Jaylen shows up, and he is putting his weight behind ensuring that our communities can thrive,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu tells TIME. “That is noticed and inspiring to so many who haven't always felt seen.”

On the court, the core of Boston’s championship team returns this season. “Our confidence level is through the roof,” says Brown, who posted photos of himself lifting weights underwater this summer. “We’ve got a great group. We’ve got a good window. So we want to make sure that we maximize everything that we possibly can. Nothing is promised. So I'm looking forward to getting back with the guys and getting the journey back on again. It's a lot of fun in the process, and the results will take care of itself.”

Brown declines to share an example of a future goal he’s written in his journal, but he’s clear that he’s thinking beyond additional titles and a Hall of Fame induction (though he expects those too). “I want to change the way we view athletes and help athletes understand their value,” he says. “I want to encourage the next generation [to] think for themselves … I identify as both, intellect and athlete. And I wouldn’t say any one more than the other. I want my legacy to balance the two.”

Set design by Sanae Ueyoshi; styling by Wayman + Micah; grooming by Brittany Whitfield; production by Aries Rising Projects