Celtics Star Jaylen Brown Details Partnership with Dara Torres, Boston College
Celtics All-Star forward Jaylen Brown incorporated an aquatic regimen to his offseason this year, working with Boston College coach Dara Torres.
Brown discussed the training during a recent interview with NBC Sports Boston on the Celtics preseason media day.
Celtics athletic trainer Drew Moore reached out to BC to see if someone on Torres’ staff would be interested in helping one of their players. It turned out to be Brown, the four-time All-Star and 2024 NBA Finals MVP.
Torres, a 12-time Olympic medalist about to start her second season as the head coach of the Eagles’ men’s and women’s teams, volunteered. She worked first with Brown in a therapy pool at the Celtics’ Auerbach Center team complex before relocating to BC’s Margot Connell Recreation Center pool about two miles away.
Brown went from a couple of workouts with Torres and assistant coach Chris Morgan to several weeks of multiple days of training.
“Just to perfect my form in the water,” Brown said. “Try to master your efficiency, no wasted movement. I feel like the better swimmer you are is an analogy to life. You don’t want no wasted movement, no drag, no extra. You want to just be able to get from Point A to Point B as easy as possible.”
Brown, who turns 29 this month, stands 6-6 and 223 pounds. He’s been remarkably durable in his NBA career since the Celtics took him No. 3 overall in the 2016 NBA Draft out of Cal, playing in at least 57 games in all nine of his pro seasons, though he was recovering this summer from surgery to repair a partially torn meniscus in his knee.
He averaged 22.2 points, 5.8 rebounds and 4.5 assists in 63 games last season, perhaps somewhat hampered by the meniscus. He has averaged 19.3 points in 135 career playoff games, winning an NBA title in 2024.
He and Torres worked on learning new techniques with apparatuses like fins and snorkels. Torres was impressed by his aerobic capacity to start with as well as his attention to detail. Brown had a fixation on making sure he was improving his technique in each workout.
“He could see the mistakes that he made at the beginning, and then the corrections that he made afterwards,” Torres said. “You can see how much more efficient he was as he made those changes.”
Video of Brown’s training and his interview is available at NBC Sports Boston.