Brown delivers passionate tribute to MLK

This was as important as any call off the bench for Jaylen Brown this season, except the Celtics rookie was asked last night to talk to the crowd before the game about Martin Luther King Jr.

He drew from a paper he wrote at the University of California last year and, in his words, gave a lengthy, impassioned speech that was “all off the top of my head. It was all last minute, so I threw something together.”

He talked about the importance of putting the teachings of King to work in daily life, then recited four quotes from the slain civil-rights leader. Brown was, again in his own words, “freestyling.” Yet the quotes came to him that easily.

“I took a class on it, student activism at Cal, so it was embedded,” he said. “I actually wrote a paper on something similar to the student rights movement, so I remembered those quotes.

“I’ve been celebrating this day for a long time, and I’ve been appreciating Martin Luther King and what he’s done for a while, so when they asked me to do this, I said yes. They came to me. I wasn’t surprised. I just had to do it. I wasn’t nervous, but when you speak with the mic, you hear the echo and it throws your train of thought off.”

Coach Brad Stevens later joked that Brown went past his allotted time, though the rookie can’t conceive of a time constraint when King is the subject.

“But is there a time limit to talk about him? I think we should do more,” Brown said. “It should be more than one day. We should practice the things he left behind more than on the day he was killed or on the day he was born.”

Bradley is patient

Once Avery Bradley understood he had strained his right Achilles tendon during a Jan. 6 game against Philadelphia, he saw a field of red flags. Few injuries cause as much concern as something involving the Achilles.

He returned last night and scored five points after a four-game absence because he was willing to take his time in recovery.

“It happened in the third quarter of the game, and (trainer Ed Lacerte) actually told me to take it easy and stop, but we had one more quarter and I wanted to win the game, so I kept playing,” Bradley said before last night’s win against the Charlotte Hornets. “It did (send up a red flag). That’s why I was taking my time. I’m going to continue to be smart about it, getting my treatment. I just have to listen to my body and the medical staff.”

It was a quiet return statistically for the guard, who played 33 minutes and was 2-of-9 shooting in the Celtics’ 108-98 victory.

Bradley finally turned the corner when he ran through a full practice on Sunday and woke up yesterday morning with tolerable soreness.

“You can’t think about it because then you’ll limit yourself to being able to go out there and perform for your team,” he said. “Just gotta go out and play as hard as you can, not worry about making shots or making mistakes, just trying to get back in a rhythm. That’s what I’m going to try to do tonight.

Inner-ear issues

Tyler Zeller, who is recovering from a middle-ear infection that started out as sinusitis, had another kind of worry in the process of missing the past seven games with his malady.

He simply wanted to know what the problem was and had multiple tests before doctors were confident they had found the cause behind his dizziness and disorientation.

“It kind of goes along with the dizziness, quick movements and stuff,” he said. “I guess in a real-world sense, it wasn’t bad until you started to play basketball and you’re snapping your head around trying to make quick reads, trying to do a lot of things. Splitsecond decisions were very difficult. As far as just walking around and stuff, I was mostly fine.”

One of the potential illnesses mentioned: vertigo.

“That was thrown out there, but again, we tested it all last week. It was nothing near that,” he said. . . .

A friend of Bradley’s in Austin, Texas, Nate Paul is responsible for putting up a billboard on I-35 asking fans to vote for the Celtics guard for the NBA All-Star Game.

“It’s really neat. I thought it was cool that somebody showed that support,” the Texas alum said. “I live in Austin and going to UT, all the guys there, they support me. So I thought it was pretty cool.”