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Brad Stevens better be right.
For his sake, this needs to be a moment where he’s smarter than pretty much everybody else or knows something that hasn’t been made public. Otherwise he has dismantled the core of a Celtics championship contender and his own legacy in one fell swoop.
The grim reality for general managers is that one blunder can wipe away all the capital built up from dozens of smart moves. Nico Harrison was well-respected before he traded Luka Doncic. Now he’s a punchline.
Stevens has been terrific as an executive after moving to the front office from the sideline in 2021. He drafted well and has made smart trades.
But now he’s the guy who not only traded Jaylen Brown for an underwhelming return, but made a divisional rival better by doing it. Around the NBA, seemingly everybody hates this trade for the Celtics at first glance.
It would have been one thing to trade Brown for Giannis Antetokounmpo. Giannis is a two-time MVP, who has finished in the top five of MVP voting in six of the last seven years. He is one of this era’s defining stars. It might not have worked, but it would have been a deal created with championships in mind.
When that fell through, no reasonable person could have blamed them for simply keeping the core of the team together and adding complementary pieces.
It’s unclear why the Celtics felt such urgency to keep shopping Brown. They weren’t forced to do anything. Jaylen Brown didn’t ask for a trade publicly and reports say he hadn’t done so privately either.
If bidders don’t meet the minimum bid, the move is to cancel the auction.
Even if the Celtics didn’t extend his supermax contract, he would have been unlikely to hold out. He’d be giving up far too much money.
The Celtics signed center Mitchell Robinson before the trade, a move that would have improved the team with the Brown-Jayson Tatum-Derrick White core intact.
- BETTING: The Celtics’ team total wins line is listed at 50.5 regular season games on FanDuel for next year. Our comprehensive FanDuel Sportsbook review provides a great guide on how to use their app.
If they felt compelled to trade him, they needed to get more and ideally move him out of the East or at least the Atlantic Division. If they had traded Brown for something like the Blazers’ right to swap future first round picks with the rebuilding Bucks, that’s at least dealing a star for likely lottery picks.
The trade they did make — getting just first round picks while taking on a bad contract — would have still been a lousy deal if the Celtics made it with the Nuggets or the Thunder or any other Western Conference team. But at least then, they wouldn’t have been enhancing a rival for the foreseeable future while diminishing their own team.
Instead, the Celtics sent Brown to the Sixers. Boston and Philadelphia not only have a generational blood feud, but these are the same Sixers who embarrassed the Celtics in the first round of the playoffs. Instead of reinforcing its roster to beat Philadelphia, Boston made a move that made the Sixers better.
There aren’t a lot of ways for the deal to mature into a victory for Stevens and the Celtics and there are an abundant number of paths that will serve as a reminder of how bad it was.
Stevens needs the Sixers to implode and for their draft picks to land in the lottery or for Brown’s play to suddenly drop off drastically. Neither of those is likely.
If not, the Celtics will have traded a superstar, who’d been an NBA Finals MVP in 2024 and was Second Team All-NBA this year, for two draft picks unlikely to be near the top and Paul George, a fading former star, who has played less than 60 games in six of the last seven seasons.
So now the Celtics are asking Tatum to carry a huge load in his first full season coming back from a serious injury just to contend to be in the top half of the Eastern Conference’s playoff picture. It’s easier to envision a set of circumstances where the Celtics miss the playoffs than one where they win the East.
That would have been unthinkable in March.
George will likely be here for two years. He’s signed for 2026-27 and has a player option for $56.6 million that he’d be nuts not to take in 2027-28. In the best case scenario, after his contract comes off the books, the Celtics will acquire an elite partner for Jayson Tatum to help them contend. But they’ll have squandered two seasons of his prime in the process.
It’s not hard to see a straight line to how this move leads to the end of Stevens’ tenure.
If this was truly a basketball decision and the Celtics crumble, Stevens could end up getting fired.
Scarier still, if this move was financial, forced on him by the new private equity group fronted by Bill Chisholm, it’s hard to see Stevens wanting to keep leading a team whose commitment to winning is waning.
The Celtics’ entire brand is about championships. Bill Chisholm has no brand yet. The leader of Boston’s private-equity funded ownership group seems like a pleasant enough guy and carries himself like a genuine fan in public.
But the fear when private equity is involved is that profit not banners will drive decisions.
Wednesday’s trade might have had nothing to do with money, but it’s hard to see how it gets them closer to raising another banner.
Just two years ago, the Celtics were fresh off a championship with a young core and smart leadership. Now the Jayson Tatum-Jaylen Brown tandem has been dissolved and it’s unclear what lies ahead.
Brad Stevens better have a plan.
More Celtics content
- Jaylen Brown releases heartfelt statement after Celtics trade to 76ers
- Former Celtics All-Star comes to Jaylen Brown’s defense
- Former Celtics guard signs with Sixers in free agency
- Celtics re-sign big man Amari Williams to two-way contract
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