Key takeaways from Celtics' Jaylen Brown trade press conference originally appeared on NBC Sports Boston
The Jaylen Brown trade between the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia 76ers became official Monday afternoon, and it has caused quite a reaction around the basketball world since it was first reported last week.
The C’s traded Brown, who they drafted No. 3 overall in 2016 and won a championship with in 2024, to the Sixers in exchange for Paul George, two first-round picks and two second-round picks.
A few hours after the deal was made official, Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens and team owner Bill Chisholm held a press conference. The theme was “optionality.” This was a word Stevens used many times when responding to questions about this trade.
“I think when you use the term ‘optionality’, you’re talking about just length of contract and assets,” Stevens said. “So that’s where the increased optionality comes from.”
George’s contract is shorter than Brown’s, and the C’s got four picks in this trade that they can use to make other roster additions.
You can watch the entire press conference in the video below. And under the video player, we highlighted the best moments from the event.
Two stars taking up 70 percent of the salary cap
The current CBA makes it very challenging to build out a roster with enough depth if you have two superstars on max contracts that take up 70 percent of the salary cap. Stevens noted that when the C’s won the NBA Finals in 2024, Tatum and Brown made up 47 percent of the cap combined.
“When I looked at our team, and I looked at where the league was heading, looked at the way that we’ve finished the last couple of years and also looked at the unbelievable way we’ve played in the regular season in the last couple of years, the path looked a little bit more challenging to me,” Stevens said.
“I might be wrong. I’m not going to stand up here and be defensive about that. But the path looked a little bit more challenging with 70 percent of our cap and such a high percent of our usage tied into two players.
“And the reality in this era, and in this day and age of the NBA, and you could see it, obviously, with the last couple of champions and some of the teams that were at the very top of the league, when it was all said and done at the end of this year is that, you have to do a great job and you have to have the optionality to do a great job of building out depth that can hopefully replace the irreplaceable individual. And that’s not an easy thing to do, right?
“And we get that. And that’s absolutely nothing against Jaylen, right? If you have Jaylen Brown on your team, you should feature him. You should use all those possessions, and you should approach things that way. But I think the importance of depth, and then obviously, we have to continue to work on ways to diversify our attack overall. All that being said, still would not have made a move unless we thought the right opportunity presented itself.”
“We like Paul”
Paul George is not as good as Jaylen Brown. George also is 36 years old and, mostly due to injuries, has played more than 60 games in a season only once since 2019. But he is still a good player. George, when healthy, remains a quality scorer and a reliable defender. He played fantastic in the Sixers’ first-round upset over the Celtics this past season.
“We like Paul,” Stevens said. “Paul’s a really good player. We’re not very far removed from all sitting in our series against Philadelphia and watching Paul be a guy that could carry you, for portions of a quarter or a half, but also play a complementary role on both ends of the floor at the highest of levels. He’s excited to come to Boston. He actually already came in this weekend, and we’re excited to get a chance to work with him.”
Draft picks could become “premium assets”
The two first-round picks the Celtics got from the Sixers in this trade could end up being the most useful assets for Boston. It can be hard sometimes for fans to get really excited about draft picks years down the road, but the more first-rounders you own, the more options you have in the trade market.
“From the draft assets, I get it. I’m a fan first and foremost,” Stevens said. “When I was a kid, I could care less about what picks came back, right? Especially second-round picks. I get it. But the draft assets in this whole deal, the way we looked at it was there are two potential premium assets.
“And so, the quality of the assets, both the 2031 Philly (pick) and the super complicated 2028 pick, which we don’t really need to go into here, both offer potential, who knows, big swings at the apple. And then the second-round picks are sweeteners that you can use in deals to do things to put your team over the top, or maybe draft Jordan Walsh or Dillon Mitchell or somebody you’re really excited about.
“At the end of the day, those guys aren’t Jaylen, but I understand that ultimately, there’s a lot of small steps that it’ll take to build out the depth in the team that we ultimately want to.”
Trading Brown to a rival such as Philadelphia
It’s not easy to trade a great player to a longtime rival that also happened to beat you in the most recent NBA playoffs. But at the end of the day, the job of the front office is to make the best possible trade.
“The Philly part, that is a hard thing, to trade a guy that you, first of all, care so much about, but secondly, have so much respect and admiration for, to a team that just beat you in the playoffs, and that you’re gonna literally play six times before the playoffs next year with our two preseason games,” Stevens said.
“But I do think that ultimately, when you do a deal, you have to be thinking about you first and the optionality it creates for you. If I was being honest, if that exact deal came from a team out west and you were comparing the two, then you’d probably take the team out west, but that’s not the way it was working.”
Did Stevens ask Jayson Tatum about the trade?
Stevens made it clear he did not ask for Tatum’s, or any other player’s input, about the trade.
“I have a real hard, fast rule: I don’t ask other guys about other guys because it’s not — I don’t want to put them in that position, and so he had none,” Stevens said.
“The mandate here is to win”
Celtics owner Bill Chisholm made it clear that the goal for the Celtics is to win, and that the team is not afraid to spend money to make that happen.
“This was all about trying to win and really trusting in our process,” Chisholm said. “We have, I think, the best front office in the NBA, and they put in their work and they came to the conclusion this was the best way for us to win. The mandate is to win. And I just have to keep saying that. We’ll spend whatever it takes to do that. The mandate is to win.”
Role of analytics in making the Brown trade
Analytics has been a popular talking point in regards to this trade, especially on social media and the comments from a Bobby Marks interview on SiriusXM NBA Radio last week.
Stevens considered analytics a “small” part of the process here.
“You take in every angle and every ounce of information that you have, and you put it all together, right? For me, and Mike and his staff might get mad at me — they do every day — I would say that was a small piece of information for me,” Stevens said.
Next moves
There’s been some debate over whether the Celtics have another move lined up. Stevens didn’t suggest there’s anything coming soon.
“We’re open, and we’ll be open. I don’t anticipate anything in the very near term,” Stevens said. “We do like the team we have. We might be able to add to it, but at the end of the day, we like the group we have.
“We like the people that we think will be able to officially sign. We’re cognizant that we have a lot of work to do.”
