Boston, MA – July 6: Boston Celtics principal owner Bill Chisholm and president of basketball operations Brad Stevens address the media on July 6, 2026. (Photo by Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Boston Globe via Getty Images
Boston Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens and team governor Bill Chisholm met with reporters on Monday to discuss their perspective on their controversial decision to trade Jaylen Brown to the Philadelphia 76ers.
Stevens was quick to point to the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement as the justification for the move.
“When I looked at our team and where the league was heading, looked at the way that we’ve finished the last couple years and also looked at the unbelievable way we’ve played in the regular season in the last couple years, the path looked a little bit more challenging to me,” he 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% of our cap and such a high percent of our usage tied into two players.
“The reality in this era and in this day and age in the NBA, and you could see it obviously with the last couple of champions … 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.
“And that’s absolutely nothing against Jaylen. 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.”
Those comments alone speak to a larger problem hanging over the NBA.
The Wrath Of The Second Apron
At his end-of-season press conference in mid-May, Stevens hinted that bigger changes could be coming to the Celtics’ roster after their first-round knockout at the hands of the very same Sixers whom they’d trade Brown to a few months later.
“We’ve been to six Eastern Conference Finals, a couple Finals in the last few years,” Stevens said at the time. “We’ve won one. And when you get beat in the first round, you’re not there.”
Once the Celtics dangled Brown in trade talks for Giannis Antetokounmpo this offseason, it seemed as though their relationship was beyond the point of repair. Still, that didn’t stop the shock around the league at the package that the Celtics ended up settling on (Paul George, two first-round picks and two second-round picks).
“I mean, the guy got traded for less than Walker Kessler, one general manager told ESPN’s Tim MacMahon. “That’s baffling to me.” (The Los Angeles Lakers traded two first-round picks and two second-round picks to sign-and-trade for Kessler, so the Jazz didn’t even have to eat a bloated contract like George’s.)
However, another general manager pointed out the size of Brown’s contract—roughly 35% of the salary cap for each of the next three years—and how the NBA’s new financial era could punish a team for building around that deal.
“It’s really hard to tie up that much of your salary cap in one player unless they’re truly generational,” the GM told MacMahon. And he’s not even close to that. If you supermax Shai [Gilgeous-Alexander] or [Nikola Jokić], it makes sense. That’s probably the list. The league is getting smarter now.”
If the Celtics had an otherwise balanced salary sheet, perhaps they wouldn’t have had to move on from Brown so soon. But with Jayson Tatum also gobbling up roughly 35% of the salary cap each year, it was increasingly difficult for the Celtics to make major changes to their roster without moving one of them.
“My general feeling watching us play in really each of the last two playoffs — the second round against New York, even against Orlando in the first round (last season) — was we had a hard time generating really good looks on that first shot,” Stevens said at his end-of-season press conference. “So we’ve got to figure out a way to do better in that, and I think that one of the things that we’ve got to figure out is how to have more of an impact at the rim.”
The Celtics did sign Mitchell Robinson in free agency, but doing so took their entire non-taxpayer mid-level exception. Robinson is one of the league’s best rebounders, especially on the offensive glass, but he’s a complete non-factor as a scorer unless he’s right around the basket. He’ll be a lob and putback threat, but not much else.
Two years ago, the Celtics were fresh off winning a championship. Now, four of their top six players from that team—Brown, Jrue Holiday, Kristaps Porziņģis and Al Horford—are playing elsewhere.
“Ultimately, there’s a lot of small steps that it’ll take to build out the depth and the team that we ultimately want to [be],” Stevens said Monday. “We’re not up here to defend ourselves in this decision that is going to certainly be scrutinized. We’re OK with that.”
Celtics Join The ‘New NBA’
The Celtics assembled their championship core during the one-year phase-in window of the league’s new CBA, and they presumably knew they’d have to blow it apart shortly thereafter. Tatum’s Achilles tear during the 2025 playoffs likely accelerated that roster’s demise, but it wasn’t long for this world either way.
The Brown trade is striking a larger chord in the NBA, though. There’s fear that teams are becoming overly obsessed with maximizing every dollar spent in salary.
“Teams are no longer making purely basketball decisions,” Milwaukee Bucks forward Kyle Kuzma said on Twitter. “They’re making fear-based apron decisions. That means good players get squeezed, homegrown cores get broken up, fan-favorite teams lose their identity, and the overall product loses some of the nostalgia and continuity that made people fall in love with the NBA in the first place.”
The Celtics’ decision to trade Brown is at least justifiable given their salary structure and their concern about retooling around him and Tatum. However, their decision to trade him for that package suggests that they’re among the analytically inclined front offices around the league that had questions about Brown’s impact on winning. (Despite him, you know, being a recent Finals MVP.)
George’s contract is only one year shorter than Brown’s, but he won’t sniff a max on his next deal, while the Celtics might have been under pressure to hand Brown an extension as early as this offseason. The 36-year-old George isn’t a long-term part of the Celtics’ future, but they draft picks they acquired for Brown could be. They also figure to flip George as an expiring contract either next summer or at the 2028 trade deadline.
However, Stevens acknowledged fans’ negative reaction toward the trade and said he empathized with those feelings.
“I keep going back to myself as a kid,” Stevens said. “I don’t want to hear about picks and optionality. I don’t. Unfortunately, in my position, that matters. So, that’s where we are.”
Stevens is right. Front office leaders have to keep both the short and long term in mind. The Celtics wouldn’t have made this trade if they didn’t think it better positioned them for sustainable success moving forward. The vision might be hard to see for now, but we’ll be able to judge this trade more fairly in a few years’ time.
However, the NBA runs the risk of alienating fans in the meantime. Teams making financially driven moves that don’t make much on-court sense is antithetical to building up a passionate fanbase. How do you convince fans to emotionally invest in a team if this might be the payoff?
That’s a problem that the league office and NBA owners will need to wrestle with, particularly if they look to maintain this system under the next CBA.
Unless otherwise noted, all stats via NBA.com, PBPStats, Cleaning the Glass or Basketball Reference. All salary information via Spotrac and salary-cap information via RealGM. All odds via FanDuel Sportsbook.
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