The Jaylen Brown Trade

Like many Celtics fans, I’ve been struggling to make sense of the Jaylen Brown trade. At face value it is about the dumbest trade possible. This is my attempt to justify it. (I’m writing this in the early morning just before a vacation, I haven’t been able to review it much… be kind.)

• Brad Stevens and the rest of the decision makers are still smart.
• The job of Brad Stevens is to maximize the number of championships. Over the long run, not any one particular year.
• We bought a championship in 2024, bringing in hired guns to supplement Tatum and Brown. We went way over the apron to do so. It was a great deal, and now we’ve been paying off that championship debt for a couple years.
• We can’t be a contender if all the apron penalties apply. We need to get back under and reset them. So last year we dumped a historic amount of salary to do so. (The Celtics went from $540 million to something like $185 million.) We need one more year under the apron to reset everything, then we can buy up free agents again and buy another championship or two. The year after this one is the key one.

Is Jaylen Brown Good?

• Jaylen Brown is a fantastic player. NBA finals MVP (deservedly). 6th in NBA MVP voting this year. Record highs in points and the usual stats. In the end, nothing counts more than wins. With him as team leader, the Celtics finished way above expectations, generating and extra 20 wins or so. He seems to get better every year.  He’s also a great person. This was his favorite year for many reasons, but a lot of it was clearly his relationship with young players he took under his wing and supported.
• But Jaylen Brown is not as fantastic as you might think. All the advanced analytics are not kind to him. His net rating clearly shows that the Celtics do better when he isn’t on the floor. Some try to justify this with waving hands, but it can’t be done. It has been a pattern for multiple years, it’s not just about this years bench. It is unique to him, not Tatum or White or other players with high usage around the league. The sample size is vast. It’s real. His increase in statistics this year can be entirely explained by his increase in usage.
• Jaylen Brown is a very expensive player. Remember he was the highest paid player in the league for a short time. His current contract is very expensive, and is 35% of the team cap. (The absolute numbers continue to go up, but the % of cap is stable. Tatum’s percentage is slowly rising.)
• Brown is so expensive that we can’t build out the rest of the team. We would not be able to re-create that title team, he and Tatum would eat up too much salary to get those other free agents (Jru, Porzingis, etc) needed to be a championship contender.
• So. Yes, Jaylen Brown is very good. The analytics are real, but an incomplete picture. It’s just stupid to think he’s actually a negative on any team. But Tatum is better than Brown. He’s top 5, Brown is top 15. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe (and The Celtics likely do) that Jaylen Brown, as good as he is, is not worth the money. He’d be a steal at $30-$40 million. At $50-$65 million he is an anchor. In other words, Jaylen Brown is very good. But not good enough for his contract. 
• The Celtics cannot be a title contender as long as the massive Tatum & Brown contracts eat up so much of the salary cap. We needed to move off Brown and get back the ability to build a title contending team.

Urgency

• Jaylen Brown is due for an extension in two weeks. If he gets it, all the problems set in for a few more years, The Celtics cannot win a championship. If he doesn’t get it, then he becomes disgruntled. This part doesn’t make that much sense to me. So what – if he’s disgruntled, he’s disgruntled. He’ll still play his ass off, like he always does. I think the issue is that the extension makes him untradeable, but we saw in real life that he isn’t very tradeable already. Let’s assume that not giving him the player option creates enough problems to make that a bad option.
• Therefore, we needed to trade Brown before that option deadline.

What did the Celtics want in a trade

• As Brad Stevens said 13 times, they wanted “optionality”. Which for the love of god is a made up word that is longer than the word it replaces, “options”. Just say options. Or flexibility. Anyhow… Optionality means 1) more/better draft picks, and significantly more cap room in the long run, particularly starting the year after this one (when repeater penalties fully reset).

Given the timeline and urgency, did The Celtics act correctly?

• Sorta. More or less. But if this analysis is correct and Brad Stevens is cold-blooded (which is the job), The Celtics should have traded Brown last year and tanked the season while we were at it. We’d be in a much better place now.
• It was correct to see if we could make a Giannis trade work. It was correct to walk away from the price Milwaukee was demanding.
• It was correct to shop Brown around the league and see what we could get. This was Nico’s biggest problem in the Luka trade. It was reasonable to think you couldn’t win a championship with Luka, it was not reasonable to only talk to one team.
• The basic problem is that every other team has some version of this same analysis. No one else thinks that Brown is as good as his contract either. And the more he was shopped around, the more other owners saw the wisdom of crowds (if everyone else thinks Brown isn’t worth it, maybe I shouldn’t pay a high price either.) This meant the Celtics couldn’t get back the kind of returns everyone thought Brown was worth.

What are the results of the actual trade?

• Is Paul George good? If he’s fully healthy, he’s very good – roughly equal with Brown. But he almost certainly won’t be fully healthy.
• Paul George is nearly as expensive as Jaylen Brown.
• But the Jaylen Brown contracts goes for two more years.
• Paul George has a player option after next year, but at that point he is an expiring contract. The Celtics can move off of him, in the same way the 76ers moved off him. It probably costs us a first round pick to do that, but moving an expiring contract is much easier than one that has more years left on it.
• In the 27-28 season The Celtics will have reset all the apron penalties, have significant cap space to build around Tatum, to sign their own young players cheap (Schierman, Hugo, etc.), get free agents, and will even have a premium draft pick or two. That is the basis of championship team.

Endnote: A couple dump media perspectives:

• You might hear media folks like Bill Simmons saying this years team is actually quite good (true), so that justifies the trade (false). You have to compare against the hypothetical of not trading Brown. If we hadn’t traded Brown, we’d also be a very good team.
• Was it because of the money? In the press conference, Stevens and Chisholm both said multiple times this wasn’t a money decision, it was a basketball decision. That has been mocked, but it’s true. It means that we are willing to pay financial penalties to build a good team. It doesn’t mean that money wasn’t involved – because the amount of money in contracts (cap space) drives basketball penalties.

I wish the trade hadn’t happened. I’ve always been a Jaylen Brown fan. He’s done nothing but play hard, improve, and win. He’s a great person. It’s not his fault that he is paired with Tatum. That is a pretty unique set up, having two superstars about the same age and team longevity on the same team, and it drives some weird dynamics. It’s not Browns fault that he was awarded the supermax contract that set him up to fail. I wish he was still a Celtic. But the trade is at the least defensible. Hopefully we will remember him when we raise another couple banners at the end of the 2020s and retire his number.