Part of the reason why the Boston Celtics got so much backlash for trading Jaylen Brown is that it's hard to replace someone as talented as him, especially after he just had his best season. Then again, basketball isn't all about talent. It's about process, fit, chemistry, fundamentals, and more.
And if there's one team that knows this, it's the Boston Celtics. Even if we don't know what's to come after the Brown trade, Boston has been through this rodeo before. It dates back to the start of the Joe Mazzulla era.
Joe Mazzulla has been here before with the Celtics
When Mazzulla was thrust into his role as Boston's head coach in 2022, winning a title wasn't his only challenge. He also had to figure out how the team was going to compensate for Al Horford's minutes restriction and Robert Williams III's inevitable time on the shelf.
It wasn't necessarily about trying to replace them with players who possessed the same skill set, but rather about inserting big men whose fit with the team was good enough to make up for the talent drop-off.
Not everyone was a winner - how many Celtics fans remember Noah Vonleh? How many remember Mfiondu Kabengele? - but Boston made it work with the likes of Grant Williams, Blake Griffin, Luke Kornet, and Mike Muscala.
It worked well enough that, with Horford and Williams more or less ready to go in the postseason, Boston was within inches of going back to the NBA Finals in 2023. It took the likes of Caleb Martin and Gabe Vincent playing their best basketball ever to push Miami over the top.
Boston not only proved that they could push past their best bigs' limitations, but that doing so could help them go further in the playoffs. That was only the beginning.
It's been a recurring theme of the Joe Mazzulla era
From there, Boston has both faced and welcomed basically the same challenge over the last few years. During their run to Banner 18, they had similar problems with Horford and Kristaps Porzingis, so they turned to Kornet and some Portuguese castoff from Sacramento named Neemias Queta. And they added Xavier Tillman at the deadline.
Yet again, replacing their best bigs in the aggregate proved successful. They didn't skip a beat, and look where it got them. They faced that challenge again the following season, if not more so, when they tried to defend their title. They had to turn to their big man depth even more to replace Porzingis and Horford, but they also had to do something similar with Jrue Holiday.
Hence, they turned to Payton Pritchard, who went from being Malcolm Brogdon's sort-of replacement to basically helping compensate for Holiday's absence by playing the same role Brogdon played in Boston in a year. It was still pretty smooth sailing despite the limited availability of their best talent.
Last season, the Celtics saw this challenge amplified more than ever. Jayson Tatum was down, and they lost the majority of their title team. Porzingis, Horford, Holiday, Kornet - all gone! Yes, the playoffs did not go how they had hoped, but they still wound up being one of the NBA's most surprising teams, as they barely got any worse.
Brown did his thing, but everyone else stepped up and basically broke out to keep the team afloat. So evidently, Boston replacing the talented players they lost has never fazed them. Now they have to do it again with Brown no longer on the team.
The Celtics will be asking plenty of guys to step up in Brown's absence, and that goes beyond Paul George. Because they have a proven track record of overcoming this exact challenge for four years now, there's little reason to think that it will all stop this season!
Add us as a preferred source on Google