It has been over a month since the Celtics dealt Jaylen Brown to the 76ers, and there’s still plenty of confusion about the trade. At this point, it should be clear that the Celtics wanted to move Brown badly and wanted to escape their reality of paying two players 70% of the salary cap going forward.
Naturally, this has led to plenty of reasonable speculation that the Celtics are just gearing up to find a better-fitting superstar next to Jayson Tatum, likely by trading the Paul George contract and draft picks next summer when PG’s deal will be expiring.
I think that’s certainly a consideration for Brad Stevens and company, but I’m not sure I’d consider it Plan A, or even a very likely option, to be honest. The emphasis from the organization has been all about optionality, so I don’t see how cycling through different max contract players would be the endgame here.
Brown may be overpaid and an imperfect fit, but he’s still a damn good player. If the Celtics' whole plan is to take a year to try and turn Brown’s salary slot into a better star, that doesn’t seem like a very realistic plan.
There simply aren’t many better options who are going to fit and live up to their contracts. If a player like Nikola Jokic, Anthony Edwards, or Steph Curry becomes available, then sure, that’s a worthy endeavor. But that’s more like a pipe dream and certainly shouldn’t be something that Boston is banking on.
Makes no sense for Celtics to go all-in on another supermax player
More likely, it will be the next tier of stars that the Celtics could trade for. Guys like Donovan Mitchell, Devin Booker, or Jamal Murray. Good players, definitely. But running back the same team with one of those guys in place of Brown is far from a clear upgrade and would just leave the team with the same dilemma that led them to trade JB in the first place.
A much more likely scenario seems like the Celtics trying to build up the team with good players they deem to be on value contracts. That seemed to be a large part of the appeal with Trey Murphy III, who is on a very reasonable contract and could scale up.Â
The plan should be to replace Brown with a committee of very good players instead of trying to splurge on one great one. This would continue the optionality trend and give the Celtics versatility and wiggle room to keep making moves, tweaking the roster, keeping their own players, and being active on the trade market.
It’s not a perfect plan, but it’s a sound one. They’ve already got the superstar in Tatum; the move is to surround him with a team that makes sense, not to just assemble star power. It’s still fun to dream about the next blockbuster deal, but I have a feeling Stevens is more intrigued by the idea of chasing smaller moves that amount to a big upgrade.
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