When the trade was announced and fans learned that the player coming back to Boston in exchange for Jaylen Brown was Paul George, it’s safe to say that it wasn’t exactly received well. The immediate reaction was everybody clowning on the Celtics and wondering how they could trade someone who just finished 6th in MVP voting for an old, injured, washed-up PG-13.
Understandably, there were a lot of emotions going into the reaction; Brown had been a staple in Boston for a decade and had delivered on his draft-day promise of going to war for the city, helping raise Banner 18 in 2024 with a Finals MVP performance. He was a great player and a fan favorite, so it would have been tough to see him go in any capacity.
The fact that he was traded to a hated rival who had just eliminated the Celtics, and that the return was a player who’s 36 years old and has played 78 games combined over the last two seasons, just made matters worse. It was a long offseason in Boston, and the criticism was coming from all corners of the NBA world.
Time for Celtics fans to move on and embrace PG-13
But as the season has inched closer, I think most have started to see the Celtics’ vision and understand that PG is still a great player and a perfect fit in Joe Mazzulla’s system, complementing Jayson Tatum in a way that JB simply never did.
Furthermore, George is a proud future Hall of Famer, and he has heard all the noise and is ready to go out and prove everyone wrong. As he relayed in a recent interview:
“To hear that like he’s not "capable" of this… or he’s washed… it’s funny, but it’s frustrating cause it’s like I’m still capable of doing those things when healthy, and I feel like I’m capable of doing those things again.”
George obviously understands the business of the NBA, and I’m sure he can grasp the dynamics of the trade and why it was perceived as a fleecing by the Sixers, but he’s also a superstar in his own right, who has been a first-team All-NBA player.
George still has a lot left in the tank
He knows what it takes to compete and succeed at the highest level, and it sounds like this trade and the reaction to it have awakened the beast within him. In the modern NBA, 36 isn’t young, but we’ve seen older players thriving in recent years, and there’s no reason PG can’t join the club.
Yes, he missed a lot of time during his two seasons in Philly, but in year one, the team was essentially tanking for 3/4 of the season, and in year two, he missed 25 games for a suspension. For the most part, he’s been an iron man throughout the course of his career, and he seems ready to get back to that standard in Boston.
He’s somewhere that he fits, where he’s wanted, and where he has a chance to make a real impact on a team that’s looking to make a championship run. The stars are aligning for PG, and he has worked to get his body and mind right for this journey. The early returns from training camp and preseason have been great; he’s saying all the right things, and this is only the beginning. The sky is the limit for George on the Celtics, and I can’t imagine how sweet it would feel for him to silence all of his many doubters.
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