BOSTON — Now five years removed from his coaching career, Boston Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens still receives questions about whether he misses life on the sidelines. When somebody asked him such a query Monday, Stevens replied that he missed it this week.
“This is not for the faint of heart,” Stevens said, referring to the emotions of trading five-time All-Star Jaylen Brown.
Despite those emotions, Stevens and the Celtics sent Brown to the Philadelphia 76ers for Paul George, two first-round picks and two second-round picks. In his first public comments since the shocking trade, Stevens said the decision was “a really hard call.” As difficult as it was to trade Brown, whom he coached for five seasons, Stevens said he believed his team needed a shakeup to maximize its chances of winning a championship again one day soon. Stevens said he thought the future looked “a little bit more challenging with 70 percent of our cap and such a high percent of our usage tied into two players (Brown and Jayson Tatum).”
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Stevens said that Brown and Tatum combined to make 47 percent of the salary cap when the Celtics won the 2024 championship. That allowed the team to build a deep, star-studded supporting cast. Many of those players are now gone after Stevens led an overhaul last season to push his team under the CBA’s second apron. After two consecutive early playoff exits, the Celtics needed to grapple with the reality that they haven’t been good enough since that championship. With Brown and Tatum taking up more of the cap now, Stevens said the team believed it needed to find a new way forward.
“We wanted to stay good,” Stevens said. “And we wanted to add more optionality.”
Ironically, that formula involved acquiring George, whose contract is similar to Brown’s but has one fewer year. Stevens said the first-round picks in the deal, including a 2028 pick with several complicated stipulations, were “potential premium assets.”
“I think the biggest thing is, it’s (George), plus the picks, plus the optionality moving forward,” Stevens said. “Paul’s contract is shorter.”
Before taking questions, Stevens expressed gratitude for everything Brown accomplished during his Celtics tenure on and off the court. In a statement released Monday, Stevens said Brown “will rightfully go down as one of the defining players of this era.”
“Like the best Celtics before him,” Stevens said, “he is a terrific player and has also had a huge impact off the court. On a personal level, I am thankful to have had a front row seat to the first 10 years of his illustrious career. I could go on and on, but a few sentences, paragraphs, or even chapters wouldn’t do it justice. His legacy as a Celtic is forever etched in stone.”
That legacy helped make the trade such a puzzling one for many in the Boston area. The Celtics never missed the playoffs during Brown’s 10 seasons with the team, advancing to the conference finals six times and the finals twice. He was named the Finals MVP after they won the 2024 championship. Last season, he averaged career highs in points (28.7), rebounds (6.9) and assists (5.1) while leading the Celtics to a 56-win regular season. He finished sixth in MVP voting and was named to second-team All-NBA for his role in helping Boston exceed expectations.
Despite Brown’s accolades, the Celtics offered him to the Milwaukee Bucks for Giannis Antetokounmpo early in the offseason. Though that pursuit fell short when Milwaukee traded Antetokounmpo to the Miami Heat, Boston continued exploring Brown’s trade market throughout the rest of the NBA. Stevens said that he communicated with Brown throughout the process, informing his camp every time another team expressed even slight interest. Still, Brown indicated on a recent live stream that he felt the Celtics showed him “a lack of respect.” He said he was fine with their approach to the offseason until “out of nowhere, things just kind of went left.”
“If he feels that way, then I’m sorry about that,” Stevens said. “I am, genuinely.”
Though acknowledging Brown could be mad at him, Stevens said Brown’s reaction to the trade chatter did not contribute to any urgency the Celtics felt to trade him. Stevens also said that the team never reached a point where it believed it needed to trade Brown no matter what.
“The answer is no, that we didn’t feel like we had to do something,” Stevens said.
Stevens also suggested he would have been hopeful the Celtics could have reconciled the relationship with Brown if he had remained on the roster.
“It was very loud and, obviously, there was a lot of talk everywhere,” Stevens said. “But we still weren’t going to do anything unless we felt like it was the right return. And the return for us was two-fold. It was, No. 1, is there an opportunity to get somebody in the door or get tools that could allow you to get others in the door, that could keep you at a good level. And No. 2, would there be assets attached that would then be usable in future deals. At the end of the day, we made what I think was a really hard decision. One that comes with very little sleep to do the trade.”
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Though the Celtics shed some salary in the deal, with George’s contract having one fewer remaining year than Brown’s, Stevens insisted that the trade was not motivated by finances. Team owner Bill Chisholm echoed that sentiment from his seat next to Stevens.
“The mandate here is to win,” Chisholm said. “And we came to the conclusion, they convinced me this was the best way for us to win. And I got there. I did. But it was hard. It was really hard. And I recognize this is a big move.”
Stevens, who has drawn criticism since the trade, said he recognized his decision was not popular in many circles. He emphasized recent NBA trends were among the driving forces behind the trade.
“When it was all said and done at the end of the year, 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,” Stevens said. “And that’s not an easy thing to do, right, and we get that. 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. All that being said, still would not have made a move unless we thought the right opportunity presented itself.”
“We’re excited about Paul,” Stevens added. “We’re excited about a lot of our young guys. We’re excited about the depth of our group. We’re excited about our very best players. We think we’ve got a good team, and we think we’ve got a lot of options moving forward.”