Brad Stevens was in a tough spot. The problem was that the guy who put him in a tough spot was Brad Stevens.
On Monday, the Celtics president of basketball operations held a press conference, along with team owner Bill Chisholm. It was the first time anyone in the organization had spoken about last week’s staggering, unexpected trade that sent Jaylen Brown to the Philadelphia 76ers in exchange for Paul George, two first-round picks and two second-round picks. To say that Celtics fans — and the Boston media — were shocked by that move and none too happy would be grossly underselling it.
But if those same Celtics fans and media expected Stevens to throw himself at their feet and beg for forgiveness on Monday, they were sorely disappointed. Stevens spoke for over 40 minutes and while he tried to explain the thinking behind the trade, he also made sure to let everyone know that “we’re not here to defend ourselves in this decision.”
That probably didn’t go over great with the locals. The guess here is neither did his response to a pretty important question that tends to be the only thing that fans really care about: Did this trade make the Celtics better for next season?
“We’ll find out,” Stevens replied.
That we will, but despite all the spin around analytics not favoring Brown as much as Brown favors himself, it’s hard to imagine the Celtics being better with George next season than Brown. For starters, PG is six years older, has a more concerning injury history and hasn’t been nearly as available. George played just 37 games last season (he missed 25 games due to violating the league’s substance abuse policy) and only 41 games the season before that. In the last seven seasons, he’s played more than 60 games just once — his final campaign with the Clippers.
By comparison, Brown is coming off a career year where he made the All-Star team, second team All-NBA, and carried the Celtics to a surprising 2-seed in the Eastern Conference while Jayson Tatum was on the mend with an Achilles injury. In the last seven seasons, Brown has played 60 or more games five times. That includes him playing 70 regular-season games three years ago en route to the Celtics winning their NBA record 18th championship and Brown being crowned Finals MVP.
George has been a better shooter from deep for his career, but he just turned 36 years old and he’s owed $54.1 million. He also has a player option for the final year of his deal at $56.5 million when he’ll be 37. There’s a reason why that contract was considered one of the worst in the NBA.
So why make the trade? To hear Stevens tell it with one word he kept repeating, “optionality.”
“The way we looked at it,” Stevens said, “is that they’re two potential premium assets [the first rounders]. Both offer potential — who knows? — big swings at the apple. The second-round picks are sweeteners or that you can use in deals … or maybe draft somebody you’re really excited about. At the end of the day, those guys aren’t Jaylen, but I understand there’s a lot of small steps that it’ll take to build out the depth and the team we ultimately want to.”
The depth is another component Stevens attempted to underline. That becomes harder to pull off when so much of your cap space is tied up in two guys — Tatum and Brown. Stevens pointed out that when the Celtics won their last title, roughly 47% of their cap went to the duo. This season it would have been 70%.
“When I looked at our team, and I looked at where the league was heading,” Stevens said, “the path looked a little bit more challenging with 70% of our cap and such a high usage tied into two players.”
Of course, to pull off the trade for salary-matching purposes, they’re in the same situation right now with George’s contract. Stevens hinted at the length of PG’s contract being shorter but didn’t explicitly state the obvious: The Celtics can be done with George after two seasons at most, at which point they’ll be able to free up a lot more money. That’s not the case with Brown. While he won’t turn 30 until October, Brown’s deal will pay him $182.9 million over the next three years — and he’ll be in line for another big-money contract to tack on after that. Stevens and the Celtics did the back-of-the-napkin math and came to the conclusion that the optionality he kept mentioning was more valuable than keeping Brown around (and the fans happy) well into the future.
That’s not an unreasonable conclusion to reach. What’s harder to figure here is why now and why this particular deal? Why trade Brown for a worse haul than the Jazz got for Walker Kessler? Why do it right this second and not shop around for a better offer? And above all, why trade him to one of your longtime rivals where you’ll have to face Brown four times during the regular season and then potentially again in the postseason? The Sixers and Celtics have faced each other in the playoffs more than any two teams in NBA history. That includes Philly pulling a shocking upset over Boston in the first round a couple months ago. And now that same Sixers team features a highly motivated Brown who said he felt disrespected by his old organization.
That part in particular — about the timing and the relationship between Brown and the Celtics — was where Stevens struggled to come up with satisfactory answers. He repeatedly praised Brown as a good player and a better guy, and he said he felt sorry if Brown was upset by how the organization treated him or if Stevens didn’t do a good enough job communicating with him during the process. Stevens added that he’s hopeful they can sit down one day and talk it through. Given how this all went down it might be a while before Brown comes to the table. Stevens also said that he believed the team and the player could have reconciled if the trade hadn’t been made but they ultimately made the move because it was the “right opportunity.”
Good luck convincing anyone who follows that franchise that PG and a dusting of draft capital was the “right opportunity” and worth offloading Brown to Philadelphia of all places. On that front, Stevens conceded that “if the exact same deal came from a team out West” he would have gone with it instead, but “that’s not the way it worked.”
The way it worked, if we’re pulling back to take in the full picture, is that the Celtics reportedly took a run at landing Giannis Antetokounmpo and dangled Brown in the offer. When Giannis ended up in Miami, Brown was evidently in his feelings about coming off the best season of his career only for the only organization he’s ever played for to use him as a trade chip. Whether Brown was justified in his displeasure matters less than Boston deciding that the franchise would be better off if he played somewhere else, and if that happened sooner than later.
And so all of that led us to Monday, with Stevens explaining why he made the move while simultaneously insisting that he wasn’t defending it. Tough to do. It will be tougher still to get Celtics supporters on board with any of this. Stevens seemed to understand that he had invited their ire. He mentioned all the people wearing Brown jerseys around town and tried to joke that “I’m pretty sure I bought a couple of them.”
“I lost sleep over the fan part of this,” Stevens said.
Maybe he was trying to make them feel better with that line? But if that’s the case, the best way to do that would have been not doing any of this at all.