Brad Stevens says ‘optionality,’ cost of stars against salary cap motivations for Jaylen Brown trade

Why now? Why for Paul George, an aging but very expensive player? How is this bringing Boston closer to maximizing the prime years of Jayson Tatum and winning another ring?

Monday, Brad Stevens explained his reasoning for trading away Jaylen Brown and all of the above questions. Stevens, the Boston Celtics’ president of basketball operations, pulled the trigger on a Brown-to-Philadelphia-for-Paul George trade that has been lambasted around the league and vilified in Boston. He took to the podium, sitting next to team owner Bill Chisholm, and explained his reasoning largely as “optionality.”

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“When I looked at our team and where the league was heading, looked at the way that we’ve finished the last couple years and at the unbelievable way we’ve played in the regular season in the last couple years, the path looked a little bit more challenging to me. I might be wrong. I’m not going to stand up here and be defensive about that, but the path looked a little bit more challenging, with 70% of our cap and such a high percent of our usage tied into two players (Brown and Tatum).

“The reality in this day and age at the NBA, and you could see it obviously with the last couple of champions … you have to do a great job of building out depth that can hopefully replace the irreplaceable individual. And that’s not an easy thing to do. And 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.”

Stevens is not wrong on key underlying facts. Tatum and Brown are both on supermax contracts, and next season they would have taken up 70.4% of the team’s salary cap, making it challenging to build out around them. Brown is up for a max contract extension on top of it, while it’s possible Boston can trade George next season in the final year of his deal (once he picks up his $56.6 million player option, which he will). Both Tatum and Brown are high-usage players who are best…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/brad-stevens-says-optionality-cost-153531496.html

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Publish date : 2026-07-07 15:35:00

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