Celtics’ Playoffs Collapse Raises New Questions About Jaylen Brown’s Future in Boston

Late Wednesday, Jaylen Brown jumped on a livestream to do some damage control. Days earlier Brown made waves for comments on a stream after Boston’s season-ending loss to Philadelphia. He called the 2025–26 season his “favorite” (Brown, if you recall, was conference finals and NBA Finals MVP in Boston’s title-winning ’23–24 season). He criticized Joel Embiid for flopping while alleging referees informed him there was an agenda against him. The NBA slapped him with a $50,000 fine for his remarks on the officiating. Internally, I’m told, the Celtics’ reaction amounted to a collective eye roll.

Brown didn’t walk back his comments on Wednesday. “I had to say something,” Brown said of the officiating. “There’s an inconsistency, and it’s there.” He emphasized his issues had nothing to do with the Celtics. On Tuesday, Tracy McGrady, the Hall of Fame forward who is close with Brown, said on his podcast that Brown’s frustration “lies deeply in the organization.” Brown lamented that Brad Stevens, Boston’s president of basketball operations, had to address that topic at his season-ending media availability. “I love Boston,” Brown said, “and if it was up to me I could play in Boston for the next 10 years.”

In the aftermath of the Celtics’ stunning first-round exit, everyone—fans, media, the team itself—has struggled with how to assess it. On one hand, that Boston was even in this position was an accomplishment. After gutting the roster last summer, most experts had the Celtics finishing in the back half of the playoff bracket. Some predicted they would miss the postseason entirely. Instead, Boston won 56 games, finishing as the No. 2 seed with a better offensive rating than the season before.

On the other—they did all that. The Celtics were cooking going into the playoffs. They won 13 of the last 16 games to close the regular season. In his season finale, Jayson Tatum, just over a month into a miraculous recovery for an Achilles tear, played 40 minutes. Oddsmakers gave Boston the third-best odds to win a championship. To blow a 3–1 series lead to a team the Celtics have owned in recent postseasons is a catastrophe.

“The part that’s hard to reconcile is just when we were sitting here, if you would’ve told me last summer that we would’ve won 56 games in the regular season, that the young guys would all become contributors, that people would have great impact all up and down our roster, that we would get Tatum back, I would’ve been thrilled with those results,” said Stevens. “But the reality is that we came up short and so now the job is to do an honest assessment.”

The most glaring need is in the frontcourt. Boston had no answers for Embiid when Embiid returned to the 76ers’ lineup midseries. Embiid scored 33-plus points in two of the final three games, averaging nine rebounds and seven assists. Neemias Queta was bad. Nikola Vučević, the Celtics’ trade deadline acquisition, was worse. In Game 7, Joe Mazzulla started Luka Garza—who had played six minutes or fewer in three of the first six games.

Mazzulla, a finalist for the NBA’s Coach of the Year, had a rough series. Mazzulla’s live-by-the-three philosophy has yielded results, most notably the 2024 championship. But the Celtics chucked up 46 threes per game in the series against Philadelphia, six more than they averaged during their championship playoff run. In its four losses against the Sixers, Boston shot 27.4% from beyond the arc. In Game 7, Mazzulla rolled out a starting lineup that had never played a minute together.

On Wednesday, Stevens called questions about the team’s three-point-heavy philosophy “really fair,” adding “we need to look at everything.” The Celtics, said Stevens, have had “a hard time generating really good looks on that first shot.” The team needs “to have more of an impact at the rim.” Asked directly, Stevens supported Mazzulla but left the door open—or at least appeared to—for some tweaks to it before next season.

“I think our coaching staff, like all of us, can continue to improve and get better,” said Stevens. “That said, I think they’re very good and we need to continue to provide them the resources to grow and to get better and to continue to be the best that we can be.”

Brown’s future bears watching. On paper, there’s no reason for Stevens to split his two stars. Since uniting in 2018, Brown and Tatum have appeared in five conference finals, two NBA Finals and collected one championship. In the league that covets versatile, two-way wings, Boston has two of the best of them.

Still, McGrady’s words should be taken seriously. McGrady isn’t a hot take-er, and the deliberate way he delivered his opinion on Brown (“There’s a lot of stuff I’ve been hearing going on with the Boston organization and JB,” McGrady said) suggests he knows something.

And, really, the notion that Brown is frustrated isn’t surprising. Brown has had a complicated relationship with Boston. In 2016, his selection was booed on draft night at TD Garden by a fan base that preferred the team swap the pick for Jimmy Butler (and if they kept it, many wanted Providence College product Kris Dunn). He has been in trade rumors virtually every year since, for Anthony Davis, Kawhi Leonard and Kevin Durant. The Durant rumors, which came in 2022, after Brown helped drive the Celtics to the Finals, were especially infuriating to Brown, sources familiar with the situation tell SI.

To be clear, Boston has never tried to dump Brown; to get players like Davis, Leonard and Durant you have to give up something of real value, and Brown was it. But expect trade buzz around Brown to linger. The Celtics had a very brief conversation with Atlanta about Brown last summer, sources say, as the team was in the midst of its roster deconstruction. It didn’t go anywhere; Atlanta was leery of Brown’s contract and Boston wasn’t looking to give him away. But Brown has taken a leap since then—he will likely land a spot on the All-NBA first team and finish in the top five in MVP voting—and the Hawks need an A-list star.

It may not just be Atlanta kicking the tires, either. More than a half-dozen teams are expected to make a run at Giannis Antetokounmpo over the next two months. The teams that don’t get him will be flush with a combination of draft capital and young talent. One or more could easily pivot and make an offer for Brown. Given Antetokounmpo’s age (31) and injury history, you can argue Brown is a safer bet.

It makes for an interesting offseason in Boston. Last summer’s roster slashing has the team well positioned (Stevens earning Executive of the Year for Moneyball-ing the Celtics to success was an acknowledgment of that from his peers). They are $12 million below the luxury tax, $21 million below the first apron and $34 million below the second, per ESPN’s Bobby Marks. They have five trade exceptions, including one for $27.7 million. They have six first-round picks over the next seven years, three that can be traded. As easy as it might be to nuke the roster, it could be even easier to add a needle-mover to it.

And they need to get better. The regular season will be a lot tougher next year, with tanking teams, several of them from the Eastern Conference, arming up. The gimmes against Washington, Indiana and Brooklyn will look a lot different next time around.

“It starts with we have to put the best roster we possibly can together, and then we need to maximize the strengths of that group,” said Stevens. “This year, some strengths appeared that were, I thought, a direct result of really good development and really good coaching. And we need to, again, look at whoever we have next in July and figure out how to build our best team and play style should be dependent on who’s on your team.”

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