Following a Sign in Brad Stevens' Office to Make Sense of the Jaylen Brown trade

It’s fitting that Jaylen Brown was traded to the Sixers by the Boston Celtics during one of the worst heat waves we’ve seen, because people are still hot about it even after a night to cool off. So let’s dive back into the deal to try to figure out where this thing is going.

I want to focus on this, from Brad Stevens’ end-of-season press conference on May 6.

“I've got a little sign above my, above my desk, that says, ‘What do you want, what's true, and how do you get there?’” he said, unprompted, in an opening statement before questions were asked. “There's no question what we want. There's no question, when you look at what's true, that, though we did a lot of good things, we lost in the first round. And we were also 3-11 against the top three seeds in the West and the other top two in the East. And so we've got to get better. And that's been the communication in here, when just talking to the team.

“I think obviously these guys are really committed to growth. I thought the coaches did a really good job of helping guys all get better. But there's another step to take. And whether you're in my shoes, or you're in any of our support staff’s shoes, or if you're in our coaches’ shoes, or if you're in our players’ shoes, we got to get better. So that's going to be the charge and the focus.

“So we'll figure out how best to do that. It'll probably be a balance of development and at some point, obviously, with the draft coming up and free agency coming up and trying to figure out how to make our team as good as it can be.”

Does that sound like a guy trying to blow it up?

I’m not exactly sure what happened from that point. My go-to quote out of that same press conference is, “We have to use what we can to build this thing moving forward and add to it. Whatever moves that means, I have no idea. But I also — I don't take for granted how good we've been when we've been full. When we've been full, and all on the court and playing together, we've been a good basketball team. Those are hard to get, so we just have to be better around the margins.”

So either Stevens is the best poker player in the world, or something changed between May 6 and July 1.

If the answer to “what do you want” is a championship, and “what’s true” is “we just have to be better around the margins,” then the answer to “how do you get there” is not trading Brown for Paul George, two firsts, and two seconds.

That means the answer to one of those three questions, “what do you want,” “what’s true,” and “how do you get there,” has to have changed.

If what they want is a championship, then one of the next two answers is different. If they are trying to win a title above all else, then what’s true about the team couldn't have been that they're good enough with everyone on the floor to work around the margins. If they were good enough, Brown would still be part of the team, Mitchell Robinson would be signed, and we’d be talking about how to find a bench scorer with whatever amount of traded player exception they could free up under the tax.

So did the Celtics brass then determine that the answer to the second question, “what’s true,” was something different? Did they determine the analytics were right about Brown and that he was more detrimental to the process of winning? It’s hard to justify that because they could have just tried to meet the Milwaukee price for Giannis Antetokounmpo. At the very least, they could have found a more productive player that fit the Jayson Tatum timeline somewhere out there.

What we do know is the answer to the last question, “how do you get there?” The Celtics answered that by taking the Paul George deal. And by answering the question that way, there's no chance that they were pursuing a championship this season. The “what do you want?” has to be different, even if the Celtics insist that everything they do is following that north star of raising another banner. They can’t hide behind that for the 2026-27 season.

If they try, then the “what’s true” becomes a massively different beast of an answer. And maybe that's where all of this lies.

Obviously, Boston wants to win a championship at some point. And, also obviously, Brad Stevens isn’t making a move without it somehow, some day, taking Boston a step closer to that goal. The 30,000-foot answers to those three questions provide semantic cover to Boston’s front office as they pivot, scramble, and adjust to new realities.

The “what’s true” is more unforgiving. That connecting piece is where all of this probably went haywire. So what is actually true about this situation?

The CBA forcing Boston’s hand? Stevens miscalculating the market? Brown’s frustration with the team? The team’s frustration with Brown becoming increasingly online and obsessed with his brand? Too much isolation on the floor at inopportune times?

We can keep adding to that list in search of an answer, and we’ll probably ultimately find a little bit of everything was a play. Maybe each thing alone wasn’t enough to stand out as a reason to move him, but added on top of one another, they became too much of a burden.

One feather is pretty light. A ton of feathers is pretty heavy. The good might have outweighed the bad in a lot of these instances, but the CBA puts a limit on how much bad can be true at any single time before decisions have to be made.

What’s true about the Celtics now is that Brown is gone and Paul George is on his way. We still need the Celtics to answer that second question clearly so we understand why they chose this path to get there.

In the meantime, those three questions immediately get posed again, and Stevens needs to make sure those answers start making more sense.

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