Please Don’t Trade Jaylen Brown

We just want to root for our guys – the guys we drafted – until they retire as Celtics.

I still haven’t met a Celtics fan who wants the team to trade Jaylen Brown.

If you consume any speculative NBA rumors, you know that Boston has supposedly been shopping Brown on the trade market for weeks, starting with a move that would have brought Giannis Antetokounmpo to the northeast.

When the deal for Giannis fell through, every Celtics fan I talked to breathed a sigh of relief.

Yes, a deal that would have sent Brown away in exchange for Giannis – 2x NBA MVP, Finals MVP, 9x All-NBA, 5x All-Defense, and NBA Cup MVP¹ – was widely seen as a bad trade by Boston fans.

We’d rather have JB than Giannis.

Hell, we’d rather have JB than anyone.

Here’s why.

Celtics fans don’t care who our best player is

Since Jayson Tatum was drafted in 2018, analysts have loved to debate who is the better player, Tatum or Brown. It’s inescapable in the discourse around the Celtics.

This chatter reached a fever pitch in 2024 when Boston won the title. Brown won both the Eastern Conference Finals MVP and NBA Finals MVP trophies. He deserved both accolades, but it was noteworthy that Tatum emerged from the championship run without an individual accolade to his name.

Celtics fans lamented the outcome, not because we cared at all – our team just won the championship! – but because we knew this discrepancy would become a talking point for podcasts and talk shows. We’d just witnessed our favorite two players lead our team to a dominant postseason run, and we’d have to listen to outsiders debate who deserved more credit.

Everyone else swirls that debate. We don’t care about it at all.

That talking point is reminiscent of how the media used to discuss Brady & Belichik

You’d hear a similar talking point throughout the Patriots’ dynastic run over two decades: “Who’s more responsible for the Patriots’ success: Brady or Belichick?”

This, too, was asinine.

Outsiders used to ask me that question because they’d heard it on First Take or something as if I was supposed to choose between my quarterback and my head coach.

Why would Patriots fans care at all about who was more responsible for the team’s success? They were both on our team!

Later, Brady won a title with Tampa Bay while Belichick floundered in the dusk of his Patriots tenure and NFL fans outside of New Englandwould say, See? Clearly it was Brady all along. As if Patriots fans were supposed to be sad that we got to root for the best football organization ever built.

My middle school students tell me, “If you didn’t have Tom Brady, the Patriots never would have won those Super Bowls.” That’s an argument only a developing frontal lobe could concoct.

Imagine for a second that Brown gets traded to New Orleans and wins a title there.² We would hear, “Well, there you have it: he was the best player all along.” And Celtics fans would be expected to somehow feel badly about the 2024 championship in retrospect because, in fact, Brown was our best player.

See how little sense that makes?

If both Tatum and Brown feel unappreciated, that’s a problem that coaching can solve

As I rehashed earlier, Jayson Tatum spent the summer of 2024 feeling unappreciated in the wake of the championship run and during the USA Gold Medal run in which Steve Kerr barely played him. The media claimed he felt like he wasn’t getting enough credit for being a great player, primarily because of Brown’s spotlight.

Now, Brown is claiming that this season was his favorite of his career – despite getting knocked out by the goddamn Sixers in the first round after blowing a 3-1 lead – presumably because of Tatum’s absence and his own ability to lead the team. Yet, in the wake of being dangled in trade talks, he feels disrespected, primarily because he is not seen as the best player on his own team.

How can both of them feel this way?

This is a matter of coaching, not team-building.

Joe Mazzulla needs to get them both in a room – Brad Stevens watching through a two-way mirror – and explain to them that this is the best possible problem to have in the NBA.

If JB gets traded to New Orleans or Atlanta or Washington or Portland or literally anywhere that can reasonably make an offer for him, he will be doing Twitch streams by February asking his front office to make a move to get him some help.

If he gets traded to Denver by some miracle, he will be the second-best player on his team and will never be accepted by the city the way he is loved in Boston.

It’s reasonable for Brown to let his eyes wander around the league and fantasize about a different situation. But in Boston, he has a max contract, the trust of his fanbase, and an elite roster around him. A trade would not bring him the answers his thinks it will.

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A frequent occurrence in my middle school classroom is that I’ll give a shoutout to a student for something small, for example, “R____ has written an answer that synthesizes the our class discussion.” And another student will say, “I did that, too!”

My response is always, “Someone else’s spotlight doesn’t take away your shine.”

So, if any of you have Joe Mazzulla’s or Brad Stevens’ email address, can you forward them that paragraph? I think it would help the Boston Celtics resolve their differences.

The homegrown star

The best thing to root for in modern sports is for your favorite team to draft a rookie, have them turn into a superstar, watch them win championships, and retire on that team. It’s so rare in the landscape these days that I have very few examples of it happening in my lifetime. Guys like Kobe, Curry, and Dirk are icons that Giannis was modeling his legacy after until his relationship with Milwaukee became so toxic that a trade had to be made.

Even in the case of Giannis, who was the topic of trade talks so saturated to the point of becoming nauseating, every Bucks fan I texted the morning the Heat trade went down was sad. They were all rooting for the Bucks to make it work, holding out hope that they could root for their favorite player on their favorite team until he retired.

The Celtics have a chance to do that with two players, concurrently, in a situation that is completely against the grain of the NBA flow these days.

The Knicks just won the title³ with one single player in their rotation whom they drafted – Mitchell Robinson – and as I’m writing this, he just signed a contract with the Celtics.⁴ It’s so rare to keep your homegrown superstars, and when they leave, fanbases mourn the loss.

Look at the uproar in Dallas in the wake of the Luka trade. Bucks fans after Giannis. Klay’s signing with Dallas.

Dame agonized for years over leaving the Blazers, and when he was finally gone, he realized he never should have left: he went right back to Portland.

Please, Celtics management: Don’t do this

If you pay attention to the rumor mill, it seems like a done deal that the Celtics are going to trade Jaylen Brown. I firmly think that would be a mistake.

There have been passive-aggressive digs, public slights, and hurt feelings. All of that comes with the territory of being an elite team in contention for a championship every year for a decade. Get in a conference room and talk like adults.

There is no situation better for Jaylen Brown than the one he has in Boston.

There is no alternative to Jaylen Brown that Celtics fans would be happier with.

I trust Brad Stevens’ decision-making, but I think he is wrong that the best course of action would be flipping Brown for suboptimal talent and a handful of picks.

We just want to root for our guys – the guys we drafted – until they retire as Celtics.

Absolutely they should change their approach because I can’t endure another agonizing playoff exit like the last two years.

Play Baylor Scheierman more. Teach Mitchell Robinson to shoot granny style. Get Hakeem in the gym with Tatum. Don’t start Ron Harper Jr. in a Game 7.

But please don’t trade Jaylen Brown.

What’s your Jaylen Brown/Celtics opinion?

1. That’s a real accolade

2. He would never win a title there

3. Sickening

4. If the Celts had Robinson this season, he would have stopped Embiid enough for the Celtics to at least make the second round. This signing alone should be enough to stop the JB trade talks altogether.