I can't be the only person who's feeling like he's been living in a bizarro world this week, as the Boston Celtics appear to be hell-bent on trading away Jaylen Brown.
When the returning piece was Giannis Antetokounmpo? Fine. I get it. He's not my cup of tea, and he might be damaged goods at this point, but he's also a two-time league MVP with five more top-four MVP finishes and one of the most uniquely dominant players in NBA history. Trading a star to get a superstar at least makes sense in the broad picture.
Yet everything that's happened since the Celtics missed out on the Giannis trade early Tuesday morning has been very, very strange.
Chris Mannix said the Celtics were interested in trading Brown for Cleveland's Evan Mobley. That would be a downgrade. Most trades would be, frankly. Brown is not a perfect player, and he's not a superstar, but he has made two All-NBA Second Teams. He has made five All-Star teams, and he did win Eastern Conference Finals MVP and Finals MVP during the Celtics' championship run just two Junes ago.
Despite that, ESPN insider Brian Windhorst made this eye-opening statement this week:
"The most important thing in the league right now for what's going to happen in the 26-27 season is that Boston has apparently decided that Jaylen Brown probably needs to be traded for them to be the team that — you know, a competitive team."
They need to trade Jaylen Brown in order to be ... a competitive team?
Perhaps Windhorst misspoke, but it's the type of comment that makes you scratch your head and wonder what planet you're currently on. (The fact that Windhorst came out days later and bluntly stated, "he's gonna get traded," indicates he meant what he said.)
Brown is by no means a perfect player, and the Celtics' first-round collapse against the 76ers was an out-and-out embarrassment. On that, there is no question.
But with Brown leading the way while Jayson Tatum was sidelined for the majority of the season, in a year with a deconstructed roster that wasn't built to vie for a championship, the Celtics were a lot more than competitive. They won 56 games, earned the No. 2 spot in the East (with plenty of distance between themselves and the eventual champion Knicks), and were the favorites to win the Eastern Conference all the way up through their fateful Game 7 with Philadelphia.
That is to say, even while facing elimination in the first round of the playoffs, the oddsmakers felt the Celtics were the team best equipped to emerge from the Eastern Conference and reach the Finals.
Obviously, that part is a bit of a moot point, or it's ammo for anyone who wants to claim Brown is overrated, or that the Celtics' run was a complete mirage. (Me, personally? I blame, in order, the coach, the coach, and the coach.)
Whatever you may feel, the reality is that the Boston Celtics in 2025-26 were competitive. They were competitive a year prior, when -- ahem -- the coach coached them right out of the playoffs yet again. And they were certainly competitive a year before that, when they took advantage of a soft postseason road and hung the first banner Boston's seen in 16 years and the second in 38 years.
We have this longstanding belief around here that the Celtics win titles. That's what they do. Count the banners, etc. In reality? They haven't won that much in the conscious lifetimes of anyone born since the late '70s.
And one of the years they did win it all? Brown was recognized as the driving force in the biggest moments.
Now just two years later, the team needs to dump him (for the likes of Evan Mobley) in order to be competitive?
Something smells.
What that is, exactly, remains difficult to discern.
If Brown is at odds with Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens, then Stevens did a tremendous job hiding it on Tuesday night.
"We spent a lot of time, just the two of us, sitting down together," Stevens said of Brown. "And I thought we had really good, candid conversations.”
Stevens added: "Jaylen Brown is a big part of us. I’m never going to predict the future. But every indication, everything that I think about over the past few years has been building around those guys. And so, obviously, you never know, but at the same time, I think the one thing I want to make very clear is how valued he’s always been. He’s been amazing, he’s been an amazing teammate, great person to be around. And whether that run ends 10 years from now when he retires or before, there’s a lot to celebrate. We have a great relationship and an open relationship, where we talk about everything. But I don’t want to predict the future. But I look at it as, this is our team.”
While there's got to be some element of Brown wanting to be The Man™, there's never been evidence that he flat out does not want to play alongside Tatum. (And the same goes for Tatum wanting to play with Brown.)
And no matter which trade scenario gets cooked up -- Mobley, Trey Murphy, whoever else -- it's difficult to find one where the player returning to Boston does everything better than Brown, who received the sixth-most All-NBA votes this season and finished sixth in MVP voting. That doesn't necessarily mean that he's the sixth-best player in the NBA, but it does mean that trading him away is probably going to make the Boston Celtics a worse team.
Realistically, the Celtics have what most teams want: a superstar duo, a few key supplementary contributors, and some role players. Their best chance to be competitive comes from adding to that roster the way they did when they added Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday, two game-changing moves that led immediately to a championship.
To be fair, Stevens has earned a lot of trust for his ability to work in the shadows to improve this team. Yet if the Celtics have indeed decided that Brown must go no matter what, it's difficult to see that as anything but a major delay in scheduling the next championship parade through Boston.