In terms of raw reaction to hearing a trade, it's difficult to compare the Jaylen Brown news to anything else we've experienced in modern-day Boston sports. And make no mistake: We've got plenty of trades to work with in the comparison department.
Perhaps the closest cousin would be the Jimmy Garoppolo trade to San Francisco in October of 2017. The particulars and details were nothing alike, but the general reactions to the Garoppolo trade were twofold.
One: That's ... it? Seriously?
Two: Why ... now?
Befuddlement. Bewilderment. General confusion. Mass hysteria. While individual reactions always differ, the two trades are similar because just about no one could even pretend to be happy with the return on what was believed to be a valuable asset.
Of course, the comparisons end there, because the Jaylen Brown trade was much, much worse.
Brown finished sixth in MVP voting and in All-NBA voting last year. He's made five All-Star teams, two All-NBA teams, and, of course, was crowned Eastern Conference Finals MVP and Finals MVP during the Celtics' championship run just two short years ago. (When Garoppolo was traded from the Patriots, he had thrown a total of 94 passes in the NFL and had more injuries than wins in his first three and a half seasons. Due to a strong jawline, a winning smile and a cool nickname, he was massively overrated. Still, a second-round pick was a bit underwhelming for a potential starting-caliber NFL quarterback.)
Nevertheless, the Celtics clearly wanted to move on from Brown. We all understand that desire to some degree. Even if we disagreed, we knew where they stood, and we were expecting a deal of some kind this summer.
And still -- still! -- we were left shell-shocked by the deal for Paul George plus picks.
Because. It. Is. So. Bad.
The great Jack Simone said it may "very well may be the worst trade in the history of the organization" and was, at the very least, "a horrendous trade" for the Celtics. ESPN gave a D+ grade to the Celtics (and an A-minus grade to the Sixers). CBS Sports listed George's contract as the fourth-worst in the NBA last season. Spotrac had it as the second-worst. More than 24 hours after news of the trade broke, most people are still waiting for Brad Stevens to step before a podium, say "sike!' into a microphone, and walk away, thus allowing Brown and Jayson Tatum to lead a championship contender in the 2026-27 season.
But that's not happening. Jaylen Brown is gone, and even if he might be a touch overrated in some circles, he will help the Sixers compete for Eastern Conference supremacy next season.
And in Boston ... who knows. It doesn't look good. And after waiting a year following Tatum's torn Achilles, this summer was supposed to be the good one. The fun one. The Celtics-are-ready-to-hang-a-few-more-banners one. Instead it's the overpay-for-Mitchell Robinson-and-sign-the-ancient-Mike Conley-and-acquire-Paul George-for-some-reason one.
Brutal.
Yet while the present and near future of the Celtics looks dreary, and while the end of Brown's Celtics career was tremendously unceremonious, we should at least take a moment to appreciate Brown's time in Boston for what it was.
Fans at the Garden booed the selection of Brown with the No. 3 overall pick back in 2016. Those same fans booed then-owner Wyc Grousbeck when he addressed the crowd after making the pick. The fans wanted the "fireworks" that Wyc had promised, or Buddy Hield, or Providence star Kris Dunn, or something other than the guard from Cal who couldn't shoot.
Yet as Brown said in his farewell message on Thursday, he "showed up every day" and put in the work, improving upon his collegiate 3-point percentage of 29.4% to 34.1% as an NBA rookie, making Second Team All-Rookie on a team that earned the No. 1 seed in the East and made the conference finals. (He improved to 39.5% in his second year and is a career 35.8 percent shooter from behind the arc.)
It was Boston's first trip past the first round of the playoffs in the post-Paul Pierce, Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett chapter of franchise history, and it established a new standard for a new era. The team drafted Tatum a year later and made it back to the conference finals, this time pushing LeBron James and the Cavaliers to Game 7 before bowing out.
What followed next was something that was a bit more organic than what we had come to see as the lone path to a championship in the NBA. Instead of building a superteam -- those Pierce-KG-Allen Celtics, the LeBron-Dwyane Wade-Chris Bosh Heat, Kevin Durant joining the dynasty-in-progress Warriors, the ill-fated combination of Kevin Durant, James Harden and Kyrie Irving in Brooklyn, etc. -- the Celtics went all in with their budding star duo.
They lost in the Finals to the Warriors (a great team making its last gasp) and then flopped in the conference finals a year later, losing the first three games to an eight-seeded Heat team before forcing Game 7 on a miracle buzzer beater and then getting blown out on the parquet in the final game of the series.
The struggle was real.
And though they did have to dip into superteam waters by acquiring Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday in the summer of 2023, the whole journey of Brown and Tatum made that parade down Boylston Street feel a bit special.
On the plus side, Celtics fans will always have that. On the downside, well, it's unclear when those fans might be able to partake in such a celebration again. It certainly won't be next year, and that is most certainly a bummer for everyone who patiently waited 14 months for the Celtics to build a contender.
With that in mind, and with the summer now in full swing, I felt it would be an appropriate time before I depart from the great Boston Sports Journal to leave you all with my championship predictions for the four major players in town.
The Boston Celtics
On the one hand, the Knicks just won a championship. The Knicks! And that came just a couple of weeks after the Spurs and Thunder redefined modern basketball and established themselves as the new juggernauts of the NBA. And that all happened two years after Brown and Tatum started a certain multi-year run of winning titles, and that happened a year after Nikola Jokic proved he'd be winning championships for the next decade, and that happened after Giannis Antetokounmpo finally broke through to win the first of what would surely be many, many championships.
That is all to say that sometimes, we just don't know as much about who's going to win the next NBA championship as we believe we do.
Still, the path for Boston appears to be inarguably more arduous to get back to the top of the mountain. And for the first time in his tenure, Brad Stevens doesn't have the majority of the public believing he can get the team to that place.
As currently constructed, the Celtics -- with Tatum, Derrick White, Payton Pritchard, George and Robinson as the likely starting five -- won't win a title. Especially not with Joe Mazzulla as the coach. They'll win plenty of regular-season games again, which we learned means less than ever.
Is it possible that Stevens gets a blessing from ownership next year to go crazy, make real additions to help Tatum, and get the Celtics back to the top? Sure. But for now, even if this prognostication is being made in the darkest time in recent Celtics history, the safe bet is that the Tatum championship number finishes at just one.
Bummer.
The Boston Bruins
When pondering this one, I had to ask myself a question: Who are the best players that Don Sweeney has brought to the Bruins in his 11 years on the job?
It's not David Pastrnak. That was Peter Chiarelli's final gift to the franchise. (What a steal at No. 25 overall. Though I've been hearing lately that late first-round picks are meaningless. Borderline useless. Great business to trade them away whenever possible.)
Sweeney obviously inherited Patrice Bergeron, Zdeno Chara, David Krejci, Tuukka Rask and Brad Marchand, who were the core of the 2019 team that could have (and should have) won the Cup.
So that leaves Charlie McAvoy and Jeremy Swayman. McAvoy was a desperately needed hit for Sweeney a year after his 2015 first-round nightmare, and he's been very good. He hasn't lived up to the lofty Drew Doughty expectations, but he's been very good. And Swayman was a fourth-round flier who's become one of the NHL's best goaltenders.
Outside of those two, the draft has been a bit of a black hole during Sweeney's tenure, which has also been defined by the GM paying absolute top dollar for any addition to the team. The $30 million David Backes deal and the Matt Beleskey contract were boondoggles, and massive draft capital sent away to acquire the likes of Lee Stempniak, Zac Rinaldo, Marcus Johansson, Taylor Hall, John-Michael Liles and others in a perpetual need to "compete" left the draft cupboards dry for years.
Can't draft well, can't utilize draft capital responsibly. Bit of a double-edged sword there, isn't it?
That's a long way of saying that Sweeney hasn't proven capable of building a championship roster. He can spend every dollar and trade every pick to keep the Bruins in the vague abyss of faux-contention, but I don't trust him to build a top-to-bottom roster that can compete with the top five or six teams in the NHL.
So until the Sweeney era ends, I don't see Lord Stanley returning to a duck boat near you.
(And, a message to Bergeron and Chara: Stay away from working in the front office. Stay far, far away. It's a place where local heroes like Cam Neely get turned into low-level meatball salesmen. Stay away!)
The Boston Red Sox
Oh boy. This exercise was not meant to be depressing. I promise!
But the state of the Red Sox can only be described using that dreaded D word.
Craig Breslow has been in over his head from day one. He can build a pitching staff, and that's an accomplishment. But he can't build a lineup, and that's kind of an important element to a baseball team.
Breslow was, famously, the team's 11th choice to bring in as the head of baseball ops three years ago, and if John Henry is to send him packing, it's hard to believe that qualified folks will be lining up to work for an owner who won't invest properly in a championship operation.
But this is where I'm going to zag.
If Henry's ownership has reliably been anything, it's been unpredictable. He'll swear off signing 30-year-old pitchers and ship Jon Lester out of town, only to reverse course and sign David Price to a terrible contract. He'll trade away a generational talent like Mookie Betts because he simply will not get bogged down by a big-money, long-term contract, but then he'll sign Rafael Devers to that exact type of contract.
And then he'll trade Devers away, too.
A big puff of the cigar for landing big fish Alex Bregman. A vow of silence when losing Bregman a year later.
You could say he doesn't know what he's doing, but that's not fair. He's a very rich guy. He knows something or another.
He's simply unpredictable because he changes his guiding philosophies quite often.
So I'll say this: In a couple of years, maybe with the comfort of a CBA governing some spending across the sport, he'll start acting more like the big-market baseball owner he used to be and dedicate himself and his resources to getting the Red Sox back to championship contention. And with baseball contention being what it is, it shouldn't take long to get there.
It may be bleak these days, but I've got a feeling that Henry has one more World Series run in his tenure.
The New England Patriots
These guys are going to win one. They have to win one.
They probably won't win two. That's hard. They definitely won't win three. Or four, five, or six. Hopefully you cherished those days.
But come on! You've got the quarterback in Drake Maye. You've got a head coach you can really believe in with Mike Vrabel. And you've got an owner who's 85 years old and desperately wants another trophy in his house.
It's gotta happen.
It won't be easy. Winning a Super Bowl never is. But the nucleus is there, and the drive is there. The roster may not quite be there in 2026, so let's say 2027, the New England Patriots deliver the next championship in Boston sports.
Long-term predictions are futile, but as I mentioned earlier, I'm leaving BSJ. It's a strange thing to say, considering I just started, but an opportunity presented itself to me and my family that I had to accept, and it will require me to focus my efforts elsewhere. I'll always be extremely grateful to Greg for bringing me aboard when I really needed an opportunity, and I'm thankful to all of you who welcomed me to your community from the moment I arrived. You are, of course, in great hands here at BSJ, and you'll surely be able to reach me at my next stop. Farewell! (And please, only revisit these predictions if they turn out to be correct! Thank you!)