What Do The Boston Celtics Intend To Be?

As an online basketball fan, you are encouraged by the discourse to consider the Jaylen Brown trade as a matter of asset valuation. One day the Celtics seemed to consider Brown, the asset, as approximately valuable enough to swap for Giannis Antetokounmpo, plus or minus some draft capital. When they didn’t complete the trade, it was just possible to believe, for a few minutes, that Celtics president Brad Stevens maybe even considered Brown too valuable for Milwaukee’s proposed terms. Then a couple days later the Celtics traded Brown anyway, to the Sixers, for a player a hell of a lot less impressive than Antetokounmpo, and now it seemed like the Celtics viewed Brown, the asset, as worse than expendable: distressed, somehow, and possibly toxic. Naturally there would come an insider tell-all, full of juicy recriminations, to describe how over the course of just a few days Boston went from loving Brown to determined to simply be rid of him, OBO-style.

The whiplash of the trade has hopefully healed enough now to refocus on what the Celtics are doing, not on the market but as a basketball operation. When they won their recent title, in 2024, and seemed poised for a long reign atop the East, it was with Brown and Jayson Tatum as the high-usage core, with a grimly optimized offense, and with a deep bench of complementary role-players. They fell short in successive postseasons and were passed in the conference hierarchy by a Knicks team vastly better than expected, to say nothing of a couple of irritatingly young and physically superior Western Conference potential dynasties. Staying the course would’ve seemed reasonable, but so did a push for Antetokounmpo, a game-breaking specimen still in his athletic prime, whose interior domination could diversify Joe Mazzula’s system, which otherwise is more vulnerable than most to swings in shooting performance.

Now the Celtics have Tatum and Paul George, a 36-year-old swingman whose best days are well behind him, who never scores inside the paint, who has been healthy and available for 60 games just once in his last seven seasons, and who at this stage of his career is suited to not much more than a role-player’s usage, within a balanced offense. It’s difficult to work out how the Celtics view this as a meaningful improvement of their title odds, which raises the question: Do the Celtics still view themselves as a title contender?