Paul George Has Turned Out To Be The Ur-Celtic

Get past the unseasoned beef between Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown in Tuesday’s Celtics-Sixers matchup, and reach instead for the real juice: a killer performance by Paul George, the player for whom Brown was traded. Though a single regular-season game in November is no way useful to assess a trade in its entirety, the contrast last night between those two wings was telling: Brown (keyed-up, foul-prone, poor decision-making) sat out much of a game where George (methodical, efficient, at ease in the flow of offense) flourished. Boston won, 123-101. More than anything, George’s 36-point outing was a reminder of his eerily slick, timeless style could have plugged into every NBA roster constructed over the last decade, and how it distills Joe Mazzulla’s Celtics squad to its spiritual essence.

Fair minds were skeptical that a star version of George would ever return. In two years with Philly, he seemed to have receded into a fog of lower-body injuries, mystery drug use, and inconsistent podcasting, playing just 78 total regular-season games. Meanwhile, Brown had just come off a workhorse campaign for the Celtics, logging 71 games while soaking up 36 percent usage on his way to an All-NBA second team. For all the hand-wringing about Brown’s true value, both in a vacuum and within the Celtics system, he was clearly the more valuable player at the time of the trade. When swapping two seemingly onerous contracts for one another, each one asking somewhere between 32 and 35 percent of the salary cap for a wing who likely wouldn’t live up to that price tag, it was the Sixers who had to sweeten the deal with draft picks.