The Jaylen Brown saga wasn’t some sudden flash of panic from Boston. According to the reporting, the Celtics had been willing to move him long before the summer, and the Warriors were part of that conversation at the trade deadline.
Shams Charania said on The Stephen A. Smith Show that Golden State could have gotten into the Brown market if it had been willing to part with a huge haul of draft capital.
"The Warriors could've got in the Jaylen Brown sweepstakes if they wanted to give up four first-round picks-ish, in that range," Charania said on The Stephen A. Smith Show.
"They decided not to, from my understanding. Those two teams, the Warriors and Celtics, did talk about a Jaylen Brown trade around the trade deadline, and it was around several first-round draft picks, potential swaps, and seconds.
The Warriors decided not to go down that route, and so that's on them. That's the decision they made."
Logan Murdock of The Ringer added that Golden State couldn’t get to a place where the organization agreed Brown was the right player to carry the franchise past Stephen Curry.
"The Warriors had an opportunity to trade for the former Celtic before the deadline in February but couldn’t build an organizational consensus that Brown would be the right player to carry the Warriors beyond the Curry era," Murdock wrote.
That matters because it frames both sides of the story. Boston was already open for business on Brown when it was sitting at 33-18 and tied with the New York Knicks for the second seed in the Eastern Conference. Brown was putting up 29.5 points, 7.0 rebounds, 4.8 assists, and 1.0 steals per game while shooting 48.6% from the field and 36.3% from 3 on 5.9 attempts a night.
And yet he was still available. The Celtics still explored moving him. If Golden State had been willing to meet the asking price, Brown could have finished last season in San Francisco.
That’s the part that stands out most. This wasn’t a knee-jerk reaction after a playoff disappointment.
Boston’s willingness to deal Brown had already been building. Once the second apron made it impossible to keep the Jrue Holiday, Kristaps Porzingis, Al Horford -lined group together, the Celtics appeared to have decided the Tatum-Brown core needed a different kind of support than the current CBA can realistically sustain.
The deal Boston ultimately made with the 76ers also tells you the market had shifted. If the Celtics were asking for four first-round picks at the deadline, then the price clearly came down later. In other words, they saw the market moving in the wrong direction and chose not to wait any longer.
That doesn’t mean the move was right. It just means it was planned, not impulsive. The idea of trading Brown was already there before the deadline dust even settled.
On the Warriors side, the reluctance makes sense in a different way. Golden State wasn’t simply chasing one more run around Curry. Tim Kawakami of The San Francisco Standard said Joe Lacob is looking ahead.
"Lacob wants to-and this might get Warriors fans mad-he wants to build the next team after Steph Curry," Kawakami said on The TK Show. "I don't know how possible that is. But Lacob has a keen interest in, 'I am going to show, or this organization is going to show what it can do with Steph Curry and then after Steph Curry.'"
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Miami, Denver and Cleveland are among the teams said to have shown interest, and Boston has also emerged as a possible landing spot as the Celtics think about how to round out their offense around Jayson Tatum. The fit is still mostly theoretical, but the idea of another proven scorer who can also help with secondary creation is the kind of conversation that tends to stick as long as the market stays open. [Read more 🡒]