Mike Gansey says the 76ers’ path to Jaylen Brown started with persistence, patience, and a lot of phone calls.
The Philadelphia president, speaking to Tony Jones of The Athletic, described a trade chase that stretched across a couple of weeks before the deal with the Celtics finally came together. The 76ers wound up landing Brown by sending two first-round picks, two second-round picks, and Paul George to Boston in a move that reshaped their 2026-27 offseason.
“The process in talking to Boston about Jaylen took a couple of weeks. We let them know we were interested and then just kind of went from there. We just kind of stayed in the mix, and the next thing you know, we were at the five-yard line … We just kept banging the drum and expressing interest,” the 76ers president declared.
Gansey said Philadelphia kept pushing while other possibilities around the league were in flux. Boston, according to the source, had been working through salary cap issues and building around Jayson Tatum, while Brown was headed toward a supermax situation. The 76ers, meanwhile, were firmly in win-now mode.
The Celtics did not begin by trying to move Brown to Philadelphia. The report says Brad Stevens was initially aiming at Giannis Antetokounmpo, but that chase eventually faded. Antetokounmpo was later dealt by the Milwaukee Bucks to the Miami Heat for Tyler Herro, Kel'el Ware, Jaime Jaquez Jr., Kasparas Jakucionis, and a bag of picks that stretched all the way to the 2033 NBA Draft.
Once those Bucks-Celtics talks broke down, the 76ers stayed in the hunt and kept making their presence felt. Gansey said that kind of persistence has been part of the team’s approach before, too.
“There were some trades that we’ve done that were two years in the making, simply because we kept calling. We kept checking in, and in the end we came away with that person. It didn’t always work, but we always wanted to make sure we did the work,” Gansey added.
Now Brown gets another shot at a title after being removed from being the NBA Finals MVP for two seasons. If he keeps his 34.4 minutes-per-game average from the 2025-26 season, the 76ers are set to get major production from their newest star.
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For Boston, the trade was framed by president Brad Stevens as a roster-building move tied to the way the team is constructed and the realities of the salary cap. Still, anytime a franchise parts with a player as established as Brown, the debate tends to linger well beyond the initial shock, and this one already has the feel of a move that will be dissected from every angle until the Celtics prove whether the gamble was worth it. [Read more 🡒]
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Celtics Just Became The Clearest Warning About The NBAs New Rules
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For the Celtics, the conversation has moved from theory to reality, with the Jaylen Brown trade serving as the clearest sign of how sharply these rules can force a team to act. Boston is hardly alone in trying to navigate the new landscape, as the Knicks, Thunder and Pistons are all dealing with their own version of the same problem, but the Celtics have become the cautionary case every other front office will be studying closely. [Read more 🡒]