Brad Stevens didn’t leave much room for debate about Jaylen Brown’s place in Celtics history.
Speaking to The Boston Globe’s Avery Hill, Stevens said Brown’s No. 7 will likely end up in the rafters once his playing days are done, even while admitting how difficult it was to move him.
"I get a lot of emails and a lot of people that ask about wanting to be a GM," Stevens said. "I'm like, 'I wish you would've been around last summer when we basically had to trade Jrue Holiday.'
That's like brutal. Or we go through this long arduous process and ultimately decide to trade Jaylen, whose numbers will likely go up in the rafters in Boston.
Not fun."
That pretty much settles the question. Brown’s Celtics run built a case strong enough that even the man who dealt him is openly talking about his number hanging in Boston.
Brown’s path with the Celtics was never ordinary. He arrived as the draft pick fans booed on draft night, and by the end of his run he had become the kind of player nobody wanted to lose. That transformation says plenty about how far he came in Boston.
The through line of Brown’s Celtics career was simple: when the team needed more from him, he usually delivered. Gordon Hayward’s injury in 2017 pushed him into a bigger role, and Brown answered. The next year, when Kyrie Irving went down before the postseason, Brown again stepped into the spotlight during Boston’s memorable 2018 run, doing it while dealing with a gimpy hamstring.
Boston kept asking for more after the Irving situation in 2019, and Brown kept responding. With the roster losing so much of its firepower, he helped carry another productive playoff push.
He wasn’t flawless. Brown couldn’t rise to the moment when Jayson Tatum’s badly timed ankle injury derailed Boston’s shot at coming back from 3-0 against Miami. But even that part of his story mattered, because he handled the loss and kept moving forward.
That resilience showed up again in 2023, when the Heat defeat only seemed to fuel him. Then came 2024, the season that pushed his legacy into a different tier. Brown won a title, along with Eastern Conference Finals MVP and NBA Finals MVP, both awards he earned through his play.
His final season in Boston may have been his most impressive of all. With Tatum out, Brown became the alpha dog and turned in his best season yet, leading a Celtics group that had lost much of its title core.
So yes, Stevens made the trade. But that was about the long-term shape of the team, not any doubt about Brown’s talent or standing. If the question is whether Brown belongs in Celtics rafters, Stevens has already answered it.
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For Celtics fans, the appeal is obvious even if the reality remains a lot murkier. Rumors about a possible trade to Boston have floated around, but there has been no credible reporting to give them real weight, and Curry would still be headed toward unrestricted free agency after his current deal expires. Still, once a player of his magnitude is eligible for a new extension, every team with a championship-sized imagination has reason to pay attention, even if the path to actually landing him remains distant. [Read more 🡒]