The NBA’s first national TV announcements of the season delivered a pretty blunt answer to the Jaylen Brown storyline: the league isn’t treating Brown’s return to Boston like a must-see event.
When the opening week slate and Christmas Day schedule came out Tuesday morning, there was plenty of reason to think Brown’s first game back in Boston could land on one of the league’s showcase dates. Opening night, Christmas, MLK Day - all of them seemed like possible landing spots.
But with MLK Day still to come, the schedule already points in a different direction. The NBA is leaning hard into LeBron James instead.
Boston opens the season on the road in Detroit on Tuesday, October 20, at 3 p.m., with the Sixers heading to the defending champion New York Knicks later that night. That setup says plenty on its own.
Philadelphia and New York are being presented as the East’s top draw, while Boston and Detroit are pushed into the early slot. Cade Cunningham gives the Pistons some star power, Jayson Tatum gives the Celtics plenty of it too, but that game is basically the warm-up act for the bigger matchups later in the evening.
On the Western Conference side, Oklahoma City against San Antonio is the headliner.
It’s hard to call a Tuesday afternoon game in October a true showcase, though. And the league didn’t even circle back later in the week to give Boston and Philadelphia a national TV meeting.
That’s where the LeBron factor becomes impossible to ignore. Even if opening night is essentially the NBA’s forecast for who it believes will be in each conference final, every broadcast partner wants a game that can carry weight on its own.
There were four chances to put Sixers-Celtics on national television. Instead, the league went with Philadelphia hosting the Cleveland Cavaliers, James’ hometown team and the one many expected him to choose this offseason.
Boston does get a big one, just not the one tied to Brown. The Celtics will host the Knicks, a strong early-season matchup, but it comes on Friday and sits in a schedule crowded by the NBA Cup later in November.
That leaves open the possibility that one or both teams could be on a back-to-back. Either way, it’s not the kind of clean, spotlight-friendly setup many would have expected for Brown’s return.
Christmas Day tells the same story. Once again, the NBA went with LeBron instead of Brown.
The Miami Heat and Giannis Antetokounmpo come to Boston for the 2:30 p.m. game, while Philadelphia faces LeBron’s former team, the Los Angeles Lakers, at 5 p.m. The league even put the NBA Finals rematch at noon, which shows just how much weight James still carries in these decisions.
The Celtics were left out of Christmas Day last year when Brown was the featured star. This year, they’re in with Tatum, but the broader message hasn’t changed. Boston’s first batch of games features Detroit, New York and Miami - not Philadelphia - because the Sixers are tied up against two of LeBron’s former teams.
Maybe Boston’s two preseason games against the Sixers dull the edge of that matchup a bit. But the schedule suggests the NBA’s thinking would have been the same either way.
LeBron James is still the bigger draw and the bigger money-maker. He gets the first call.
Everyone else waits their turn.
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There is still a reason the move feels so dramatic, though, because Boston did not just tinker at the edges. The Celtics dealt Jaylen Brown for Paul George, then followed with another addition meant to reinforce the same formula, bringing in Mitchell Robinson to help on the glass and at the defensive end. It is the kind of roster bet that says the Celtics believe cohesion can matter as much as star power, even if the real test of that theory is still ahead. [Read more 🡒]