Brad Stevens once made his case plain: he didn’t want a roster built around two players soaking up too much of the cap and too much of the offense. The Philadelphia 76ers are now heading straight into the kind of setup he was trying to avoid.
The issue starts with the money. Stevens said after the trade that two of the reasons he moved Jaylen Brown were usage and cap concerns.
Philadelphia is set to live with both. Joel Embiid and Brown are projected to account for 70.2% of the cap for the upcoming season, and Tyrese Maxey is right behind them at just under 25%.
Put those numbers together, and three players are eating up a staggering 95% of the cap.
That leaves very little room for anything else, and that’s exactly the kind of roster math Boston wanted no part of. The Celtics spent years leaning on Brown and Jayson Tatum as their top two pieces, and that arrangement eventually helped deliver a championship in 2024. But as the source material makes clear, that kind of expensive construction only worked under a very specific set of circumstances.
Now Philadelphia is trying to do it anyway.
The cap isn’t the only concern. Stevens also pointed to usage, saying he didn’t like how much of the offense was being funneled through two players.
In Boston, that meant Tatum and Brown. In Philadelphia, the load is expected to be spread across Embiid, Brown, Maxey, and LeBron James, but the result is the same: a heavy concentration of possessions among a small group of stars, with limited room for the rest of the roster to matter.
That’s the tension the 76ers are walking into. They are building around a group that will command a massive share of both the salary sheet and the ball.
If Stevens was right about the danger, Philadelphia could be stepping into the same problem Boston tried to get out of. If he wasn’t, the 76ers may end up proving him wrong.
Next season will tell the story.
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