Brad Stevens had to answer some tough questions on Monday following the Celtics blockbuster trade of all-star forward Jaylen Brown.
During the 30-minute presser alongside governor Bill Chisholm, Stevens had the tall task of explaining away why Boston moved off of Brown after the best season of his career.
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The rationale from Stevens was that the front office wanted to gain more flexibility while remaining competitive. But the large sentiment was that Stevens did not want two players taking up 70% of the team’s cap space.
“When I looked at our team and where the league was heading, looked at the way that we’ve finished the last couple years and at the unbelievable way we’ve played in the regular season in the last couple years, the path looked a little bit more challenging to me,” Stevens said. “I might be wrong. I’m not going to stand up here and be defensive about that, but the path looked a little bit more challenging, with 70% of our cap and such a high percent of our usage tied into two players [Brown and Jayson Tatum].
“The reality in this day and age at the NBA, and you could see it obviously with the last couple of champions … you have to do a great job of building out depth that can hopefully replace the irreplaceable individual. And that’s not an easy thing to do. And that’s absolutely nothing against Jaylen. If you have Jaylen Brown on your team, you should feature him, you should use all those possessions and you should approach things that way. But I think the importance of depth and then obviously, we have to continue to work on ways to diversify our attack overall.”
Trading Brown to the 76ers in exchange for Paul George and a few draft picks remains a difficult pill to swallow for most Celtics fans despite Stevens’ explanation.
Patrick Dowd is a contributor for Ball Exclusives. You can follow him on Twitter, via Pat_Dowd77
