After the Boston Celtics won the title in 2024, you couldn’t blame fans — or Jayson Tatum — for envisioning a few more to follow. This was a well built team with two elite perimeter players in the form of Tatum and Jaylen Brown, the Celtics were primed to go after banner 19.
Instead, just more than two years later, the roster is barely recognizable from the one that won that ring. The last dagger was Boston’s surprising trade of Brown to division rival Philadelphia for a way-too-small package built around Paul George and draft picks.
For the first time, Tatum spoke about the trade after an event promoting his new children’s book, with quotes from Noa Dalzell of Celtics Blog.
“To be honest, weird. It’s weird... You play on a team with a guy for nine years. I was fortunate enough to go to the finals with him twice, and win a championship, and push each other to be the players that we are today...
“It’s tough. But it just makes you appreciate the moments and time that we had. Obviously, it came to an abrupt ending, but it doesn’t mean that it wasn’t super successful. Great years, obviously, that he gave to the city and to the organization.”
Celtics boss Brad Stevens was clear when speaking about the trade this week, he did not consult Tatum in making the deal.
Stevens’ reasoning for the trade was that, in the salary cap apron era, having two supermax players (Tatum and Brown) eating up a combined 70% of the salary cap meant the team couldn’t build out a championship roster. He pointed to recent champions built around one star, such as the Knicks being built around Brunson.
That also only worked because Brunson willingly took far below the max. Good luck finding another star willing to do that. It’s going to take some very creative team-building to win in the luxury-tax apron era, and Stevens believed he was getting ahead of the curve with this trade.
However, in the short term, the Celtics got worse, and that’s going to be hard on Tatum.
