The Enemy Is Now My Small Forward

Beckett dives into the stunning Jaylen Brown trade and why he feels conflicted, but ultimately excited.

Mike Gansey’s not asleep anymore…

In a stunning move yesterday with a rival who has never, not once, gotten the better of us in a trade, the Sixers dealt Paul George, two first-round picks, and two second-round picks to Boston for disgruntled Celtics star Jaylen Brown. I don’t even know where to start.

I guess the most important item of note — and one that probably shouldn’t be lost debating the finer points here — is that Jaylen Brown is good at basketball. Brown is coming off a season where he had 28.7 PPG, 6.9 RPG, and 5.1 APG, placed 6th in MVP voting, and earned Second-Team All-NBA honors, just barely missing the last First-Team slot to Cade Cunningham. As I’m sure you’re aware, he’s also a Finals MVP and proven performer both in and out of the playoffs, who has unfortunately shown the proof of that against the Sixers on more occasions than I’d like to recall. People can get hung up on the analytics side of the Brown debate (stay tuned for a deeper breakdown here next week) and lose track of the overall fact that he has been a consistent top-two contributor to one of the best teams in basketball for the last decade.

Almost more importantly than all of that, though, is his durability. He’s never played fewer than 57 games in a season — a number that Paul George has only hit once since the 2018-19 season in OKC — and has been hovering right around 70 games played per year in four of the last five seasons. We’ve been begging for years to be able to stay afloat with Joel Embiid off the court, and Gansey just acquired a player with a proven track record of helping his team do exactly that, having just carried the Celtics to the two-seed in the East without Jayson Tatum. This is humongous for Joel and especially Tyrese Maxey, who has been forced to shoulder almost the entirety of the team’s offensive load for the last couple of years, leading the league in minutes and carrying most of the scoring responsibility.

We have plenty of time to talk about the fit and play style, but the primary takeaway from this trade should be that the Sixers have gotten far more talented on the whole.

All that said, I was initially much more shocked than actually excited by the trade when my phone initially blew up at 6:17 PM yesterday. First, there was absolutely no hint that a move like this was coming. Second, dealing with the Celtics in the Process era has always been a traumatizing experience, with the Fultz and Horford experiences taking up a heavy load of mental bandwidth. Third, and most critically, however, is that it’s just so weird to take a core player from a rivalry team that I’ve hated with a passion for the last 10 years.

The locker room will also be interesting, to say the least — we are just two months removed from Jaylen Brown calling Joel Embiid a flopper after their intense seven-game playoff series. It’s the same feeling I’d have as if the Eagles suddenly traded for Dak Prescott from the Cowboys. Am I supposed to like this guy now? I just spent almost a decade of my life focused on finding ways to hate him, and now he’s on my team? It’s a rewiring of my brain chemistry, and my emotions don’t quite know how to handle it.

Even beyond the emotional side of it, the roster math still has me a little confused. The Sixers still need at minimum one more contributor in the frontcourt, ideally someone who can hold up in the playoffs (LeBron James on the minimum anyone?). As currently constructed, they’re still relying on Adem Bona and Ariel Hukporti as their only centers — both of whom I believe are solid backups, but also aren’t players I trust to combine for 48 minutes in a night when Joel Embiid is inevitably out.

However, after today’s Anfernee Simons signing for two years and $12.3 million, they are running into a bit of a math problem with only $4.3 million remaining under the hard cap. They conveniently have a $4.2 million trade exception thanks to Jared McCain, but the options are limited, and they have only one open roster spot remaining. None of that changes the calculus on the trade itself — it just means the front office can’t be finished. I know this drill all too well: get excited about a big move, then watch ownership stop just short of closing the gap that actually needed closing.

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But even accounting for the lack of depth, this is still the most aggressive the Sixers have been since the Jimmy Butler and James Harden trades. We’ve spent every season dreaming about the newest possible target we could add to the team to maybe, just maybe, make a run if things broke right… only for the front office and ownership to trade away talent for purely tax-ducking purposes once we reached the deadline. Gansey is coming in and going for it with a move that has shaken the league to its core; that has to count for something.

I love it the most for Embiid’s sake though, with the Sixers not just letting the big guy’s last few seasons of (sorta) health waste away into oblivion. We’ve spent the last two years focused on finding the fun in the little things, without any real contender to put our full effort behind. It would have been far too easy to mentally check out over the next few seasons while we waited for the Embiid and PG contracts to clear up cap space again. The team was a little too good to actually target a tank again (nor would the new lottery system allow it), but wasn’t good enough to make us really believe it could go anywhere, as the Knicks so aptly showed in this year’s playoffs. Now we are all forced back on board the train, whether we like it or not, and can finally put our full-hearted effort towards winning games again.

Will it work? Who knows! In fact, probably not! It doesn’t work for most teams, and especially not when that team is the Sixers! But it’ll be fun regardless and provides a real draw to a season that I, for one, can’t wait to get sucked into. Just give me some time to process the emotions first.