Jaylen Brown was on top of the basketball world in 2024 with the Boston Celtics, and he has now been shipped out of town. The Celtics traded Brown to the Philadelphia 76ers, and the five-time All-Star made it clear on his Twitch stream on Thursday that he didn’t feel he got the respect he deserved.
“It was definitely a bittersweet ending,” Brown said, via FearBuck. “Like I said before, I’m still processing a lot… I wasn’t thrilled with how the conversation was facilitated. I did feel like it was a lack of respect. At one point, it was fine, and then out of nowhere, it just went left. I definitely think there’s more to it. There definitely is more to it.
“I know Brad [Stevens] is getting a lot of the criticism,” Brown continued. “But I just wish the more to it could have been explained. I just wish they had the respect to tell me exactly what it was, and I would have understood, and I would’ve respected that. But it didn’t go down like that. It wasn’t facilitated like that.
“So that was the most disappointing part,” Brown added. “Because I thought I earned respect in a place that I had built or I helped contribute to build, and that just wasn’t the case. It just wasn’t the case. So sometimes it be like that. Sometimes you got to smile at it. They packed me up. They rolled me up, packed me up.”
The Celtics had selected Brown with the No. 3 pick in the 2016 NBA Draft. In his first eight seasons, he helped the team reach the Eastern Conference Finals six times, and they’d progress to the NBA Finals twice. While the first trip in 2022 ended in disappointment, the second ended in glory.
Brown won Finals MVP as the Celtics took down the Dallas Mavericks in five games in the 2024 NBA Finals. With all that the 29-year-old had done for the franchise over the years, he is right to feel that he should have been shown more respect. He still looks to be in the dark about a lot of things.
The Celtics sent Brown to the 76ers for Paul George, a 2028 first-round pick, a 2031 first-round pick, a 2028 second-round pick, and a 2030 second-round pick. To say that is an underwhelming return would be an understatement, and there is still a lot of confusion over why they accepted this offer.
Brown just averaged 28.7 points, 6.9 rebounds, 5.1 assists, 1.0 steals, and 0.4 blocks per game in 2025-26, and finished sixth in MVP voting. Even if analytics doesn’t think he’s as good as the numbers suggest, this was a bad trade for them.
Brown put out an emotional goodbye message to Boston on Thursday after news about the trade broke. There was no mention of the Celtics, though, which was telling.
The Celtics’ Concerns About Jaylen Brown And His Partnership With Jayson Tatum
A lot has been said about why the Celtics made this move. ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne has now reported on SportsCenter that the team felt the relationship was beyond repair after the failed Giannis Antetokounmpo trade and that there were concerns about the partnership with Jayson Tatum.
“I think this was a hard choice for the Celtics this week because clearly this is not the return you want to get for a player of Jaylen Brown’s caliber,” Shelburne said, via NBA Base. “But there was this sense that the bond between the player and the franchise was probably irreparable after his name had been dangled in discussions this summer, and the reasons why he was dangled were many, right?
“But one of them was they fell after the season he had, he wanted to be the No. 1 option, and it would be hard for him to go back into a more of a supporting role with Jayson Tatum,” Shelburne continued. “They worried about how their offense would age together with the sort of you take the ball, I take the ball that had worked before. They’d want a title that way, but how would that age?
“And then there was this decision about the contract extension that was coming up later this summer,” Shelburne added. “If you give him a two-year extension when he’s making almost $70 million a year, what does that do to your roster construction?”
The Celtics had, of course, tried to send Brown to the Milwaukee Bucks to acquire Antetokounmpo. They failed in their pursuit, as he ended up with the Miami Heat.
You wondered if they could stay together after that, but it was widely reported that Brown didn’t ask for a trade. Shelburne mentioned here that even with that being the case, though, his speaking his mind on those Twitch streams was going to make things uncomfortable regardless.
Brown had a lot more to say on Twitch about the situation on Thursday. He is definitely going to have a point to prove when the 76ers face the Celtics next season.
