ESPN’s Vincent Goodwill Talks Celts & Jaylen Brown; Timberwolves’ Next Steps

For a while, many people believed Boston was the destination for Giannis Antetokounmpo, in a franchise-altering deal that would have sent Jaylen Brown and two first-round picks to Milwaukee. Instead, the Celtics got neither the trade nor any quiet about it. Brown's name is now publicly out there, and Vincent Goodwill walked the show through where Boston goes from here.

Goodwill started with his colleague Brian Windhorst's framing: the Celtics may have decided they cannot beat the New York Knicks as currently built, which would force changes. Goodwill stopped short of calling it a declaration, but he laid out the human side bluntly. Brown is a Finals MVP who carried Boston to 60 wins in what was termed a gap year. To blow a series to the 76ers, ugly as it was, and then hear the team would love to trade you for Antetokounmpo, "that wouldn't make me feel good."

There is, however, a salve. "The one thing that soothes hurt feelings? Cold, hard cash," Goodwill said. The Celtics can offer Brown a two-year, $140 million extension in a couple of weeks. The question is whether they want to tie up that kind of money, $70 million a year on top of Jason Tatum's roughly $60 million, in the new economic NBA where financial trades are everywhere. If those questions go unanswered to Brown's liking, Goodwill could see him asking to part ways and find a place to be his best self. The show compared it to Myles Garrett, who took the Browns' extension and was content for now, a reminder that money solves some problems but not all of them.

On Minnesota, Goodwill was emphatic that standing pat is not an option. He does not buy the idea that Anthony Edwards is itching to leave, but a team that fell from the Western Conference Finals to a second-round exit cannot freeze in place, not with Oklahoma City and San Antonio going nowhere. The Donte DiVincenzo Achilles injury, which will cost him almost all of next season, only deepens the need for impact players.

The Wolves do have tools. Goodwill detailed the roughly $33 million trade exception and the $15 million mid-level exception, walking through the rule that the trade exception cannot be split and must absorb a single player before it dissolves a year to the day. He credited Tim Connelly as creative and bold enough to use them.

But Goodwill ended on the line that captured Minnesota's bind. Trace the chain: the Wolves traded Karl-Anthony Towns for Julius Randle, then traded Randle for a trade exception. "Karl-Anthony Towns got a ring, you got a trade exception," he said. "That don't look good."