The Athletic’s James Jackson on the Celtics’ Next Steps with Jaylen Brown

Is Jaylen Brown a Celtic on opening night? James Jackson of The Athletic did not hedge much. "I doubt it," he told the show, before reframing the question into something sharper: the better ask might be whether Brown even wants to be.

Jackson's reasoning ran through the last few weeks of churn. With Giannis Antetokounmpo on the table, Boston had to get into that conversation, and Brown's name surfaced publicly as part of it. That is an awkward tipping point for a player who was Finals MVP a couple of years ago, the one who carried the Celtics while they waited for Jayson Tatum to return. Brown understands the business, Jackson said. He braces for this. He knows it is a tough game. But the moment a franchise signals "do you even want me here," the math changes, and Jackson does not think Brown ends up staying.

He pushed the timeline even tighter when the show wondered whether Brown could move tonight. Jackson floated a wild thought experiment, crediting a Twitter account called Dragonfly Jones, about simply dangling Brown to Minnesota to see if anyone bites. His broader argument was that trades are rarely about who won or lost on paper. "If you dangle a trade for five seconds and they bite," the rationale goes out the window, and a player like Brown, in his mid-prime, a Finals MVP, and by Jackson's account deeply invested in his community, is worth seeing what comes back. Pairing him with a young star, getting creative for depth, all of it is on the table.

That depth matters because of Tatum. Jackson raised the obvious question hanging over Boston's offseason: how does Tatum look next season coming back from a ruptured Achilles? The Celtics have decisions to make regardless of what happens with Brown.

The conversation kept tipping into comedy, with the group joking that you only send a blockbuster trade text at two in the morning, the basketball version of a "you up" message, then wake up Saturday wondering if you really hit send. But Jackson kept pulling it back to structure. This was inevitable, he argued, and not really personal. Boston's ownership shifted a couple of years ago over concern about how expensive the roster was becoming. What is happening now is a byproduct of the NBA's era, where winning a title buys you two or three years to figure things out. He pointed to the Nuggets and to the Thunder, who face their own looming bills with Isaiah Hartenstein and Lu Dort.

So Jackson landed not on a feud but on economics. "It's less just about how much they do or don't like Jaylen Brown," he said. "You got slim margins to maximize these expensive rosters." The Celtics are not breaking up over hurt feelings. They are doing the cold arithmetic every contender eventually has to do.