Tom Pelissero: Don’t Sleep on a Jaylen Brown Trade to the Nuggets

Tom Pelissero was upfront that his NBA credentials have limits. "I'm an NFL insider. I am happy to give you all the NFL insight. My NBA insiderdom slightly more limited," he said on the show. Then he floated a Jaylen Brown destination almost nobody was talking about.

The Brown conversation was already loud. Reports that day, including from Jon Krawczynski of The Athletic, said the Minnesota Timberwolves had called Boston about Brown, and that the Celtics were continuing to shop him. The show figured Brown's price would run higher than LaMelo Ball's, given Ball's injury history and the type of scorer Brown is. Ball's deal, as recapped in the studio, was Naz Reid, a first-round pick seven years from now, some pick swaps and second-rounders.

It was a What's More Likely Thursday, so the question came in that form. Is Brown on the Celtics for Game 1 of the 2026-27 season, or playing elsewhere?

The first answer in the room was Boston. The logic: the Celtics need to stay near the top of the East, so they need real players back, and who can offer a top-10 player in return? The joke was that Boston's asking price for the Wolves was Anthony Edwards, followed by a very quiet phone line.

The pushback came fast. Reading into how Brad Stevens answered questions about Brown after the first night of the draft, the host saw a front office trying to save whatever value it still had in a player in a complicated situation. The question for Pelissero was whether the Celtics were making calls or taking them.

Pelissero said that distinction is the whole game. "You don't need to make calls when you've got the asset that people want," he said. "But when you're getting those calls, it doesn't mean that people are going to give you the package that you want."

He pointed to football for proof. The Las Vegas Raiders never had to make a call on Maxx Crosby, he said. They got a ton of calls, brought it to a head, and Crosby ultimately ended up back with the Raiders. "It's same thing that happened with Myles Garrett," Pelissero said. "If you've got the asset everyone wants, you don't have to shop the guy."

Eventually, he explained, a team lines up its two best offers and forces the issue, the way the Giannis Antetokounmpo sweepstakes came down to Miami's package of role players and picks against a Celtics offer of two firsts plus Brown. "These level of deals are usually initiated by people calling you," he said.

Then came his tip. A few teams have been very quiet this offseason relative to what people expected, and one stands out. After the Denver Nuggets were knocked out of the playoffs, the reporting was that if your name was not Nikola Jokic, you were available. Denver has been really quiet since.

Pelissero thinks the Nuggets have the ingredients. They have some assets on the roster, maybe not high ones, and would likely have to add picks. They have sufficient flexibility. And they have made abundantly clear they want to re-envision how they win around one of the most efficient players in the NBA, "albeit a guy who Rudy Gobert exposed to a great degree in the first round of this year's playoffs."

"You need to make a lot of changes," Pelissero said. "Could Denver make a run at Jaylen Brown?"

"I'm cool with it," came one reply from the studio.

Food for thought, indeed.