Last month, the league was shaken from the report of The Athletic’s Shams Charania that the Boston Celtics have offered Jaylen Brown and several assets to the Brooklyn Nets for Kevin Durant. Eventually, the Nets didn’t move a needle and were looking for an all-time proposal in order to push the trade button.
And as the Durant-Nets drama bubble already popped up, Celtics office leader Brad Stevens now made it clear that he’s committed to the core that he built.
“Since the [Malcolm] Brogdon trade, we felt really good about our team,” Stevens noted, via Brian Robb of MassLive. “We felt really good about building around these guys that we’ve been building around, trying to accentuate our best players.”
”We’re excited to move forward with our team and that’s really been our focus for a while. You say it’s been busy and there’s been a lot of talk but it hasn’t been from me. Hopefully, it gave everyone something to talk about. It’s been pretty quiet on our front for a while now.”
Stevens also revealed that amid those previous reports of Celtics-KD linkage, he was reaching out with Brown throughout the summer and keeping up transparency with each other.
“Jaylen’s been through this from the standpoint of listening and the noise has been around him for a long time, big names over the years. I think one of the things you have to be able to do is ignore the noise and know what’s important. Also, be able to reach out and have candid and transparent communications with the people involved. We’ve had those and been very open from the get-go as all of this has been going on for any of our guys. I sat down with Jaylen last week in LA. He looked great and he will be back to Boston soon.”
Following the painful NBA Finals defeat in the hands of the Golden State Warriors, Boston propelled for an offseason of retooling, acquiring Malcolm Brogdon and Danilo Gallinari.
Looking on paper, the Cs definitely has its place at the top-tier teams of the title-contenders category. Both Brown and Jayson Tatum kept on improving their game, with the recovered Rob Williams III returning with force under the glass.
With training camp soon to begin, the Celtics have every single reason to be optimistic on what lies ahead in the upcoming basketball year.
