Court Sense: The East gets tougher for the Celtics ☘️

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Welcome back to Court Sense ☘️ A newsletter here to add some insult to injury

So, you thought this summer couldn’t make you feel any worse about the Jaylen Brown trade. Never let your guard down!

The trade that (mostly) everyone hated got a little tougher to swallow on Friday when LeBron James finally made his free agency decision, opting to take his talents to South Broad Street to join the Philadelphia 76ers.

James signed a vet minimum deal for two years and $8 million as the soon-to-be-42-year-old seeks one last championship.

Reactions ranged from shock (the wider basketball world) to elation (76ers fans) to “I’m going to drive into the ocean” (my older sister).

As our own Gary Washburn writes, the Celtics were probably already third in the pecking order in the East for next season, and that’s now a distant third as Philadelphia puts together perhaps the most talented starting five in basketball.

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Now, let me say this: I have no idea how this team is going to work, exactly. There are some personality clashes to sort out — Jaylen is Jaylen, LeBron is LeBron, Brown and Joel Embiid haven’t exactly gotten along in the past, etc. — and, crucially, only one basketball!

There’s a stat called usage rate that measures the percentage of a team’s plays a given player finishes while on the court (either with a shot attempt, a trip to the free-throw line, or a turnover). It’s not a perfect metric, but it gives you some idea of how ball-dominant a player might be.

Here are last season’s usage rates for Philadelphia’s projected starting five for 2026-27:

Tyrese Maxey: 28.6 percent

V.J. Edgecombe: 19.6 percent

Jaylen Brown: 35.1 percent

LeBron James: 26.2 percent

Joel Embiid: 33.6 percent

Add that all up and you get … 143.1 percent. So, you know, someone might need to take a few shots fewer.

To be clear, I’m totally misusing math to illustrate a point, but it is notable that it’s very, very rare to have so many ball-dominant players on one team. Brown is just coming off his first season as a true No. 1 option, Embiid has been one for a decade, James has been one since the Bush Administration (though he certainly took a backseat to Luka Doncic in Los Angeles), and Maxey just finished last season among the top-five scorers in the NBA.

Coach Nick Nurse is going to have a big job on his hands getting all this to coalesce. If he pulls it off, the Sixers might spend much of next year ruining the winters and spring of New Englanders. If he doesn’t, this might be the 2012-13 Lakers (of Kobe Bryant, Dwight Howard, Steve Nash, and this ill-fated Sports Illustrated cover) all over again.

Anyway, I promised you all last week that we’d do a little Court Sense mailbag today, and a few folks wrote in with questions on the Celtics.

Derrick White. Are rumors on point that point to an off-ramp from C’s point duties to another town?

—Matt Wagner

Putting aside the Seussical nature of this question (which I loved) — I’m highly doubtful that the Celtics would consider moving Derrick White at this point.

There were some rumors that White was drawing some interest last month, particularly from the Timberwolves and Raptors, but reports are that Boston dismissed them out of hand.

White is coming off a bit of a down year offensively, and his shooting woes were a big factor in the Celtics crashing out of the playoffs as early as they did. White shot 38.7 percent from deep in his first three full seasons in Boston, but that number dropped sharply to 32.7 last season. It got even worse in the playoffs, when he hit just 27.3 percent of his triples against Philadelphia.

But White is still a huge part of this Celtics core. He was first team All-Defense last year and an important offensive initiator, especially in a post-Brown world.

Plus, the Celtics have already done their needed salary-clearing; there’s no real reason to dump White and his $30 million cap hit. There are only so many Derrick Whites in the world, and unless a team comes to Brad Stevens with an offer he simply can’t refuse, I don’t think he’s headed anywhere any time soon.

We hear about how Jalen Brunson (and, notably, Tom Brady) renegotiated lower salaries for themselves so they can bring in better players to win. Not once have we heard that discussed from Brad Stevens (or even Jaylen or Jayson) … or any news organization. In your view, would this still be feasible for Jayson? Why wasn’t this a consideration for Jaylen?

— Alan White

I have also wondered if this will become more common in the future, but there are a few moving parts.

Players taking big pay cuts are a real rarity, and I think they will always be a very unusual exception rather than a norm. Also, the Players Association really, really doesn’t like when players take pay cuts, as it sort of undercuts the collective bargaining process to get as much for the players as possible.

That said — I do think that what happened with Brunson might set a bit of a precedent for some players moving forward. We’ve already seen it with Spurs star Victor Wembanyama, who took a slightly reduced deal at 25 percent of the salary cap instead of 30 percent — saving San Antonio about $10 million a year — and leaving $50 million on the table.

(Brady, by the way, was in a very, very unusual situation where his superstar model wife was making more money than him anyway, so that’s very much an outlier case.)

It’s hard to blame Tatum or Brown or anybody else for accepting the maximum salary that they can. Maybe they’d have different feelings moving forward after seeing what happened with the Knicks, but their deals both pre-dated New York’s championship. Maybe Tatum will think about it when he’s up for an extension in a couple of years, but his current deal is what it is.

And these things have to be player-driven. I don’t think it could ever come from Stevens or the team; if they were to suggest a pay cut, I think the vast majority of players would take that as disrespect —whether you think that’s fair or not — and the team would catch some flak for being cheap or not valuing their guys. It’s a bit of a rock and a hard place.

Some would argue that these guys are already getting tens of millions — what’s the real difference in Brown getting paid $50 million a year instead of $70 million, which might’ve been enough to keep him in Boston?

The dynamics are all a little more complicated than I have space to lay out here. I think cases like Brunson’s will remain a rarity, but his sacrifice — and the rewards that followed, far exceeding the money he left on the table — might be the start of a trend.

ICYMI 🗞️

LeBron James signing with the 76ers just made things even more difficult for the Celtics

By Gary Washburn

After the latest of LeBron James’s decisions, the Celtics suddenly look no better than the third-best team in the Atlantic Division.

And it’s a distant third after James shocked the basketball world yet again and signed a two-year, $8 million deal to join the rival Philadelphia 76ers, the new home of Jaylen Brown.

It’s been speculated that the 76ers acquiring Brown, which catapulted the franchise into NBA Finals contention, was an encouraging factor for James to join the club. He said in a statement that his goal is to win a fifth championship by joining Brown, Joel Embiid, Tyrese Maxey, and VJ Edgecombe to form a formidable quintet.

As the celebrations continue in Philadelphia after what has been a rousingly successful first offseason under new president of basketball operations Mike Gansey — acquiring Brown and James, and dumping the anchor-like contract of Paul George while not having to give up Edgecombe in the process — the reaction in Boston can’t be positive.

Other top stories we’re watching …

In his return from medical leave, Christopher L. Gasper has a few pent-up thoughts to share, including on the Celtics dumping Jaylen Brown to the 76ers.
The Celtics signed wing Jordan Walsh to a three-year, $15 million contract extension. Gary Washburn has the news.
The new NBA salary reality is settling in this offseason for teams like the Celtics, Spurs, and Thunder. Gary Washburn covers that and more in this week’s Sunday Basketball Notes.

Trivia Tuesday 🧠

Each week, we’ll be asking a piece of Celtics trivia to test your knowledge on the 18-time champions.

Congratulations to Larry Brown of Chicago, the first person to correctly answer last week’s question. As a refresher, we asked you to name a player (other than Paul Pierce) to have worn the No. 34 for the Celtics.

There are quite a few answers to this one — 10 in total — but the most recognizable is probably Rick Carlisle, who wore the number for those famous 1986 Celtics. The only other players to wear it for more than a year (prior to Pierce) were Jim Ard and Kevin Gamble.

Here’s this week’s question: Which Celtic legend started coaching at Boston College after his retirement in 1963?

Know the answer? Send us an email at [email protected], and the first person to write in with the correct answer will get a shoutout when the answer is revealed in next week’s newsletter. Good luck!

The Joe Mazzulla Quote of the Week

Congrats to Celtics star Jayson Tatum, a really unexpected winner of the Joe Mazzulla Quote of the Week.

I’m not going to lead into this one too much, as to let you all draw your conclusions. Here’s what Tatum said abut leadership at a basketball camp last week:

“Being a leader doesn’t mean you know it all. I don’t know it all. I’ll be the first person to say that,” Tatum said. “Being a leader is being comfortable with, [raising] your hand like, ‘I don’t know, can you explain that to me. I don’t know XYZ, I want to learn.’

“Being around somebody that feels like they know it all, I don’t want to be around that person. I don’t want to be the smartest person in the room. I want to learn from someone else.”

Does the second part sound familiar to you at all?

Naturally, the online basketball world took this clip and ran with it as a thinly-veiled shot at now ex-teammate Jaylen Brown, who has at times been accused of thinking he’s the smartest person in the room a little too often.

If Tatum had said this at the start of June, before Brown was shipped out of town, I’m sure it would’ve just sounded like reasonable advice on leadership and humility. But this is some tough timing, Jayson!

Anyway, check back in next week for Brown’s response on a Twitch stream, probably. What a world.