The Boston Celtics Have Successfully Survived The Kevin Durant Trade Saga

Unsurprisingly, the Kevin Durant Trade Saga came to an anticlimactic end earlier this week, with the NBA superstar deciding to remain with the Brooklyn Nets after his team made halfhearted attempts to satisfy his trade request. Amusingly, the team most affected by the news might not be the Nets but the Boston Celtics, who found themselves caught up in the wake of Durant’s withdrawn ultimatum.

It starts with Jaylen Brown, who was at the center of the most high-profile trade proposal surrounding Durant. According to reports, the Celtics made a preliminary offer to the Nets of Brown, Derrick White and a first-round draft pick for Durant. The Nets reportedly demanded Marcus Smart instead of White and that was the end of that.

However, the word leaked to the media, in the deadest part of the NBA offseason, ensuring that Brown found himself in the midst of unwanted attention. It was enough that team president Brad Stevens went on local radio station WEEI to try to minimize any collateral damage after Tuesday’s announcement.

“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,” Stevens said in his interview. “I think one of the things you have to be able to do is ignore the noise and know what’s important.”

It certainly sounds like the team are more relieved than bummed that the Durant talks, such as they were, are over. Most Celtics fans would likely agree, including Boston mayor Michelle Wu who summed up her constituents’ thoughts with a simple tweet.

It’s a counter-intuitive reaction to missing out on a Hall of Fame player and perennial MVP candidate, but there are sound basketball reasons for thinking that Boston is better off staying put.

The Celtics were two wins away from a title just a few months ago and made several moves to improve their roster without sacrificing any key pieces at the start of free agency. In this context, it made less sense for the Celtics to make the huge chemistry-altering move to swap Brown (and other significant pieces) for Durant, who was older, more expensive and had already lost significant time to injuries the season before.

However, the backlash surrounding a potential Brown-Durant trade wasn’t entirely a logical one: emotions were a factor. The Celtics had drafted Brown, who has developed into the team’s most consistent player over the last few seasons. Alongside Jayson Tatum, Robert Williams and Smart, Brown has established himself as part of a homegrown core with a genuine chance to win a championship in the very near future.

There is still room for sentimentality in sports. For many, the fact that a healthy Durant is a much better player than Brown only counted for so much in this particular equation. Even if Boston had finagled a way to acquire Durant straight up for him, there would have heavy opposition among the fanbase.

One reason for this: there remains lingering fallout from the Isaiah Thomas-for-Kyrie Irving trade. When Stevens’s predecessor Danny Ainge traded away Thomas after the point guard played through a career-altering injury and personal tragedy, it changed the perception of the Celtics around the league. This was a team that did not value loyalty, so how could it expect it from its players in return?

Brown was here for the Thomas trade and was not a fan, even before Irving ended up being a poor clubhouse fit. “It’s tough because it’s the business we live in,” he told Complex’s Adam Caparell. “Do I agree with it? Not necessarily.” Whether fair or not, it’s understandable that many prematurely worry that the Durant trade talk made Brown more likely to leave in free agency two years from now.

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So, it’s not all’s well that end’s well in Boston. It would have been much easier for the Celtics if the Nets had traded the superstar out of the Atlantic Division (preferably to the Western Conference). Should Durant’s Nets outlast the Celtics in these upcoming playoffs, these “better off without him” takes will be targets of earned mockery.

However, nothing that Boston could have done would have definitively promised them Banner 18. In the absence of such certainty, it’s hard to blame those of us who would rather the Celtics attempt to win a championship and fall short with their own players than gut their core and hand the keys to the franchise over to a talented stranger.