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Hey, it's Bill from the Bill Simmons podcast. FIFA World Cup 26 fans, listen up. Is the official beer sponsor of The FIFA World Cup 26 Michelob Ultra is giving away $1,000,000 worth of FIFA World Cup 26 tickets and prizes. Enter now at Michelobulture.com SuperiorAccess/ FIFAWorld Cup 26 McLob Ultra FIFA World Cup 26 Superior Access no purchase necessary. Open US residence 21 begins on December 1, 2025 ends on July 31, 2026. Multiple entry periods. Visit www.mcglobeultra.com SuperiorAccess FIFA World Cup 2. 6 for free entry, entry deadlines, prizes and details. Right now get up to 15% off select storage solutions put heavy duty HDX totes to good use, protecting what's important to you. The solid impact resistant design prevents cracking and the clear base and sides make items easy to find even when the totes are stacked. Find select shelving and tote storage up to 15% off at the Home Depot. To organize every room in your home from your garage to your attic, visit homedepot.com how doers get more done hey
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That's GoldBelly.com promo code GIFT today is Thursday, July 9th, and this is Celtics Beat on CLNS Media, the leading online provider of audio video coverage of the Boston Celtics. I'm adam Kaufman. Episode 684 features Yahoo Sports Dan Devine.
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C
And I'm Evan Valenti. And today's show is powered by prizepix. Prizepix is the official daily fantasy partner of CLNS Media. Download the app today, use the promo code, Click and get $50 in lineups when you play.
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B
$5. Hey everybody, welcome in. This is a new edition of Celtics Beat. And, well, I. I guess I should start by both apologizing and equally, you know, simultaneously saying, what else would you expect? Which was I wasn't here last week and Jaylen Brown got traded. So I. I've got a lot of thoughts on this and I could go on for a solid hour, probably uninterrupted, but I would not be a very gracious host in doing that. Not only a host of this particular show Celtics beat, but host of the Jaylen Brown reaction party that we're about to have here. Adam Kaufman, Evan Valenti, our special guest. Love having him back. Senior NBA writer from Yahoo. Sports, that is Dan Devine. Dan, it's good to see you. It's been a quiet NBA off season, huh?
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A
Yeah, not much going on. Peek behind the curtain here. We had been trying to work something out for a little while and then after the Jalen Brown trade happened, I was like, so my bad. I'm not getting back to you guys sooner but I guess you might still have some stuff to talk about if you'd like to. And so I'm happy that you know, while obviously it'll be better to be a more prime prompt responding guest. Maybe the timing all worked out.
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B
Yeah, it's I think the, the real lesson here in and I mean you wouldn't know this unless you know you're, you're in the shadows as a die hard listener of Celtics beat, which certainly we would appreciate. But ev, as you know, as someone who, you know, jumps into the lead spot anytime I'm not here and any of our listeners would be well aware this should have been the expectation because anytime that I go away, something significant happens surrounding this team without fail. And I know the Jaylen Brown trade was not a shock by any means, but the timing was a little bit unknown. Would this takes weeks? Would it take months? What would it be? We should have said to close out the previous show two weeks ago that I did. All right. Well anyway, enjoy your trade deadline reaction or trade reaction show with Jaylen Brown because he's absolutely moving while I am unavailable. That's how it tends to go.
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C
I just want to point a few things out. Number one, it's not just you. You remember two or three years ago when I went on vacation, Rob Williams got hurt, I think in a game against the Minnesota Timberwolves.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And was pretty much done and cooked for the rest of the season. So stuff happens when we go away.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And with that being said, I have a trip coming up and you have one more trip coming up. So this month is going to be electric.
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B
As you well know, as someone who covers the, you know, the league, league wide, no time is safe. I mean, I can remember too, I was also on vacation when the Kyrie Irving trade broke. Now that in mid to late August was supposed to be the safe time for people to go away in NBA circles. But you know, it just goes to show there is no reliable time to escape in what has become very much a year round sport.
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A
100%. We typically same sort of thing. We typically have a family sort of trip at the end of August. It is basically the safest thing we can do. And there have been a number of times where I have either had to like bow out of pool time or just be like, sorry guys, you guys are gonna have to handle this one without me. And you know, shockingly, the world does continue to move on when I'm not present for it. Weird, but I know, shocking that that's how it works out. But in this case, yeah, like I would imagine so you have had a week to just sort of stew on this and think and, and take in everybody else's takes and let it all kind of marinate. So I'm very interested to hear, like to be here for it. What, what's like, what's job number one for you as you react to this?
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B
Yeah, I, I guess in some ways, I mean, don't get me wrong, the news broke and I just started tweeting up a storm. So it's not like my real time thoughts were not out there. But I do think if I had popped on a show immediately, like you know, Garden Report doing its live reaction show here on the network, I don't know, I might have said some things that I, that I would have regretted in time. To your point, I've had a little time to digest this thing and I think my overarching thoughts from the moment the trade happened to where we are now, after listening to Brad Stevens, after getting reaction from not only Jalen Brown, Jason Tatum, again, everybody's takes are out there and a lot of the financial information is out there. All of the, you know, your colleague Haverstro had had a, an incredible article breaking down the analytics and the on off of Jalen Brown and whether he's net negative on the floor and all of these things, like everything's out there. I think my overarching thoughts really have not changed though, which is one I'm disappointed, but not surprised. I would have been a little bit more on board, for instance, with a Giannis attentokounmpo trade than I would have been getting, you know, a, I don't want to do the whole like bag of balls thing, but obviously what feels like a lesser return. This only amplifies the fact that Jaylen Brown, and we've said this a number of times on this show in recent weeks. So this is certainly not new that he is not the player, according to the league, that he is within his own mind, not even close to it, you know, and, and he is not organizationally viewed as being on Jason Tatum's level, never has been. He is not a superstar, despite all of the things that he did so well last year. And, and we're just talking about Jaylen Brown the basketball player. We're not talking about Jaylen Brown the Twitch streamer. We're not talking about Jaylen Brown the incredible member of society and in the community and all the amazing things that he already has and will continue to accomplish off the floor. We are purely talking Brown the basketball player who did get outplayed in that singular playoff series by the guy coming the other way, Paul George. Now, I don't believe there's a whole lot left in the Paul George tank. I would love to to be proven wrong on that. But as Brad acknowledged, this was not about acquiring Paul George. This was about those assets, in particular the 28 and 31 first round picks that with the new lottery reform, maybe, just maybe you luck into having a couple of top five picks that help you along in your rebuild, in your pursuit of that next championship. But when it comes to Jalen leaving this team, one immediate concern that I do have is heaven forbid Jason Tatum misses any extended period of time. And as he continues to recover, you don't have that guy who can carry you now night to night. That's one thing versus isolated nights. Derrick White, Peyton Pritchard, even Paul George. These guys can go off in a given night and carry you on a random Monday in Charlotte, as Jason Tatum likes to say. But sustained excellence or performance as Jason or Jaylen Brown generally gave you last year, that's hard to come by. But this was not like for all the people. Two things. One, and then I will stop rambling. This is not about private equity money. This, this is not like for all the people that Bill Chisholm is cheap and he's ruining this team. And this is what you get with a new owner they don't want to spend. This is about ducking the second apron, which every single NBA team wants no part of, and resetting and limiting penalties. The Knicks did it and not bring back Mitchell Robinson. He, he's yours now, by the way. And obviously the Thunder have done it, not bringing back multiple role players. The Celtics, we're talking about the last three champions, a slew of teams have avoided or have, you know, orchestrated sort of the same financial path. Bill Chisholm, who in his Presser with Brad Stevens spoke in a limited amount and looked incredibly uncomfortable and borderline scared at the media reaction that he was dealing with for the very first time. Promised he will spend when the time is right and there are no financial blocking on his end of Brad Stevens. And I'm going to take him at his word right now because I don't believe that anything they have done right now is financial in the sense of we are not going to spend X on a given player. What the organization decided, and everybody knows this by now, but I felt this at the time, if we talked about this, they didn't want to give Jaylen Brown that contract. The contract that he has, it was overpaid. He's being paid like a top five top 10 player and he is not. He's a top 20ish player in the league, you know, depending on the year. Obviously, I know he's coming off a top 10 season, but that is not who and what he is. He's going to regress. He would have ingressed, regressed in Boston with Jason Tatum back and healthy. He's going to regress as being a, a third or fourth option some nights in Philadelphia behind Embiid and Maxi and even Edgecombe. So this is about to look very different. I saw somebody tweet and I think this is overstating it. We're about to enter the, you know, Tobias Harris era of Jaylen Brown. I think that's. I think that's a little bit much. But he is becoming something that he has not, you know, been in Boston, here in Philadelphia, they would have been willing to devote 35% of the cap to two different guys. 70% all told. And pay, and pay and pay. If you're getting two superstars, Tatum, Giannis, you're not doing that and committing that usage as Brad talked about. And everybody drink, by the way, if anybody says optionality, they're not going to do that with Jaylen Brown, because Jaylen Brown's not worth it. Which goes back to the whole thing that I've been screaming about for a month and then I'll shut up, which is Brad Stevens is comfortable doing the Moneyball thing. The old Billy Bean, or at least Brad Pitt as Billy Bean. Let's replace him in the aggregate. It's not about not spending the money, it's how you spend the money. They are content having multiple successful role players behind Tatum. And hey, it's Tatum's team. Not 1A, 1B, not Batman and Robin, not, you know, all of that. And, and going from There and having a clear cut vision at that point. My only thing that I'm a little uncomfortable with, Dan, as I, I transition this to you, I promise is doing this at the peak of Jason Tatum's prime.
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A
Sure. However, that's what the timing is, right. I mean you're entering a situation where you are coming off of if this is what the value proposition for Jaylen Brown is now waiting longer to do it would, would not have returned you even this much. Right. And so the argument being you do this when there are still three years left on his contract, you do this before he, while he is now eligible for an extension. That again, as you sort of, as you noted there, like this is a clear indication that the Boston Celtics did not want that extension to be their problem. Let's let somebody else decide whether they want to pay Jaylen Brown what amounts to a total of I think $325 million over five years. Right. Let's, let's let that be somebody else's issue to deal with as he gets into his early to mid-30s. We need to do it now because he just averaged 29, 7 and 5 and was all NBA second team player. Those numbers are not going to replicate as you mentioned next season. There is a whiff of and it's an unkind comparison. But like Sam Hinkey back in the day with the 76ers saying Michael Carter Williams, take every possession you want and you're going to finish the season averaging like 17, 7 and 7. And then after the season we're going to trade you because we don't think that you're going to actually be on a rate and advanced metrics perspective that you're not going to be that helpful a player but it's going to look real good. So let's try to like pump this, the value and then move off of you from there. Obviously Jaylen Brown significantly higher level player than that. But that's the idea, right? When will Jaylen Brown be more valuable on the market than this? And again, if you have canvassed the league and what the return, the best return you feel, the return you felt most comfortable getting was similar salary structure but done a year earlier and potentially two years earlier, which I think is the gigantic part of this. And then some picks that may or may not turn into high level equity, we will see I think doing it now. The longer you waited, the less likely was you were going to get even that. And so to be able to say as you mentioned, if there was a 35% player that you could get and over the years this will continue to be a. Should they have put more in the middle to just get the honest deal done? Reasonable people can disagree about that and history will be the judge of whether. If Giannis goes on and has five more phenomenal years in Miami and they look like a wrecking crew and the Celtics aren't able to flip the assets into the next partner for Tatum, then yeah, this is all going to wind up looking pretty, pretty rancid. Brad Stevens, I think to this point in his front office tenure, I think has done nothing but earned the benefit of the doubt with the way he has managed this roster and the financial situation and trying to maximize winning here. So to me it comes back to, as you mentioned, Jaylen Brown, the value he has as a player. Can we recreate it in the aggregate but also fit a style of play a little bit better? Are we in a position where by not just redistributing the touches and the usage and whatever else to different players, but like players who have a lower turnover rate, players who might be more likely to create turnovers on the defensive end, players who might be more likely to extend possessions on the offensive glass, players who are a higher volume 3 point shooting team, higher accuracy 3 point shooting player, like that possession battle, winning the margins, which has been the tenets of Joe Missoula's Operation Missoula ball for the last two, three years, like if we are able to do that, maybe we're not even taking as big a step back right now while also positioning ourselves to either flip those assets into the next star or maybe just in a year's time have 50 something million dollars come off the books and, and then the world's your oyster in terms of how you want to build the team around Tatum. I think your point about making that bet after seeing, I think what was it like 740 total minutes of Tatum after coming back from that, that would give me some pause, especially considering Tatum didn't finish the playoff series. Right. Like I think the idea of saying we're going to build it all around you, that like a little bit of concern. But by that point like this, the team was already built that way. It was, it was already going to be built around Tatum when healthy. Tatum, as you mentioned, was the clear number one in the hierarchy. Even if they were a tandem, all of the metrics and all of the on court impact suggests to you Tatum's the guy, he's the engine, the one driving it. We're going to build around him how do we best do that? This is the way to do it. It hurts and it sucks, but you see it. You understand the thought process. Although doing it to Philly, that's particularly
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tough for anyone that cares. By the way, I do live in the betting space quite a bit and I like to look at odds in the DraftKings sportsbook. Just to mention again for anyone that this matters to your odds to win the championship. As they sit today are San Antonio, Oklahoma City, big surprise. Followed by the defending champion. Still getting used to that, New York Knicks. And then the Boston Celtics at 13 to 1. Not the Sixers, they're behind them at 20 to 1. Your win totals the Celtics 51 and a half, the Sixers 48 and a half. Again, just want to mention that this is based on present day rosters and Philadelphia's odds might even be inflated by the potential of adding LeBron James. But everything you said Dan, there's a lot to unpack and continue to unpack there. But one thing about Brad Stevens and not losing faith in Brad, what a relief that is because Twitter told me that Brad had a lobotomy the morning of the Paul George trade and it turns out he might still know a little something about the sport of basketball. A quick break to hear from our good friends over at Prize Picks. It's a scorching sports summer. You can make all your picks on prize picks. The WNBA baseball season, they are heating up. Big tennis slams, major golf tournaments on the horizon. You can make your picks for all these events and more all summer long on Prize Picks, America's number one sports sports picks app.
- [17:50]
C
The entire summer of soccer is on Prize Picks. Cough. I've been all over this. I love this tournament. It is so much fun and I'm getting bummed out because it is coming to an end. All 48 countries in every matchup. And if you're if you want to rep your side in the tournament on prize picks, you can win a trip to the final in New York, the biggest tournament ever. Which means there's even more opportunities to cash in while you root for your favorite sides and global soccer stars. Now last week, coffin you were not here. I was a little spicy last week and instead of a flex play, I went power play on my pick for the week. And guess what buddy? We locked it in and we scored. We went Messi less than passes. We went Mbappe more than a half a goal. We went Holland my man. More than half a goal. All three of them came in. I 6.25x my money and with that being said, we're going back to the well for this week's power play. Messi, Mbappe, Holland, all three of them, more than a half a goal. We're locking into this a power Play. I will 6.25x my money if that comes in. However, you know me, I am the, the king of the flex play. I love flex play. During most seasons, we will be doing flex play on the show, which means if you get all three right, excellent. Your three extra money. That's excellent. Maybe even more. Maybe even better than that. Sometimes with the Goblins, you get a little better than that. But if you get two out of three right, you get your money back, which for me is a win. And getting your money from price picks could not be any easier. Little as 15 minutes, watch it roll into your account. I use you use it for Venmo. You can put it in your, your debit card or your bank account. Whatever you want to do, do it that way. And if lamps on fire, which I thought about cop and I almost texted you, but you were on vacation, so let it go vacation or not. I, I had an early payout opportunity and I said I, I can hear Adam Kaufman right now telling me don't do it. And we didn't. And I won way more. So thanks for the spiritual wherever you work off. I appreciate that. So download the prize picks app today. Use the code CLNS. Get $50 lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. That's code CLNS to get $50 in lineups after you play your first 5 dollars lineup.
- [20:15]
B
Listen, I'm just sitting here as you're talking. I'm, I'm looking to build out this, this goals little, little fun, this trifecta right here. I, I wanna, I wanna be able to cash in right along with you and keep on doing it while people are listening to us ramble on about the Celtics sweating out the World cup too. It sounds pretty good. So once again, download the prize picks app. Do it today. Use the code CLNS. Get $50 in lineups after playing your first for just $5. That is promo code CLNS. You get $50 in lineups after playing YOUR first for only $5. So go download that prize picks app. Do it right now. Let's get back to the show. We're back here with Dan Devine, senior NBA writer over at Yahoo. Sports, of course, talking all things Celtics, especially in the wake of the Jaylen Brown trade. And we will, as we go along, try and forecast what is still to come. But one thing that you did mention before our break there in terms of Paul George, and I think this is an important takeaway that of course plenty of people have talked about, but I think it bears repeating and reminding people that again, it's not about the money. Contracts do matter. Celtics didn't want anything to do with Jalen Brown's future contract and extension and didn't really want his present day contract either. Which, yes, economically speaking, AAV average annual value is pretty much the same as Paul George's. So people said, well, what are you doing? You're replacing a, a solid player. Could have been, you know, top five mvp, could have been first team all NBA last year. If you don't get a couple of exemptions in there for Kate Cunningham and Luka Doncic and, and you're replacing that with a lesser guy who's, you know, 36 years old and not, you know, he could still play. He can be a very successful 3 and D player, especially in the Missoula system. But he's not too, too far from being washed and at the end of the line. So please make it make sense economically. Here's how it makes sense. You're getting one year of Paul George, right? That's it. A year from now he's going to opt into his contract and he will be a tradable expiring contract. Maybe he breaks camp with the team next season and they trade him before the trade deadline. So you get a year and a half out of Paul George. That's it. This guy is not around for the long term. They are freeing up that salary slot and looking to devote it in other places. And one thing that I saw on social media the other day, and I don't remember who tweeted at this point, but it was, it was just a, a random user. It was not an NBA talking head. And I just thought that this hadn't really been properly explored. There are some crazy contracts. For instance, you've written about the, to me, however necessary it might have been insane extension that Donovan Mitchell just got.
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C
Sure.
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B
At $75 million a year and how poorly in my mind that is going to age because he is already not a number one option as far as I'm concerned. I would have loved, not as a Celtics fan, but as an NBA fan. Giannis in Cleveland, not that he ever would have signed off on that, but he could have been a clear one. You bump Mitchell down to two, you got Harden as a three. Maybe Mobley's out the door, but whatever. Like that would have Made sense. Mitchell has proven time and time again solid regular season player. He can lift you to certain places, but he can't quite get you where
- [23:31]
C
you need to be.
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B
The number one can carry you to. He's not a number one, but he is being paid like a number 1A with a freaking bullet. So some of these contracts are going to age poorly. Is Brad Stevens. This is where we go the other way, right? This is where we do the dance of his. Brad, a genius as ugly as the Jalen Brown trade, just feels. It feels icky, right? Is Brad just ahead of the curve in the sense that there are going to be good, not necessarily great. Again, Jaylen Brown is a good to very good. Very good. We'll call him very good. He's a very good player. He's not a superstar. There are going to be some very good players that are going to spring available in the next couple of years simply because teams are trying to do what Brad just did, which is avoid certain penalties. Brad. I just keep saying Brad, but the front office, sure trying to avoid certain penalties and trying to get under certain thresholds and guys that teams don't want to move. They didn't want to move Jaylen Brown necessarily. Maybe they did, but they definitely didn't want his money on the books anymore. Teams are going to be forced to move certain players and that is going to spring guys available that you wouldn't normally think are available. And Brad is now getting a year or two ahead of other teams that are going to be in the same boat in having some of that available money to take on a guy like that. It's why people are starting off. This is going to happen. But teams are. People are starting to fantasize Celtics fans, like, could Jokic. Could Jokic wind up in Boston? Are the Nuggets not going to pay Jokic? But it's those conversations.
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A
Is
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as much as Brad deserves the. The benefit of the doubt and being a great basketball mind and all of these things, are we not giving him maybe a certain level of credit that he deserves in the forward thinking of where the league is going and where these contracts are at in terms of his position to be reactionary when the time comes?
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A
I mean, it's certainly possible. You know, the Celtics front office has been forward thinking for, you know, generations of front offices and head coaches and star tandems. Right. Like in terms of, you know, being kind of early on the early edges. If we build a big three too, on the early edges of as that big three ages, we gotta move off that and get younger. We gotta find a way to move forward. And obviously that's under Danny Ainge. But like a lot of the sort of underlying people, Mike Zarin and some of the other folks that have been in that front office bridge those gaps. And so I think that there is a zag component to this. Right. We talked about this on the big number with Tom Haberster. That feeling of like we are moving into a real, an even great higher accelerated all in NBA where the windows are getting shorter and shorter and your ability to maximize them is dwindling. Right. Like we are now in eight straight years of no repeat championship. We are in stretches where as you mentioned, the defending champions are the teams that as they've won wind up having to decide either right afterward in the case of Mitchell Robinson with the Knicks or maybe a year down the line with OKC or two with Boston. This is how we have to navigate the second apron era. And maybe in some instances that's ownership saying I just don't want to pay up that much. But sometimes it's. We see the roster building restrictions that come with going into the second apron and staying there. As you know, that's like a bright line that we just can't cross. So if that is the case and your windows are so narrow and you have multiple teams that are trying to jam themselves through that window, right. It's Toronto going for Kawhi Leonard. It's to some degree Philly knowing they're kind of pot committed on their three star build, saying we can upgrade the star from Paul George to Jaylen Brown. It's Miami going and getting Giannis. It's. It is Minnesota with all their dealing to try to maneuver their teams to get Lamelo ball next to Anthony Edwards, if you're close enough, go for it era in the NBA. And I think that to some degree this is Brad Stevens in that front office saying there's going to be a rebound to some of these misses. Right. And if we don't have the financial flexibility, the draft assets to be able to capitalize on those things that the, if we're. Even if it's not necessarily we got to go get one of those stars as they break free or a sub star that might be a great fit for our structure and our team and our build who might accentuate what we do and sort of be the rising tide that lifts all boats. If we are in a structure where we are paying 70 to 73% of the salary cap to two players who are going to be on the wrong side of 30 getting into the 12th, 13th, 14th years of their careers. And we just don't have the ability to really make significant adjustments there. That's where you wind up out of outs, Right? You know, there have been versions of this sort of deal in the past where teams will say, we want to take that one big salary and break it up into several smaller pieces. Right? Like I'm reminded of a few years ago when Dallas traded Kristaps Porzingis to Washington and everyone looked at the return and it's like Spencer Dinwiddie and Davis Bertons and whatever. It's like, what are you doing? But the idea was those are more movable and it gives us more ways to do some different things. And then, you know, a couple years later they're in the finals, right? They were able to maneuver around some of those pieces and put themselves in better position. And so I think that there's some component of that, I don't want to use the O word that you mentioned is going to get everybody drunk at the beginning of the podcast. But the idea of this is how we make sure we're more fluid, more flexible, we have more ways that we can leverage our forward thinking, our creativity, whatever. If we just were only able to build one way. That's how you die. That's how you wind up not able to capitalize on those opportunities. This puts the Celtics in position to, in theory, when whatever those opportunities turn into, as you get a handful of years into the second apron era and teams are forced to confront the bill coming due on some of those roster management decisions they made earlier, the Celtics find themselves in a position where we got our 1A guy. We have now a number of sort of smaller, more variable contracts. We've got exceptions, we got picks, we got ways we can go in the short term. It hurts. It hurts to bid farewell to someone who has meant so much to so many for so long in Boston. I do think that there is an argument to be made and you know, we won't see the full arc of this transaction for several years time that the Celtics can absolutely come out on the other side of it because they had the willingness to bear short term pain for potential longer term gain.
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C
I know in our sphere of things, transactions are spectacular for content creation, driving people to websites, to YouTube channels, to television sets. It's all good for us. I mean, I, I cannot imagine the programming. I mean I can imagine because I watched it. ESPN just fed off Jalen Brown for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. This is just going to keep happening every year. We're going to have the content wheel spinning. You know, whether it's Oklahoma City, whether it's going to be San Antonio at some point, whether, you know, Minnesota's link it lurking there, Denver. I've. There was a great. I gotta make sure I attribute this correctly because I just want to point out how great it was. It was. Ryan Blackburn had a great breakdown.
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A
Oh yeah. Mile High Sports. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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C
Of. Of the. Of what's coming for the Nuggets and what. There's what their salary caps sheets gonna look like this year. Doesn't look great. But I sit here, I'm listening to everybody kind of talk about things and I. The one question I kept coming back to as I'm listening, it's like, is this good for basketball that we're gonna have all these people moving around all the time? We're gonna, we're gonna have teams like, you know, eventually a Sacramento or maybe a New Orleans Pelicans or maybe insert whatever team here. Maybe it's Portland, I don't know. Pick a team who's going to be able to at one point say we're going for X player, we're going for him. We're going to give everything that we got to this particular thing. We're going to bring this guy aboard. Some people would say that's great for basketball. Like if they. If somehow the Sacramento Kings are able to pry away just let's say it's Anthony Edwards. And I'm not going to say that's. That's going to happen. I'm just saying. Right.
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A
For the sake of argument.
- [31:48]
C
Yeah. Let's just say like this ends up with Anthony Edwards and the Kings. Well, this is wonderful for Sacramento fans, but is this type of player movement? Because this is what's good. This is just the first domino of what's going to happen the next couple of years. Is this actually good for basketball? Because I would say continuity is what really makes. Is what really made the Knicks special is they have continuity. Not from just playing together the regular season, playing together in college. That continuity is going to be kind of thrown away for the content machine that's going to just eat all this. Update. Are we headed to a darker place or a better place here?
- [32:25]
A
It's a phenomenal question and it's one that I think the NBA has powers that be. And from Adam Silver on down, they've determined that in pursuit of parity and the idea of having. Of every organization theoretically having the opportunity to, if you are well managed and you are forward thinking, put yourself in position to contend. Right. And their view of this would be that we haven't had a repeat champion since the warriors with KD is an indication of a healthier overall ecosystem. That you've got teams able to make those moves. To siphon off a second star from a higher salary team is an indication of a system that is going to more readily and broadly distribute talent so you don't wind up with the Steph Katie Clay, Draymond warriors or whatever. Insert version of that, I guess to some degree. Also the Jays and Drew and Porzingis and Horford and whatever Celtics like the idea of, rather than having it be one team that's going to stack five all Stars or whatever, there's going to be more teams that have the opportunity, if they are well managed, to bring in more talent. And then what that means is more teams as we sit here on July 9, there's what, 11 teams in the east that can tell themselves that they're going to be a top six team in the playoff like, and however many of those might realistically have a shot at home court in the first round. And you know, a similar story in the west, although obviously there's a lot of, you know, more in flux there too. I think they would argue that this is the system as they want it to run. Like no longer will you have in theory, Sacramento being a franchise that goes 16 or 17 years between playoff berths. If you are one positive move and one series of transaction cycles away from you're good or you're pretty good, that gives fans something to hold on to and to get excited about. The flip side to that is Sacramento got there right and then in a year and a half it was like gone and now they're back where they were. And if you sign the contract, you get the star in trade. You have to start getting worried about when is the extension eligible, when do we have to. Are we going to get too expensive to be able to keep all these guys together? Are we now looking at guys that can only stay with a team for a handful of years, you know, like Jaylen Brown. A decade long Celtic goes out the door. When who is going to be the next beyond Jason Tatum? Decade long Celtic Mitchell Robinson, as you just mentioned, he goes from New York to Boston, was the longest tenured. Nick, right. Got there as a second round pick in 2017 or 18, I believe, and was there. Fans developed the connection to him because he was there from all of the horrible seasons to the absolute Top of the mountain. And is it harder to develop those connections if you are a fan? I think that's a real concern. I wrote about this in 2019. I think back when I was at the ringer, I think it was when Kawhi and Paul George were going to LA and it was like, are we at a place where it's just the acceleration of the player movement and some of it is on the player side where, you know, players realize they could exercise more control and more agency on where they go if they accepted shorter contracts. Some of it is on ownership because they shortened the length of contracts, right? Like they didn't want to have the 7 year kg deal in Minnesota anymore, so they cut down the length of the maximum contract. They wanted to make sure the players had an incentive to stay in town. So. So they developed the supermax then they didn't want to pay the supermaxes. So guys were starting to go out of town. It is the downstream effect of all of these changes to the system that now you are in a position where guys are just used to moving every couple of years. Teams are now afraid of what it is going to cost to keep them together for more than two years at a time. So you're in this perpetual churn of we have two or three years and then who knows what it's going to look like. And at this particular moment in time, it's hilarious. You have all these teams trading 2031, 2032, 2033 draft picks. We don't even know what the draft's going to look like in 2030.
- [36:49]
B
Right?
- [36:49]
A
Like we've just added a new lottery system that they put into place that it's going to sunset in 2029. So no one even knows if there's going to be a draft in 2030, let alone how valuable the picks are going to be. So it is a league that is basically operating like refreshing Twitter. You're looking for the dopamine hit of the next 15 seconds. And is that a good thing? I mean, as somebody who's become addicted to social media due to my professional responsibilities over the last 15 years, probably not. Probably not an awesome thing for the ongoing health of a business like this. But that is where the eyeballs are. It's where the attention has drawn. And like in an attention economy, I think the league has put itself in position to maximize that. Is that a good thing for the long term health of the game? I think is a very, very valid question and I think the answers are going to probably come. We'll find out. We're going to find out one way or the other.
- [37:46]
B
Yeah, Certainly not great. Has been talked about widely by players, media, fans alike. The idea that homegrown players are now having to be moved because of contractual situations and not even because, again, you just don't want them anymore. They're not good, whatever it may be. I mean, like, long gone. Soon enough are going to be the days of guys spending their entire careers with one team. Sure, there'll be outliers. You know, there was Kobe, there was Duncan, there was Dirk. There were, you know, like, maybe, maybe Tatum will be that guy, but probably not. That doesn't mean he's going to leave during his peak. But he could be like a Paul Pierce who at the end moves around for a couple of years and, and just isn't here. He goes to, you know, I, I don't know, play. Maybe St. Louis has a team by then, for all we know, but it's. This is just the realities of, of the league and chasing parody. As you talked about. I. I wasn't. I was oddly ambivalent about a Jalen Brown move in general. I'm as disappointed with the return as a lot of people, but I wasn't advocating for the Celtics to keep or move Jalen Brown. I kind of trusted in the front office to recognize what needed to be done. Obviously, what needed to be done from a financial standpoint, as we've discussed ad nauseam at this point, was figure out something different than that contract because they clearly felt after a couple of, you know, ugly playoff exits following a championship, that the Jays, the era of the Jays had kind of plateaued. And it wasn't, no matter what you surrounded those two with, saying nothing about them as individuals or their working relationship or how they share the floor together or any of that that everybody wants to obsess over from a basketball standpoint, it just wasn't going to get much better. It was only going to cycle downward. And so as you look at the Celtics as they exist now, and Brad alluded to the fact that there would be another move with some of the limited money they have available right now, and maybe they will find a way to use some or all of that tpe. Depending on, again, moves they could make, all of it would require, you know, probably moving a White or a Pritchard. I don't think that's going to happen, but you could ship off a Hauser and, you know, get a good chunk of the tpe. I think there's going to be something else. Doesn't mean it's going to be monumental. There will be something else. As you look at the Celtics right now, sort of in the scope of the Eastern Conference versus what they were, you could make the case they are better on paper than they were as a 56 win team that flamed out in the first round and adding Robinson, adding Conley, addressing certain needs, getting a healthy Tatum, you know, we'll see what George is within this system and how they load, manage the hell out of him and how much he can even stay on the floor. But how do you look at this Celtics team in terms of how far away it is for competing a championship?
- [40:42]
A
I honestly don't think it's dramatically, certainly don't think it's dramatically worse than last year. Like and it's to your point about the earlier point about the Vegas win totals and the championship odds. Vegas is often basing those things on the broader sample, right? On what we just saw over 82 games as opposed to what we just saw in seven games in the first round. And the underlying numbers on this team were fantastic, right? It was a 56 win team that was near the top of the league in offensive efficiency, was still an excellent defense, didn't turn the ball over a ton, offensive rebound did great, found all these ways to make maximize possessions to, you know, shot a ton of threes, shot way more with Jalen Brown off the floor. And I think that's part again to the style of play component if we. No one begrudges Jason Jaylen Brown the mid range shots or the drives to the rim that he was generating last year because you needed them. Right? But I do think that there is something to be said for like the Celtics, whether it's in that alignment between front office and coaching and whatever, they know a style of play that they want to play. They want to play a higher three point volume game. They want to play a more possession, valuing game, suppressing turnovers and creating turnovers. And they were in the middle of the league in terms of winning that nightly possession battle. There's a fantastic site. I want to give it a plug. Last night in basketball, my guy Jared Dubin tracks the possession battle on a nightly basis. Like whether you get more offensive rebounds than you give up, whether you generate more free throws than you give up. The Celtics were 15th in that last season. They barely broke even and that's while doing so many of the good things right. And a lot of it is they didn't create a lot of turnovers. They didn't get to the free throw line as much as they would have liked to. But also they had more turnovers and a lot of those like talk about the on off numbers the perpetual bane of this conversation stylistically they shot way more threes when Jaylen Brown was off the floor. They generated more turnovers than Jaylen Brown was off the floor. And they forced and they committed fewer turnovers when Jalen Brown was off the floor. And I think that's part of this the idea of if you get most of a season of Paul George, he's perennially had fantastic steel rates. He's a lower turnover guy, he's a higher three point volume guy. If you get again with the load management plan that the Knicks put into place for Mitchell Robinson where he played 60 games, I don't even I don't think he averaged 20 minutes a game but and we didn't play in back to backs but was there for most of the season. The arguably the best offensive rebound in the league. Perpetually great block and steel rates as a big man. So like you're jet the idea of generating more turnovers. I think that there's something to be said for like that's how they want this to look more broadly. And if you get the coin flipping heads two times on the health for those guys, I don't know if it's 56 wins but I would be surprised if it's much below 50. You know, like especially if what you saw from Tatum in those 700 odd minutes when he came back, that's the floor and progress isn't linear. Who knows exactly how health is going to look in the first full year back after an Achilles. But I think you can look at what the return was for a guy like Kevin Durant and say a handful of years younger, advances in the treatments, the fact that he got under the knife right away, all those things we've read about and we've talked about, there's reason for optimism that what Jayson Tatum looks like in his first full year back is a hell of a lot closer to what Jason Tatum used to look like than anybody might have predicted at that point. And so if that's the case and it's Jalen Jason Tatum occupying that kind of central role that Jaylen Brown did with better supporting talent and depth, why isn't that a team that should still be in the mix for a top four seed in the Eastern Conference especially as like, you know, yeah, it's rising and falling all the time. Who the hell knows where Denver, I don't really really know what Detroit's doing. But like where Detroit lands at the end of all of the transactions here, you know, we'll have to see how much Kawhi Leonard plays in Toronto. We have to, you know, Trey Young saying what's going to happen whenever. When the Wizards are number one in the East. I will believe that when I see it. But you know, there's a lot more in flux there. I don't see any reason to believe that the Celtics can't, can't be still in that mix provided they get the health that they're, they're hoping for and that they're looking for out of those newcomers and of course out of Jason Tatum.
- [44:56]
C
Yeah, and I, I get that exact point of. Okay, so if we're going to possession max, I'm going to try an attempt to use Gen Z slang for a minute here.
- [45:05]
A
Exactly right.
- [45:05]
C
We're going to possession max here by limiting turnovers which I think everybody could agree is a good thing. Like going from Jalen Brown who again we all love on the show but is turnover prone to Paul George. Way less turnovers. The balls are going to be in the hands of the more of Payne Pritchard who is an absolute machine and not turning the ball over. Jason Tatum, Derrick White, we all can agree that's good. You can also agree that bringing Mitchell Robinson in as an offensive rebounder is going to change the way this team plays on offense there obviously it's something that they did a lot of during the regular season and we'll hopefully will continue during the postseason. I understand that you want to talk about Paul George's shot profile. Well, he's an A pretty good and we have a decent several year long sample size of. He's a great catch and shoot three point shooter and he's an excellent corner three point shooter. I think he's been above 45 six to last seven years from the corners in the NBA for Paul George. I get all that stuff, totally get it. I think my question revolves more around is it a. Is this a bad way to build a team? Is leaning so heavily into analytics and trying to, to gain the possession battle is I think is a separate discussion. Is, is that a bad thing? Because again the Jalen Brown discourse itself was throughout the entire year exhausting. You know he's, you know he's, he's, you know you look at the counting stats, he's great. You want him out there, he's awesome. But at the analytics again we referenced Tom Haver show's article on last week's show quite a bit because I thought it was very illuminating. Is Boston, in your opinion, leaning too much into the. Well, here's what the Hellenics say about what's happening on the floor versus the what your eyes tell you what's happening before or you think it's like Boston might be one of the few teams to do this successfully because their president basketball operations used to coach these guys not too long ago and has a great idea of how, how the game of basketball is actually played. Sure.
- [47:05]
A
I mean, I think there's arguments on both sides of it.
- [47:09]
C
Right.
- [47:09]
A
Like, you know, you mentioned the Adam, you mentioned the Moneyball component earlier. The other thing that Billy Beane was fond of saying or that if it's an apocryphal story or not, that my bleep doesn't work in the playoffs. You know, like the idea of I'm here, I'm going to be able to in the aggregate build you a better team over 162 and then you're in a small sample and who the hell knows? And you know, we have seen that certainly over the course of time from analytics acolytes, the Daryl Morey teams in Houston and then in Philly, it's to be seen. But we've also seen the Celtics did win a title doing that in the same way that Theo Epstein doing Moneyball with money brought World Series to the Red Sox. It's not impossible that this stuff can continue to work. I do think that there is one of the things that I think was most illuminating about this Knicks championship run. And again, yes, we, we're all getting used to saying that phrase was that they were able to play different styles in basically each of their series. They had the flexibility to be able to do different things on the court. Right. The first round against Atlanta, Dyson Daniels and Nikhil Alexander Walker, they're making life tough on Jalen Brunson. They're able to pivot to playing through Karl Anthony Towns at the elbow and having more off ball action against Philly in round two. They're able to say, all right, shoot. Joel Embiid is not going to be able to guard on the perimeter. We can go to the steady diet. A high pick and roll in Brunson. Right. They get to the Eastern Conference finals against, against Cleveland. They're down big at the end of game one and it's just okay, it's Brunson matchup hunting against Harden. They get to the final. They just, they had different ways to play and some nights it's OG Anunoby and some nights it's Mikhail Bridges. And the idea of like you need to be able to, you need to have more than one pitch, you know, to bring it back to the Sox. Like the idea of if you're just throwing a fastball, they're going to hit it eventually. You got to be able to have more than one way to play. And so I think to your point, Evan, like that fear of if the Celtics are just, it's a high volume of threes, it's crash the offensive glass, it's. That's the style on every play, then yeah, I mean you could find yourself in position where if, then if Celtics fans know too well if it's a cold shooting night, yeah, the expected points per shot look great, but then you're down.02 in the series, right. Or you suddenly on the wrong side of the variance. So I do think that there's. Having the ability to play different ways is going to be critical. I think the flip side of that though is like with Jaylen Brown being able to be that mid range marauder and get to the rim, like they still had those downsides and the negative risk in the playoffs with the shot profile that they had. So we've seen both sides of it in the Jaylen Brown era where it did work to get them to multiple conference finals and all the way to the finals and all way to a title. And we've also seen he was there on the floor in a heavy, heavy doses when those shots were going haywire and where things didn't work out so hot. So if you're going to experience both sides of the variance, but there's an opportunity for you to reimagine what the roster could look like. I think that's the argument if I'm Brad Stevens in the front office, like, yeah, maybe this makes us a little more one dimensional stylistically, but also like we believe in that style and having this other pitch here wasn't really working for us in the way we wanted to anyway. And we didn't believe that this particular arsenal was going to be able to get us there anymore anyway. I think that point that you made earlier, it's exactly right and it's the forgotten part now. It's been so much of a discussion about Jaylen Brown and what eye test versus numbers say about him, that the Celtics and Brad Stevens said it in his postseason press conference like they had come to the conclusion that this just wasn't going to be good enough to beat the other best teams in the league that they did not have confidence that this structure as it's put together was going to be good enough to beat the other best teams in the league. So they had to find a different way. I don't know that this roster as constructed has a whole lot of different ways. Right. Like, I mean, Mr. Robinson, I think, is a huge component of that. But the offensive rebounding, the corner crashing was already a big part of how Boston wanted to play. I think it'll be interesting to see how they develop the versatility, but if nothing else, it sets you up to find whatever those alternative answers might be in a few months at the trade deadline next summer, as you move forward, all those kinds of things.
- [51:21]
B
I've had the opportunity with John Zanis last week to break down the immediacy of the trade. Obviously here with Dan, we've started unpacking just some of it. I mean, truthfully, this is going to be. Not to say every show is going to look and sound like this, but this is going to be an off season of unpacking the Jalen Brown trade and looking ahead to what this next iteration of the Celtics looks like plays like, you know, we don't even really have time to get into some of these latest reports about, you know, how was Jalen potentially a little disingenuous about being caught off guard when in fact the Celtics were as I expected, because Brad is a straight shooter keeping him abreast of what was going on. At least he and his agent, the team behind the scenes as to these teams are interested in you and this is a potential trade and him saying what? Or at least indicating that I'm not going to go there or I'm not going to sign an extension there. You know, Allah, Giannis, Allah, so many others in the NBA, the power is the player in the league. If, if, you know, Milwaukee might have been able to get a better return than Miami offered, but he wanted to go to Miami or he wanted to go to Boston, and your hands are tied at that point when the guy's a year away from free agency. I don't know how many teams in the NBA that theoretically could have offered a better return than Philadelphia did for Jaylen Brown would have been scared off by the fact that they only had him for a couple of years and then he's out the door because he doesn't want to stay there. All of that comes into play. So I think, you know, we didn't necessarily get the complete story from Jalen. We obviously didn't get it from the front Office either. That's the way it goes. As we were talking coming on the air here, you were mentioning, Dan, that in the downtime, such as it is in the off season, gives you an opportunity to, you know, start to delve into some hypothetical pieces in the league. Now, these aren't crystal ball pieces. These are what happens when so and so signs an extension and, you know, what's that look like for that team's cap and future and blah, blah, blah. I want you to attempt to have that crystal ball, though.
- [53:26]
A
Okay.
- [53:26]
B
And how do you suppose, if you're writing that hypothetical article, we are talking about this trade one year from now, One year of Paul George in Boston, one year of Jaylen Brown fitting in, however it works in Philadelphia. How are we looking at this deal then? Because as we know, just to. And then I'll let you go. Celtics fans who didn't get it are currently irate. Celtics fans who did get it are still disappointed. You would be, you know, it's needle in a haystack territory to find someone that's actually happy with this deal.
- [54:02]
A
Yeah, I think the best, the sunniest version of this is just like, I guess, you know, like where you. Because it's where the fan feeling connects to or collides with the understanding of the broader superstructure and the salary cap and the minutiae of it. Right. Where you can get why it just kind of sucks. And so my guess is in a year, the Celtics and Sixers are both coming off postseason appearances. I don't know who's in the play and who's in the playoff, how it all works out, but postseason appearances that do not end in a title might be my guess. Neither of those teams are winning a championship this year would be my guess. And then in that case, the Celtics look at. Are looking at their sort of structure. And if they haven't already rerouted Paul George for something else, they are actively seeking to do so with a, you know, replenished kitty of draft assets to be able to do it and a broader number of potentially interesting targets for them to try to go shopping for. And I think fans in that setting will look at it and say that's something to get excited about. The version of the team that we could have, the mystery box could be anything. It could even be a boat. Right. Like the idea of we don't know exactly what it's going to be, but there's an opportunity here. And if you. In this setting we're looking or coming off a season where there was whatever amount of success you had with Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown together, again, which I think we would have to assume would be quite a bit, because that's what history would indicate with these guys. But again, you're coming off a season where maybe that ended short of a championship, and everybody's kind of frustrated about that, and you're now having to decide, oh, man. All right, so where are we on the Jalen extension? And what's that going to look like in three years? And where are our outs there? And, okay, I think that's where everyone feels more claustrophobic. And that is, unfortunately, the sort of state of affairs right now in the NBA. And it's due to the point you made about the Donovan Mitchell extension. That is a situation where the Cavs, like, the Cavs took a swing on a guy that everyone thought was going to leave, got him in town, convinced him to stay to the tune of signing. Two separate extensions have made the playoffs every year. One playoff series without LeBron for the first time since, like, 1990, made the conference finals. And everyone's like, oh, boy, I don't know about making that. You know, signing that guy. And it's like reading Cleveland people, Cleveland going to Cavs beat writers folks. They're like, this is going to ensure that Donovan Mitchell's jersey gets, like, raised to the rafters in Cleveland when he's all done. And from a fan perspective, you're like, we kept the guy. And from the way the league works, you're like, that's going to be really tough for them. I don't know. And so this is the where. And it's where Celtics fans have found themselves these last couple of weeks. It's where you mentioned Denver and Jokic. Like, he's saying, I'm not going to sign the new deal until next summer because then I can maximize how much it pays me. The Denver Nuggets are going to have to look at it and say, do we want to pay $360 million over the next five years for Nikola Jokic? And the answer to that should just be yes, because he's Nikola Frikin Jokic. But maybe not. I don't know. Maybe that's not the way it works out. We are in this place where everyone's gonna have to get comfortable with the. That sucks. And I get it. Or I get it, but that sucks. There's kind of, like no two other ways around it, you know, and so it's not a fun collision point, but this is where. Yeah, where fandom and the what you Feel watching the guys collides with what the eventual financial realities wind up being. My guess is in a year's time, the Celtics are in better position to make the next. To build the next competitive iteration of the roster than they felt like they would be if Jalen Brown was still on the roster. That's my guess.
- [58:05]
C
Cop. If I had a dollar for every time I've used It's a mystery box. Would even be a boat line if I. I would be a rich man by now. Because I was gonna say so many people. This exact opposite idea of what he just said. And I've used that exact same line. I'm like, it could be anything. Could even be a boat.
- [58:22]
B
Most people.
- [58:23]
C
Most people get it. Which is.
- [58:24]
B
I was gonna say between. Obviously, Dan saying it, the number of times that you say it, other guests have said it, like in terms of obscure, just random references, but that most people understand. I don't think that phrase has been used more on this show than, you know. I. I don't even know. That comes up a lot. I like it.
- [58:41]
A
Really funny.
- [58:42]
B
Good one.
- [58:43]
A
Listen. It's a good. It's a good way to describe what you're all looking for with flexibility and optionality. You know, like, you know, what you got in this one situation. But the other thing could be anything.
- [58:53]
B
On our way out the door here, Dan is there. Do you think that Brad Stevens. I know like college programs, every time there's an opening, everybody wants to fantasize about Brad going back to college and hitting the sidelines again. I have never thought he's really doesn't mean he'll never ever do it. But I haven't thought he's like sat back and longed for it. I think he genuinely enjoys doing what he's doing and doing it with an iconic franchise and obviously winning a championship a couple years ago and all of that. But the new realities of the cba, I do imagine present a different level of stress. Emotionally, mentally, physically. All of it that didn't come with the job when he first got it. Do you think he has a long term stomach for this?
- [59:37]
A
I mean, it's a. It's like the onset of the nil era. Meaning that so many coaches decided they did. I'm done. Thanks. Go do TV for a while.
- [59:45]
B
Or like, and it's completely different. Or like, you know, umpires who are retiring because they can't take abs. It's like just the world turns over a little bit and your feelings change.
- [59:55]
A
Yeah, I think over. Let's just start saying I have no idea. I have no idea what Brad Stevens, you know, thinks and feels about this. But I could certainly understand feeling like if the opportunity to build a winner becomes so much more challenging and the competitive window with which to do it becomes so much shorter and the churn becomes so much faster, I can see that being exhausting and stressful in a way that would burn people out faster on the job. Right. The flip side of that is as mild mannered and flat affect as he can be, you don't get to where Brad Stevens is by not being like a maniacally competitive person who actually wants to win everything all the time. And Pat Riley is going to be 7,000 years old and still trying to put the rings on the table to get another star in Miami. Right. When you get to this level, this is the absolute peak of the biggest league in the NBA and you are running a glamour franchise, one of the historically important ones, and you've brought a championship to it. And where do you go from there? Like literally outside of being like, I guess I'll run for president, I don't know what you would do that would be more exciting than that or on a competitive level that could deliver that same juice for somebody who, who is wired that way. So my guess is until or unless he's like, this is, I literally can't sleep because I'm so stressed out about this. I think he probably is here because like, what's going to be better than that? I don't know. I mean, for me, I would be a basket case. I wouldn't be able to handle any of the pressure or any of the stress of like a losing streak, let alone we're going to have to trade away a 10 year beloved guy who's going to have his jersey race to the rafters, let alone, you know, anything else. So. But I tend to think that Brad Stevens and people who reach his level are wired a little differently than the guy who blogs about it. So my guess is he's probably sticking around for a long haul because he's thinking not about how hard it's going to be, but like how sweet it's going to be when you do the hard thing. That seems to be the way these guys operate.
- [62:09]
B
Dan Devine Senior NBA Writer, Yahoo Sports on Twitter at your mandevine we always appreciate when you hop on with us here. It's illuminating, it's insightful. We look forward to reading, obviously, the scribbles to come and yeah, man, it'll be a good time. But interesting, fascinating. Offseason and it's not over yet. So be careful with that vacation time.
- [62:29]
A
Yeah. Everybody keep your head on a swivel
- [62:30]
B
out there again for Dan. Evan Valenti, I'm Adam Kaufman. We remind you subscribe to Celtics Beat wherever you get your podcast. The audio version available to you, Apple, Spotify, you name it. I mean it's everywhere. Just search Celtic speed. It'll pop up. Rate reviews, subscribe most importantly or of course the video version CLNs YouTube page. You can check out us on the main page or the all access page sometimes both us a whole lot of other great Celtics programming across the network and other sports too. Going to be ramping up some of that football coverage right around the corner as we are approaching here mid July. But again for the three of us, thanks to all of you. Thank you, Celtics. Be will return next week with probably a few more thoughts on Jalen Brown. We'll talk to you then.