Jaylen Brown strode through the Cox Pavilion in Las Vegas last week, sitting to watch his new team, the Philadelphia 76ers, before posing for a photo op with his new blue jersey.
all smiles when JB is here. pic.twitter.com/eKdliLcI48
— Philadelphia 76ers (@sixers) July 12, 2026
While the full story of this confusing trade is still yet to be told, Boston Celtics President of Basketball Operations Brad Stevens made it clear that the league’s new financial system was a big reason why the move had to be made.
“The path looked a little bit more challenging with 70% of our cap and such a high percentage of our usage tied into two players,” Stevens said a week-and-a-half ago.
The translation there is that Brown’s ball-dominant ways were no longer justifiable at the price they were paying. Their formula of adding total usage to his production didn’t equal his massive salary any more, so they jumped at the chance to dump him.
This might not have been an issue in the past. Teams routinely paid two stars and then figured out how to fill in the blanks around them before the apron era, but now teams are taking a much harder look at how the tops of their rosters are built. Opting for depth behind a single star seems to be the path forward.
Wyc Grousbeck specifically said teams “are going to be so strangled on purpose” under this new system, and that’s exactly what’s happening.
“It’s certainly not an unintended consequence,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said at the league’s Board of Governors meeting in Las Vegas Tuesday evening. “Every general manager is going to need to make mixed basketball and business decisions … at some point, you can’t have unlimited resources, whether it’s for a team or any business.”
New Players Association executive director David Kelly also held a press conference in Las Vegas, saying the union “should have done a better job of fighting back against the second apron.” He specifically mentioned the Celtics and the Knicks, two of the three most recent NBA champions.
“I don’t know that fans in Boston would say that everyone’s making out fine, or that fans in New York would say that everyone is making out fine,” Kelly said. “We see that as a problem for our members, but also for the fans and for the game.”
The Celtics certainly benefited from the system by snagging Mitchell Robinson with their Mid-Level Exception. He became available after James Dolan declared, almost immediately after winning the title, that it would be “suicidal” to go into the second apron.
But this is the point. The Celtics were in a position to add to a great roster, but they couldn’t justify a simply additive move.
“If there was a rule in the CBA that said the guys that you drafted that you sign to 35% supermaxes count as 25% cap, because then that would allow you to build out towards the aprons with a lot more flexibility,” Stevens said. “But the reality is that those are hard to build. And you can look back on [2024] … 47% of the cap is what [Brown and Jayson Tatum] were when we won it all. And that’s just going up and up and that’s tough.”
Silver brushed aside any notions of that happening, saying simply that if players had any issue with the CBA, it can be brought up whenever negotiations reopen. That could be in 2029 if either side exercises an opt-out clause. If Kelly leads a charge to eliminate or mitigate the second apron, he can probably expect a lot of pushback from the league.
Silver noted that players are making a lot of money right now, and he’s right. Victor Wembanyama’s five-year, $252 million maximum rookie-scale contract extension represents a sacrifice of 5% of the cap, or about $50 million being left on the table. This is an era where taking less still signifies generational earning potential.
Would Kelly risk a lockout to reopen the contract and attack the second apron? That could be the consequence he faces, because the league is very clear where it stands on things.
“When you look at any issue in the abstract, an issue that the players want or an issue that the teams want, that every collective bargaining agreement is a result of a series of compromises,” Silver said. “That’s what this one is, as well. But certainly from my standpoint, from a competitive standpoint, the system is working very well.”
