Jaylen Brown Rumors Reveal Celtics Star Isn't On Trade Block, Only Available in Giannis-Bucks Deal

If the Boston Celtics don't ultimately trade Jaylen Brown for Giannis Antetokounmpo, don't expect Brown to go anywhere this summer.

"Everyone around the league is going to be talking about this—if this deal does not get done for the Celtics, what is the future of Brown? He's got multiple years left on his deal. To just trade a player like that—you've seen what Brad Stevens has done—to my knowledge, they're not shopping Brown," ESPN's Shams Charania reported Monday on The Pat McAfee Show. "This is a very specific situation, but this is now twice in four years that the Celtics have offered Brown in a major trade for a future Hall of Famer. In 2022 they offered him, as well as other pieces, for Kevin Durant. They missed on that. Now they're going after Giannis and they've put Brown on the table. It's a situation where they have a clear goal, they feel like they're going to be upgrading their team."

If the Celtics don't land Giannis, there probably will need to be some damage control with Brown's camp given the influx of rumors regarding him in the past month, especially given he's coming off his best NBA season.

The veteran wing averaged career highs in scoring (28.7 PPG), rebounds (6.9 RPG) and assists (5.1 APG) during the 2025-26 season, shooting 47.7 percent from the field and 34.7 percent from three.

Some of that came from necessity, with Jayson Tatum missing the majority of the season. But the 29-year-old Brown led the Celtics—a team many wrote off after Tatum's injury and the cost-cutting trades of Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porziņģis—to a 56-26 record and a No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference Playoffs.

You don't give up on a player of that caliber lightly. But after falling short in the first round of the postseason to the Philadelphia 76ers, the Celtics seemingly want to shake things up. Bringing aboard Giannis would certainly qualify.

As Shams noted, however, there may not be another move out there that would seriously upgrade the Celtics if the Antetokounmpo trade doesn't come to fruition. Brown is one of the best two-way wings in the entire NBA—if you are dealing him, it needs to be for a Giannis-level talent (or in a rebuilding scenario, which obviously isn't the case in Boston).

So it's Giannis or bust for these Celtics. And if it's bust, mending fences with Brown will be the next step for Boston.