The Celtics never considered trading Jaylen Brown or Derrick White before or during the 2025 NBA Draft, longtime team executive Mike Zarren said after the draft concluded Thursday night.
Zarren, Boston’s vice president of basketball operations, dismissed trade rumors involving Brown and White. Multiple NBA insiders, including ESPN’s Shams Charania and Brian Windhorst, reported teams were calling with trade offers for the Celtics’ two most valuable trade chips, though most added that Boston was unlikely to move either.
“Those two guys are really, really great NBA players, and there hasn’t been anything close to serious about trading them,” Zarren said in a video conference. “I’m not sure where all this reporting came from, but those guys are key parts of our team, and we’re lucky to have them here.”
The Celtics dealt two other championship-winning starters earlier in the week, sending guard Jrue Holiday to Portland and center Kristaps Porzingis to Atlanta in moves that saved the team more than $250 million between salaries and tax penalties. They also dropped Boston out of the second apron of the NBA’s luxury tax, which the team viewed as an unfortunate offseason necessity.
“The (second-apron) penalties are real,” Zarren said. “You can lose your future draft picks. They can move down. They can be frozen and then move down to 30 — that’s a big deal because you use those to go get good players a lot of the time, in addition to just using them to pick. And there’s a bunch of transactions you just can’t do when you’re up at high levels. We sort of had a good idea of the realities of all of this a couple years ago when we made trades to acquire guys who became key pieces of a Celtics championship team, and now we’ve reached the point where we have to think about what to do moving forward. I think nobody enjoys that.”
Zarren, president of basketball ops Brad Stevens and the rest of the Celtics front office were well aware when they traded for Holiday and Porzingis in 2023 that they’d eventually need to deal with this apron-driven roster crunch. The championship Boston won last season made it a worthwhile gamble in Zarren’s eyes.
“There was a period of transitional rules the last couple years as these rules got phased in, and we sort of realized where we were a couple summers ago that we could take advantage of the situation with the assets we had and the salary situation we were in and the quality of players we already had,” Zarren said. “We could make a jump before the rules got as punitive as they were going to get. That was a very conscious decision at the time, and it worked. So we feel good about that, obviously. … There was a good moment to seize, and I think we seized it. There’s a banner that will be here forever because of it, and we’re working towards the next one now.”
That process could include additional departures from Boston’s roster. The NBA trade market remains active post-draft, and the Celtics could increase their short- and long-term “flexibility” — the term Stevens used more than a half-dozen times Wednesday night when discussing his team’s offseason plans — by shedding more salary to dip beneath the first apron or out of the luxury tax entirely.
Sam Hauser still is a possible trade candidate, as are newcomers Anfernee Simons and Georges Niang, who arrived in the Holiday and Porzingis deals, respectively. And Zarren didn’t completely rule out the idea of moving Brown or White if a sufficiently compelling offer materializes in the coming weeks or months. Stevens, though, referred to both as “foundation” players in his draft-night news conference, along with Jayson Tatum and Payton Pritchard.
Zarren said the Celtics do not have a specific salary cap threshold they’re aiming to reach this offseason, adding that they want to be in a position to contend once Tatum returns from his ruptured Achilles.
“No, there’s not a specific number,” Zarren said. “It’s just a matter of putting ourselves in a position where we think when Jayson’s back fully healthy, we’re ready to go trying to get that next banner. Some of that has to do with the cap rules. Some of that has to do with the assets that we have. Some of that has to do with the players on the roster. We take all those things into account and try to build the next championship team.”
Originally Published: June 27, 2025 at 12:05 AM EDT