It’s going to be an offseason worth watching in Dallas, thanks to a lottery win nobody saw coming. Now they’ve got the No. 1 pick, and it’s basically Cooper Flagg’s name written all over it unless Nico Harrison and company pivot and take someone else.
But even with Flagg in sight, the bigger storyline is how Dallas plans to handle the balance between the future and the now. Flagg will be just 19 next season. And while he could contribute right away, there’s still the reality that a playoff-tested, established star might do more to help Anthony Davis and Kyrie Irving win in the present.
That doesn’t mean Dallas can’t find a middle ground. But Flagg is the kind of prospect who gets opposing GMs to take calls they usually wouldn’t. That level of leverage brings players like Boston Celtics’ Jaylen Brown into play, as The Athletic’s John Hollinger recently pointed out.
Brown is an NBA champion, a Finals MVP and a proven two-way force in the postseason. Boston could be headed for notable roster tweaks this summer, and while Brown isn’t the main piece likely to move, Hollinger also wonders, from the Celtics’ perspective, if Brown’s inclusion in a deal could help the team regroup while Jayson Tatum works his way back from injury.
Per The Athletic:
“The other avenue, we must whisper, is asking Boston about Jaylen Brown,” Hollinger wrote for The Athletic. “Brown is a much easier positional fit next to (Anthony) Davis and (Dereck) Lively, but he’s owed $236 million over the next four seasons, and the Celtics’ roster gets frighteningly expensive next season. Would Boston mind resetting around a New England native and waiting out a gap year if Tatum needs it to recover? For that matter, would Dallas do this unless it also had considerable capital coming back in addition to Brown?”
