What do you do when the numbers and common sense are so far apart?

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It’s July 2nd and my favourite basketball team — probably the entity I’ve spent more collective hours of my life watching and thinking about than anything else over the past 10 years — just traded a franchise icon for Paul George and 2 first round picks. Therefore I think it’s as good a time as any to lean into the “mostly” of Thinking About Thinking: A Mostly Fantasy Football Newsletter and write about it. PSA — This is a totally free post without any direct relevance to fantasy football so if you don’t care simply scroll right past it. I’m going to have an article on ambiguous wide receiver rooms in best ball and redraft posted within the next few days. Thinking About Thinking: Mostly Fantasy Football Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. What was the Trade? To 76ers: Jaylen Brown To Celtics: Paul George, 2028 1st Round Pick ( Complicated terms but likely results in BOS receiving or swapping to LAC’s 1st), 2031 1st Round Pick (PHI), two 2nd round picks Both Brown and George are on massive contracts, the former with three years remaining and the latter with two. If you’re not a massive NBA fan there are some wrinkles to the deal that I think make it look more reasonable then your first instinct would assume when you see “29 year-old Jaylen Brown traded for 36-year old Paul George.” NBA rules require that teams must “salary match” when acquiring a player that does not fit into their existing salary cap space. Jaylen Brown has the 8th most expensive contract in the NBA, so any trade moving him required substantial matching salary. Further, the NBA salary cap is more dynamic than the NFL or NHL’s. Teams can exceed the salary cap by a wide margin in order to re-sign their own players, can remain over the cap through salary matching trades, and have access to specific and limited “exceptions” to sign players in excess of the cap. For example, the Celtics’ payroll is currently at $201M and the salary cap is $165M. Because of all this, one criticism of the deal which is easily contestable is that the Celtics took on a “bad” contract in George. While his contract may be negative-value in a vacuum, it is both valuable and necessary to the Celtics. First, in order to legally trade Brown, Boston literally needed to acquire a large salary in return (or an aggregate of multiple salaries). Second, even if the Celtics could have theoretically traded Brown directly for picks, they’d have had just $21M in cap room. You’re not signing anybody better than George — who remains a highly effective defender and 3-point shooter — for that amount in 2026-27. Third, in 2027-28 George’s contract becomes somewhat of an asset. As an expiring contract his salary won’t be prohibitive to moving him, and the Celtics will benefit from having a large salary they can use as a “match” to pair with other picks or assets if they wish to make a subsequent trade for a new star. All that being said, this trade is hardly about George. The real assets Boston received in the deal are the two first-round picks. One of these is a 2031 76ers pick which is effectively a black box. It’s impossible to know what Philadelphia will look like by then, and it’s frankly unlikely the Celtics will even keep the pick long enough to find out. The 2028 pick could potentially be highly valuable. As I said earlier, the terms are complicated: The TLDR summary is that in 80-90% of scenarios, the Celtics wi…