After a very quiet week on the trade rumor front, Monday morning brought an unexpected wave of information about the two biggest stars on the trade market currently — Kevin Durant and Donovan Mitchell.
A few intel dumps from NBA newsbreakers published in the morning, with reporting on a group of teams that have inquired about Mitchell as well as a new team that’s poked around about KD — the reigning Eastern Conference champion Boston Celtics. The Celtics offseason has been plenty busy, with the addition of Malcolm Brogdon in a splashy trade after free agency began, but Brad Stevens apparently hasn’t stopped looking for ways to upgrade the roster of a team that fell just a bit short in the Finals.
Shams and Woj both reported on Monday morning that the Celtics had offered a package with Jaylen Brown as the centerpiece to Brooklyn for Durant, with Derrick White and some picks also going to the Nets, but had been turned down. It’s unclear exactly when this overture was made — there’s some scuttle it might be a bit of old news being refreshed in the middle of the offseason lull — but it certainly raised eyebrows considering how important Brown was to Boston’s run to the Finals.
Brown, for his part, saw the reports and offered a succinct response on Twitter.
Smh
— Jaylen Brown (@FCHWPO) July 25, 2022
It’s a guarantee that the side that leaked this information was Brooklyn, as Boston would have no incentive to possibly disrupt what had been to that point a happy offseason with a happy locker room. Instead, they now have at least a bit of work to do to smooth things over with Brown, who understandably isn’t thrilled by the news (even if Boston calling and seeing about a Brown for Durant swap makes plenty of sense basketball wise). The Nets seem to want to drum up some more urgency from the rest of the league to put forth better offers, making sure that other teams know a bonafide All-Star in Brown was offered along with picks and more and they said no, as they continue to set the bar almost impossibly high for a KD trade — one could also argue it is impossibly high and that’s being done on purpose because they don’t actually want to trade him and instead would rather just run it back one more year, but that’s a discussion for another day.