'We're not playing for second': Celtics owner plants flag after Jaylen Brown trade

"I've said before and I'll say it again, we're not playing for second," Chisholm declared. "We're playing to win and to raise banners. You know, someone joked and was calling me at the beginning, 'Billy Banners,' because I said that – I want to earn that. I want to earn that, and I haven't yet. 

"We have the ingredients to do it, and certainly the commitment," Chisholm continued. "We have the fans, and the organization has the commitment from me. We'll do whatever it takes. I'm desperate, desperate, to win. And it's the Boston Celtics, and so we should, and we will."

It's understandable that some fans would find the attitude of "whatever it takes" to be incongruent with the action of trading Brown for an aging Paul George, no matter what the analytics department says about his usage rate or on-off splits. Brown's declaration that the 2025-26 season, largely played without Tatum, was his "favorite year" in the NBA may have raised red flags, but plenty of Celtics fans remain adamant that the player underneath the personality was always worth holding onto regardless, and that the only reason to trade him must therefore have been a reluctance from Chisholm to pay him.

Not about the money

But the messaging from the Celtics front office has remained consistent that financial factors are not dominating the team's drive to win. President of Basketball Operations Brad Stevens, who served as Brown's first coach in the NBA, commented on the current second apron era in the latest "Celtics All-Access" video.

"When the league adopted the apron rules four, five years ago now, but they eased them in over time, we knew that our window was going to be that first couple years to be exceeding that," Stevens said. "Last summer, when we made the moves we made, we knew we would ultimately have to do that with the new apron rules, the thresholds, and really the challenges of trying to operate in that neighborhood." 

"Those challenges are not the financial part," Stevens explained. "It's the limitation on trades, the future draft pick issues, et cetera."

At the end of the day, everybody is entitled to their own opinion regarding whether the Celtics got better or worse by handing the keys fully over to Tatum and shipping Brown off to a major rival. But the motivation for that move and all of the others being made in Boston under the current regime still has to be understood in terms of basketball, not the bottom line.

Titletown rarely finds a way to settle for second. Bill Chisholm has made clear that he won't be bucking that trend anytime soon.