As trade rumors swirl around the NBA in the aftermath of the Giannis Antetokounmpo blockbuster and in the lead-up to free agency, the Nuggets have indeed kicked the tires regarding arguably the biggest remaining star on the market, league sources told The Denver Post last weekend.
That would be Celtics wing Jaylen Brown, who has emerged as a trade candidate over the last week since Boston’s unsuccessful attempt to offer him to Milwaukee for Antetokounmpo. The Bucks ultimately chose Miami’s Tyler Herro-led package, leaving Boston with an awkward dilemma.
Brown led the Celtics to 56 wins and the No. 2 seed in the East while co-star Jayson Tatum was rehabbing from an Achilles injury last season, only for them to lose in the first round of the playoffs to seventh-seeded Philadelphia. The disappointing result had already sparked a wave of uncertainty about the future of Boston’s core — a situation reminiscent of the Nuggets’ crossroads after their own shocking first-round exit.
Both teams have ridden their star duos to championships this decade, and both have regressed in the years since.
The Nuggets have registered at least mild interest in Brown, having internally discussed whether they would have a realistic chance to acquire the All-NBA swingman if they were to actively pursue him, as NBA insiders Marc Stein and Jake Fischer reported over the weekend.
But all indications, for now, are that no such pursuit is likely to occur. Two other league sources who spoke to The Denver Post were highly skeptical that Denver would be able to complete a deal for the 2024 Finals MVP. Boston reportedly wants four first-round draft picks for Brown. While that’s widely viewed as an unreasonable asking price — Milwaukee got three back in the Antetokounmpo deal — the Nuggets don’t have a single first-rounder eligible to be traded.
Lead executives Jon Wallace and Ben Tenzer made it a priority to replenish their depleted asset pool when they traded out of the first round of the NBA Draft last week. Where does that leave them? With three second-round picks available to trade once the new league year begins in July, plus .
That’s all to say that Brown’s market will need to dry up in the next couple of days, or Boston’s priorities will have to shift away from a picks-based package, for the Nuggets to truly have a chance to pounce. The Trail Blazers are looming here with a stash of valuable draft capital and a craving for star power after Giannis already rebuffed their advances. (It raises the question of whether the Nuggets might be able to get involved in a Brown trade even if they’re not the ones receiving him; they could join as a third team, sending starters to Boston and collecting young role players back from Boston and Portland.)
What would a trade look like?
Even if nothing comes of the rising smoke, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Denver has contemplated a player of Brown’s pedigree. When a sixth-place MVP finisher becomes available, it’s due diligence. Kevin Durant was discussed internally last year before Phoenix traded him to Houston, team sources told The Post at the time.
But what would a Nuggets package look like? And would Brown meaningfully improve their roster? If these questions are worth exploring inside the front office, then they certainly are outside the walls of Ball Arena as well, as Brown represents the most dramatic roster-building avenue hypothetically available to the Nuggets at this point.
As The Post reported in April, Cam Johnson has long been considered the most likely Nuggets starter to be traded this offseason due to his expiring contract, though multiple key players could be on the move this week. Johnson and Christian Braun have been the front office’s primary focus amid efforts to reconfigure Nikola Jokic’s supporting cast — and shed enough salary to ward off Peyton Watson’s suitors in restricted free agency.
The Nuggets have been far more reluctant to include franchise cornerstones Aaron Gordon and Jamal Murray in trade conversations, league and team sources have told The Post — ready to listen, not so much to shop them, . But there have also been murmurs over the last few days speculating about Denver’s willingness to consider a larger-scale roster overhaul.
Brown is on a supermax contract, with a $57.1 million cap hit next season that makes him the seventh-highest-paid player in the league. The Nuggets could aggregate several smaller contracts to match salary in theory, but if they acquired Brown without including Jamal Murray in the outgoing package, they would have three players occupying 100.7% of the salary cap — $166.2 million in combined 2026-27 salary.
Just one month ago, team president Josh Kroenke was reflecting on Denver’s rationale for trading Michael Porter Jr. when he said: “We had to take a hard look at where we had committed ourselves from a salary standpoint, and understanding that having three max players was probably not something that was gonna be continuous for us going forward. … That was something we felt the organization needed to do to maintain a roster going forward, to establish more depth.”
Consider it unlikely, then, that Denver would trade for Brown without Murray’s $50.1 million salary going the other direction. Building out a deep rotation would become immensely challenging, even if Wallace and Tenzer get a green light to spend over the $199 million luxury tax line.
This leads to the delicate reality of a situation like this: Murray. He’s an all-time Denver sports great, a surly but selfless star who speaks lovingly of his basketball bond with Jokic. He helped the Nuggets win their first championship. They would never take the possibility of trading him lightly, and the last thing they want to do is make the same mistake Boston just made with Brown — alienating a longtime star by offering him in a trade and failing to complete the deal.
If the Nuggets have any plans of escalating trade talks, they must be careful not to misread the situation.
Would the Celtics bite at the opportunity to upgrade their backcourt with a newly minted All-NBA point guard? Keeping in mind that Denver ideally wants to shed salary, there would probably need to be supplementary pieces involved, likely hard-capping both teams at the second apron.
For example, Murray and Johnson for Brown and a cheap role player of the Nuggets’ choosing — let’s say Baylor Scheierman — would be allowed under the league’s trade rules, netting a $13.3 million salary reduction for Denver. Murray and Gordon for Brown and Sam Hauser would result in a $14.2 million reduction.
Obviously, if this is a two-team hypothetical trade, Boston would have to be comfortable with eschewing first-round draft compensation in order to land a player of Murray’s caliber (plus another starter like Gordon or Johnson).
It would be a bold move from both sides, a swap of home-grown stars signaling belief that both the Jokic-Murray and Tatum-Brown partnerships have gone stale.
The tradeoffs for swapping Murray and Brown
Murray and Brown are a strangely fitting trade match, in many ways. They’re three months apart in age, so neither team would be disadvantaged in that regard. They were drafted four picks apart in 2016 — Brown third overall, Murray seventh. They’ve enjoyed arguably the two best pro careers in that class. They both have three years remaining on their current contracts, with no player or team options.
For Boston, it would be a different look for Tatum: a skilled guard who can take turns initiating the offense with him, who can play off the ball and hit 3s at a blistering rate, who’s unusually accustomed to screening for a bigger ball-handler in inverted pick-and-rolls. The Celtics love to play the math game. Murray was the most efficient high-volume 3-point shooter in the sport last season, 43.5% on 7.5 attempts per game.
Then again, there’s this recent quote from Celtics president of basketball ops Brad Stevens: “One of the things that we’ve gotta figure out is how to have more of an impact at the rim, and I think we do need to add to our team to do that.” Perhaps this particular trade would be counterproductive.
For the Nuggets, it would be a sacrifice of unparalleled pick-and-roll chemistry in exchange for a secondary star who can defend at a way higher level than Murray. (Brown proudly touts himself as the best two-way player in the league right now.) For years, the Nuggets have had to contend with opponents’ desire to put their two best players in every action. Jokic and Murray have dazzled offensively together and stumbled around defensively in the dark. Brown was responsible for guarding Luka Doncic in the NBA Finals two years ago. He has switchable size and a chip on his shoulder to uphold that self-appointed label.
It would be a fascinating stylistic experiment. Brown’s playmaking ability has improved over the years, but his instinct is to use a ball screen to go mismatch-hunting in isolation, rather than Murray’s bob-and-weave deployment of Jokic in the two-man game. The Nuggets would also need to make other moves to find a new point guard; one league source doubted that a Jokic-Brown-Gordon front line would function well without a table-setter.
Brown’s shot selection was more midrange-heavy than Murray’s last season, with 23.7% of his total field goal attempts classified as midrange by NBA tracking data. He’s a bona fide tough shot maker, but the burden of efficiency is large when taking what’s considered a low-percentage shot. Murray took 19.6% of his shots from that range last season, as the Nuggets encouraged him to hunt his 3-pointer more.
Brown’s shot selection was also more paint-heavy — 50.1% of his attempts were in the lane and 22.4% were in the restricted area, compared to 39% and 17.1% for Murray. The Nuggets know they need more rim pressure off the dribble. Murray is a more skilled ball-handler than Brown, but Brown uses his size and athleticism better to get downhill.
Jokic’s ability to draw double-teams and his eagerness to pass out of them would open up a lot of driving angles and attacking opportunities for Brown, who has a strong appetite for the ball. In Denver, he would be a clearer No. 2 on the roster hierarchy than he was before, but he’d be playing alongside a primary option whose first instinct would be to help him score a ton of points.
The list of pros and cons goes on from there. Brown gets to the foul line at a better frequency than Murray. Murray has a higher assist rate and lower turnover rate than Brown. Brown is a proven winner, given that his crowning achievement was a playoff trophy. But there’s also that whole pesky analytics debate that Brown is waging war against — should Denver be concerned that Boston routinely has a better net rating when he isn’t on the floor?
The risk would feel substantial. The roster shake-up would be undeniable.
It would be an arrangement born of two teams in a similar predicament, trying to figure out which cards to play next in basketball’s era of parity.
Or maybe it’s nothing, and the two longest-standing active tandems in the NBA will live to fight another day together.
