I’m not going to even try to re-litigate the particulars of this trade (yet). There are other posts on this blog and all over the internet explaining just how bad a trade the Boston Celtics made yesterday. Until we get the silver bullet “now they tell us” reasons for what happened, we’re just not going to know.
What I’m more concerned for is each of you. The real, diehard, bleeding green forever fans of this team. The Jaylen Brown trade immediately goes down as one of the worst I can think of, even
across sports. I’m not as big a fan of the Red Sox as I used to be, and part of the reason I stopped caring was the Mookie Betts trade. This deal has that kind of impact potential.
I’ll speak for myself first. I’ve been walking around in stunned silence for so long that my wife is concerned about me. Internally I’m ping ponging through the stages of grief, mostly bouncing between anger and sadness. I haven’t started sobbing “Minnie Driver in Good Will Hunting” style, but I’m not ruling it out. I’ve even started questioning myself and my ability to understand basketball. Maybe I’m really just dumb and Jaylen Brown isn’t as good as I think he is. Clearly the market wasn’t what I thought it was, so at a minimum I misjudged that.
Or perhaps I’m way too invested in a silly kids game played by millionaires who are paid by billionaires using our money. That’s been true for decades and I don’t really see it changing. But enough about me.
Every one of you is unique and interacts with sports and the Celtics differently. You are all going to process this in your own way. Anger, sadness, confusion, denial, resignation, and a myriad of other emotions are expected. Some will say that this is all overreacting, and I understand the perspective, but I disagree. I would venture to guess that most of the people reading this post have invested time, money, passion, and love into this team. So witnessing a trade like this one for as little as they got back is traumatic. Not nearly on the scale of losing a loved one, but there can be minor echoes of that sort of feeling.
So I want this blog to be a safe place to work through all those emotions. That means if you are someone who copes by lashing out at people, please, please resist the urge. There are a lot of fragile human beings searching for answers, so try to follow my golden rule on here: Respect others by treating them the way you would like to be treated. I generally try to go the other way. Reach out to people that are struggling with this. Help them through their own emotions. You’ll find a funny thing happen when you do that. It becomes cathartic to you to help someone else and you actually end up helping yourself as well. Give it a shot.
We’ll get back to the basketball stuff soon enough. Just try to be excellent to one another. God bless.
