You could gauge the shock of this summer’s most controversial NBA trade simply by scrolling social media, where, on the evening of July 1, you’d find the entire range of all-caps exclamations, from outrage and apoplexy to outright mockery.
“WHAT”
“WTFFFF”
“CELTICS GOT FLEECED”
You could track the fallout through fiery columns, quick-hit trade grades, and an endless string of 🚨EMERGENCY🚨podcasts.
Or you could measure the emotional toll by simply watching the tears stream down one young boy’s cheeks, in a video that went viral that same night.
“I love you so much. And you mean a lot to me. And you are my favorite player in the whole NBA,” says little Giovanni Jean, age 6, dressed in the bright green no. 7 jersey of his hero, the now-former Boston Celtic Jaylen Brown. The clip runs for nearly two minutes. Gio’s voice quavers and cracks every few words. The sobbing never stops. “And thank you, thank you for everything that you did with the Celtics.”
It’s been three months since Boston stunned the world by trading Brown—the Most Valuable Player of the 2024 Finals—to the rival Philadelphia 76ers, in exchange for Paul George and a handful of draft picks. Explanations have been given. Analyses have been written. Debates have been had. The raw feelings in Boston may take much longer to subside.
“I was in tears seeing my baby cry like that,” Gio’s mother, Gigi Jean, says in a recent phone interview with The Ringer. “His dad [Rubin] sat him down and told him, ‘I know you're upset, but trades happen. This is how sports go. Sometimes the player doesn't stay in one place.’” As a parent, of course, she understood. As a mother, she wondered whether the fandom was worth the cost. “I no longer wanted my child to follow sports,” Gigi says through tears, “because it was just too heartbreaking.”
In eight days, Brown will make his official 76ers debut, in an opening-night game against the defending champion New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden. George will make his Celtics debut that same day, in Detroit. It may be months or even years before the trade can be properly judged in pure basketball terms. But it’s the river of tears drenching Gio’s face that should serve as a forever reminder of what the NBA has wrought, and what we all have lost, in this dizzying era of draconian payroll rules, enforced parity, and constant roster churn.
Today’s NBA is a league of perpetual change, with no room for affection, loyalty, or sentimentality. Nothing is sacred. Nothing lasts. Champions can’t repeat—for eight years running. Most can’t even get back to the Finals. Elite teams are annually forced to shed key players, even All-Stars, to avoid the penalties that come with hitting the dreaded payroll threshold known as the “second apron.” Superstar tandems are broken up in their prime. Generational stars like Nikola Jokic and Giannis Antetokounmpo are reduced to one-and-done champs, leaving their résumés thin compared with legends of the past.
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Rosters seem more fluid than ever. “Continuity” feels like a quaint notion from the analog era.
“You can feel the difference between the offseason now and the offseason even just like 10 years ago,” says Shea Serrano, a writer, podcaster, and devout San Antonio Spurs fan who authored the 2017 book Basketball (and Other Things).
Ten years ago, fans still enjoyed some semblance of stability. But consider the major moves of this past summer.
Within a three-week span, four of the past eight Finals MVPs changed teams—Brown (Finals MVP in 2024), Kawhi Leonard (2019), LeBron James (2020), and Giannis Antetokounmpo (2021)—an occurrence so profoundly anomalous that we don’t even need to consult Basketball Reference to declare it unprecedented. Salary cap issues either directly or indirectly influenced all four moves.
And that was just the start.
By the end of July, the Oklahoma City Thunder had traded away three rotation players from their 2025 championship team, including starter Lu Dort, purely for cap reasons. The Denver Nuggets, who have been bleeding talent ever since their 2023 title run, lost another core player when they elected to trade Peyton Watson to Cleveland rather than pay him his market rate. The Knicks, fresh off their first title in a half century, let a key contributor to that run, Mitchell Robinson, leave in free agency to avoid the second apron—and they’re now balking at the extension demands of Karl-Anthony Towns, their second-best player.
“That guy should get paid,” Serrano says of Towns. “He should automatically get paid. But it wasn't weird at all” to see the Knicks hesitate, given the current climate. “And 10 years ago, it would have been the weirdest thing. Twenty years ago, it would have been unheard of.”
And the Celtics? After trading Brown (and his $58 million salary), they employ just four of their top 10 rotation players from the squad that won the championship just two years ago.
Brown isn’t the first superstar to be traded in his prime—but he is the first Finals MVP to be dumped primarily for cap purposes, just two years after winning a ring. Little Gio isn’t the first fan to be heartbroken over losing his favorite player, but tearful goodbyes may only become more frequent for fans as the effects of the NBA’s current system—the closest it’s ever had to a hard salary cap—take hold.
League officials love the new parity. They relish a system that forces great teams to give up great players so that less talented teams can improve. They exult at the shrinking payroll gap between the highest and lowest spenders and the emergence of contenders in small markets. It’s hard to argue against the ideals of competitive balance. But it’s even harder to explain those virtues to a devastated 6-year-old—or, for that matter, even a devastated 36-year-old—after they see their favorite players shipped out to fix a spreadsheet.
Devoted NBA fans, of course, are well accustomed, if not numbed, to the constant movement of stars—a trend that commenced in 2010, with LeBron James’s infamous decision to leave Cleveland for Miami. But the cycle has accelerated in recent years, spurred in large part by the NBA’s new spending restrictions. Teams lose roster-building tools when they reach a specific payroll level (the “first apron”) and lose even more tools when they hit another plateau (the “second apron”). They also pay increasingly onerous luxury taxes.
Even formerly free-spending owners who once willingly paid those taxes, like New York’s James Dolan, now live in fear of the aprons. This past summer gave us the most vivid display yet of how the race to acquire talent has now become a race to pare down payrolls.
All told, 23 of the NBA’s 30 franchises made moves this offseason specifically to avoid one of the two aprons, according to ESPN’s Bobby Marks. Fans may find this jarring, even disorienting. But league officials find it encouraging.
“The purpose of the system is ultimately to create competition throughout the league, and from that standpoint I think the system is working incredibly well,” Commissioner Adam Silver said in July. “The goal isn’t necessarily to have a different champion every year, but we’ve had eight different champions over the last eight years.”
We're seeing [the second apron] decimate teams and forcing decisions to be made that are not basketball decisions and not good for the teams in the league.David Kelly
As Silver noted, talent is a zero-sum game, “so to the extent that [a team] doesn’t re-sign a player or chooses to trade a player, of course that player goes to another team.”
In other words, for every Knicks fan who’s despairing over the departure of Robinson, there’s a Celtics fan who’s thrilled to get him. One Thunder fan’s loss (of Dort) is an Atlanta Hawks fan’s gain. Fine, cool, great. And to be sure, the NBA has gained something in this era of über-parity: Fans in just about every market have reason to believe that their teams can compete for a title. Milwaukee, Denver, and Oklahoma City have all won championships in recent years; Indiana and San Antonio have each made the Finals. But we’ve also lost plenty along the way.
We’ve lost dynasties, for better or worse. We’ve lost the polarizing—and energizing—effect they have on rivals and fans. Without them, we’ve lost cultural and historical touchstones that define an era—what are the ’80s without the Showtime Lakers? The ’90s without MJ’s Bulls? The 2010s without Steph’s Warriors? We’ve lost a sense of continuity, as players spend every summer playing musical chairs. Yet ironically, because cap room is so tight now, we’ve effectively lost superstar free agency, too; the best players mostly change teams via trade now. Gone are the days when a half dozen teams would fly to Cleveland to woo James or visit Kevin Durant in the Hamptons. The excitement and intrigue of free agency have all but disappeared, replaced by a wild flood of cap-compliant trades.
We’ve even lost a degree of sentimentality (the good kind) as fans become more versed in salary cap arcana and thus see the game through the clinical lens of a team executive: Oh, you just traded my favorite player because his next contract would trigger the second apron? Well, sucks for me, but damn, that’s some smart cap management!
Yet: A Nuggets fan who spent three years watching Watson develop—then suddenly blossom last January—surely wants to see that emergence continue in Denver, not Cleveland. More critically, Denver’s loss of talent in recent years means that Jokic is less likely to win another title there, and perhaps more likely to one day seek greener pastures, as Antetokounmpo just did after growing frustrated in Milwaukee.
Devoted fans (well, fans of good teams) generally prefer continuity. So do coaches and general managers. Continuity means familiarity, and familiarity breeds chemistry. Constant turnover is a detriment to all of it.
“If you want to keep winning, you have to keep your core together. You just do,” says Doc Rivers, who entered the Hall of Fame in August after nearly three decades as a head coach, including a championship run with Boston in 2008. He recalled a key bit of wisdom from Celtics patriarch Red Auerbach. “He always said, ‘I don't know how you get chemistry, but I know one thing: You better fight to keep it.’”
The Celtics, to Rivers’s lament, failed to heed that advice after the 2008 championship. Boston parted with key veteran contributors that summer, let Tony Allen leave in 2010, and eventually traded starting center Kendrick Perkins.
“If we wanted to keep winning, we needed to bring back James Posey, bring back P.J. Brown, bring back Tony,” Rivers says. “Then it was Perk. Players keep dropping off. You think you can replace, it’s plug and play: ‘We can replace him with this.’ [But the new player] doesn’t do the exact same things. They’re not the same person. That person you had fit perfect. Chemistry was perfect. He understood his role. So you lose something there. The new guy doesn’t fit in the same. Guys don't like him the same. He wants more. He’s used to playing a different way, and so you got to go through all that, and it makes it really hard.”
It’s all significantly harder now. NBA teams have always had to make tough decisions, going all the way back to the first salary cap in 1984. But for decades, a soft-cap system offered teams considerable wiggle room and endless tools (e.g., “Bird rights”) to retain their stars. The second apron has all but eliminated that flexibility and forced teams to part with top talent under duress.
The Minnesota Timberwolves—coming off their first conference finals run in two decades—almost certainly would not have traded Towns to New York in 2024 if not for the second apron. The Golden State Warriors—the NBA’s most recent (maybe last?) dynasty—might not have parted with beloved franchise icon Klay Thompson in 2024 if the league’s old cap rules were still in effect.
As David Kelly, the executive director of the National Basketball Players Association, lamented in July, “We're seeing [the second apron] decimate teams and forcing decisions to be made that are not basketball decisions and not good for the teams in the league.”
To put it in more stark terms: If today’s rules had been in place a decade ago, the Warriors might never have become a dynasty, period. It’s nearly impossible now to keep three max-salary stars together for 13 years—as the Warriors did with Thompson, Stephen Curry, and Draymond Green—unless the stars agree to massive pay cuts. (And adding a fourth max, as the Warriors briefly did with Kevin Durant? Zero chance under the current system. Reasonable people can debate whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.)
Sam Presti, the longtime Thunder GM and one of the sharpest execs in the league, spent a huge chunk of his preseason press conference explaining just how difficult it’s become to navigate the new rules. He listed all the blockbusters from earlier this decade that would not be possible today—from the Celtics adding Jrue Holiday, to the Suns trading for Kevin Durant and Bradley Beal, to the Clippers trading for James Harden, to the Mavericks trading for Kyrie Irving, to the Bucks acquiring Damian Lillard.
Notably, Holiday helped the Celtics win the 2024 championship—by beating Irving’s Mavericks.
I wake up every morning confident in the belief that they will be together forever. But because of all of [the new rules] … it's in the back of my head, like, This could get taken from us. And that's the thing that I've never had to worry about before.Shea Serrano
“None of those trades could be executed today,” Presti said. “The aprons are intended so that if you are a high-spending team, you’re not in a position to add more talent.”
The Thunder, thanks to Presti’s masterful cap management, have so far maintained their star trio of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Jalen Williams, and Chet Holmgren, who are about to start their fifth season together. But given the current rules, there’s a good chance that group will be broken up well before they reach the 10-year mark.
And the same is likely true for the San Antonio Spurs, who made the Finals this past June behind Victor Wembanyama, Stephon Castle, and Dylan Harper. It’s undeniably too soon—way too soon—to start fretting over a financially driven Spurs breakup, given that Harper is just starting his second season and Castle his third. But the math is the math. They’re all going to be max-salary players, and the system makes it hard to pay three maxes and still build a functional roster. Barring a change to the apron rules, it’s almost inevitable that the Spurs’ cap will eventually burst.
For lifelong Spurs fans like Serrano, the very suggestion brings a shudder.
“Like, should the day come when one of those guys leaves, there's going to be riots in San Antonio,” Serrano says. “Because we know a certain version of what building a team looks like, and that's what we're expecting to have happen.”
What every Spurs fan hopes, of course, is for a replication of the model that powered them to five championships from 1999 to 2014, a model that featured three stars—Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, and Manu Ginobili—spending 14 seasons together.
“I let it enter my thought every waking second of my life,” Serrano says of the prospect of the Spurs’ new trio doing the same. “I wake up every morning confident in the belief that they will be together forever. But because of all of [the new rules] … it's in the back of my head, like, This could get taken from us. And that's the thing that I've never had to worry about before.”
It’s harder than ever to sustain success, period. Consider the Bucks, who in 2021 rode Antetokounmpo to the championship but have won only one playoff series since then because of a combination of age, injury, bad luck, some bad bets, and, yes, salary cap rules that made it incredibly difficult to reload on the fly.
Or consider the Nuggets, who rode Jokic—perhaps the best player of his era—to the championship in 2023 and haven’t been back to the Finals since. Cap constraints first took away Bruce Brown and Jeff Green, then Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, then Michael Porter Jr. and most recently Watson.
“You have to make hard decisions that you don't want to make,” says Calvin Booth, who served as the Nuggets’ general manager from 2020 until April 2025, when he was fired, along with coach Michael Malone.
Booth had to part with players he’d have preferred to keep. He also famously clashed with Malone over their differing views of the Nuggets’ youth movement—a tension born of the modern-day need to develop younger, cheaper players around veteran stars to avoid a skyrocketing payroll and the dreaded aprons.
“One of the goals, and maybe we got away from this, was to try to avoid the scenario that preceded us with the Bucks and Suns, by integrating and playing younger guys,” Booth says, “and obviously we were split. We didn't have a plan.”
You have to make hard decisions that you don't want to make.Calvin Booth
In another era, under a less punitive system, maybe the Nuggets would have retained their vets or more easily replaced them. In another era, the Bucks could have more nimbly rebuilt around Giannis, rather than being forced to trade him. In another era, the free-spending Knicks would surely have re-signed Robinson and given generous extensions to Towns and Josh Hart, and New Yorkers wouldn’t be fretting about the possible breakup of a title team. Thunder fans wouldn’t be wondering how long Holmgren and Williams will stick around. Spurs fans wouldn’t be pondering the long-term viability of their new Big Three.
In an alternate timeline, Brown would still be a Celtic, and little Gio would be waiting for his next visit to his school in suburban Boston. The two first met when Gio was in pre-K and Brown came to read stories to the class. It was fandom at first sight. Soon, Gio was wearing that green no. 7 jersey everywhere he went.
Over the summer, as the shock subsided, Gio added another no. 7 jersey, this one in blue, with red and white trim. And Brown paid him another visit, to assure him they will always be friends, regardless of where he plays. But Gigi says her son is still “devastated” and “still waiting for the Celtics to change their mind. He still thinks that someday Jaylen will be back to Boston.”
It might take some time before the reality truly sets in, and likely much longer before Gio understands why NBA teams sometimes make moves that feel wholly illogical or coldhearted. Such is the reality of growing up and understanding the true nature of professional sports and our relationship to them. Gio’s fandom endures, despite everything, and his mother has come to embrace the messy emotions that come with it.
“I think the life lesson is so much bigger than sports,” Gigi says. “While it’s OK to be invested, you also have to be open-minded that change will come. And we won’t always like it. But we do have to accept it.”
