honeymoon was officially over. It was June 30, and Stevens was in his sixth-floor office inside the ultra-modern, 70,000-square-foot Auerbach Center, the Celtics’ gleaming practice facility just 7 miles down Storrow Drive from TD Garden. Memorabilia from the team’s historic past adorns the walls. But everything else about it is meant to feel big and spacious — an obvious metaphor for a team with unrivaled history but still hungry for more. In his office, Stevens was deep in discussions about committing nearly $440 million to two of his team’s key players — a record-breaking $314 million extension for Tatum and a $125.9 million extension for guard Derrick White.
The discussions were not so much about whether the Celtics should commit that much money to two players so soon after investing $304 million in Brown, $135 million in ball-hawking guard Jrue Holiday and $96 million in center Kristaps Porzingis, but rather about committing that amount of money in an era in which the new collective bargaining agreement makes it exceptionally more punitive to field such an expensive team.
“We’re going to face some basketball penalties down the road that we’re going to have to make decisions on,” Stevens told ESPN. “But we’re also very cognizant that we have a really damn good team and we’re trying to win a championship.”
That night, when the league’s free agent moratorium opened, Stevens planned to place calls to the representatives for Tatum, White and the team’s other free agents. But before he could dial out, a call came in that he had to take.
It was team owner Wyc Grousbeck.
Stevens didn’t think much of it at first. Everyone was on board with the team’s offseason plans.
But Grousbeck wasn’t calling to approve the deals or strategize about the ramifications of a $500 million payroll in the future. He was calling to tell Stevens that he would soon announce his intention to sell a controlling interest in the team. That, in other words, someone else would eventually be signing the gigantic checks Stevens was about to authorize.
“He reiterated his support for basketball operations,” Stevens said. “And he said to just keep on doing what we’re doing … and know that this is probably going to be a long process.”
Later, Grousbeck clarified that he would remain as the team’s controlling owner through 2025 and didn’t intend to complete the sale until 2028.
It was unsettling news.
“I think our job is to continue to, with everyone in the room — owners, basketball operations, [coach] Joe [Mazzulla] — our job is to build the best team that we can under the comfort level of the people in the room,” Stevens said. “So we’re just going to do our best to put our best foot forward, and then each year we’ll have to assess how everything looks. Then certainly the new ownership group will dictate a lot of that.”
Recent NBA history has not been kind to defending champions. The last champion to make it out of the second round of the NBA playoffs was the Golden State Warriors in 2019, and even those dynastic Warriors eventually disintegrated on and off the court — losing Klay Thompson to injury and Kevin Durant first to injury, then to free agency.
The Celtics didn’t even make it through two weeks of the offseason before the ground beneath them started to shift. Even by NBA standards, Boston has had one of the shortest championship honeymoons in recent memory.
“It’s amazing how many of my friends in the industry who have won a championship [say] it’s like it’s one or two days and then it’s done,” Stevens said. “I think in a lot of ways I would agree with that from my own perspective.”
He chuckled. From Grousbeck’s shocking announcement to the public dismay over Tatum’s sporadic playing time with Team USA and Brown’s exclusion from it to the lingering uncertainty over Porzingis’ serious ankle injury, the Celtics’ summer vacation could’ve come with trip insurance. And what should have been weeks or months of elation quickly turned.
But Stevens knows sympathy is in short supply, especially for champions.