Could the Boston Celtics saga surrounding rumors the team had been in talks with the Brooklyn Nets about trading star Celtics wing Jaylen Brown for veteran forward Kevin Durant finally come to an end? According to new reports from Heavy’s Steve Bulpett, the Nets’ front office will meet with Durant this week, although precisely what the purposes of that meeting may remain unknown.
Per Bulpett’s anonymous league executive source, KD is “going to meet with the owner this week” regarding things the Nets star is unhappy about. “I’m not sure any of that gets fixed here,” they added. “But maybe it does.”
So where, exactly, does Boston fit into all of this?
Evidently, the entire process surrounding Durant’s trade request and how the Nets have dealt with it has ruffled feathers in other front offices with the Celtics being tied to Brooklyn via the leak about Brown.
“I think there’s some teams that aren’t very happy that when they talk to Brooklyn it gets in the papers,” related a personnel executive of a team other than Boston. “That doesn’t help. I’ve talked with a couple of teams that are not happy with the rumors that creep out of there through all this.”
“It’s not a good way to do business,” they suggested.
Bulpett himself pondered if Brooklyn’s intentions might also be to purposefully damage the Celtics’ connection with Brown.
“That’s probably why they won’t get anything done and why they haven’t had any conversations for a while,” offered another unnamed source. “I don’t think they are going to get anything done with Boston.”
Could this all have been a ploy to get Durant to return to the team after the series of in-season trades to acquire and then move James Harden having left the Nets with an incomplete roster by the time the postseason had arrived?
It’s not common for teams to leak misinformation with the explicit intent of harming rivals in the way Bulpett questions.
But, it’s also not unheard of — and if it happened to fall in line with their goals of keeping the team together, it could actually make a fair amount of sense.
On the Celtics side of things, it would be something of a reprieve for fans eager to see what a bolstered version of last season’s Finals squad can do with the addition of Malcolm Brogdon and Danilo Gallinari.
As for ties between Boston’s front office and Brown, they have weathered similar situations in the past.
If it ultimately pans out that the Celtics never had a serious interest in moving on from the Georgia native, this might all appear to be much ado about nothing not too long in the future.
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Story originally appeared on Celtics Wire