Celtics should maybe actually maybe trade Jaylen Brown

The Endowment Effect is an important thing to understand when you’re a die-hard Celtics fan.

In psychology, the Endowment Effect has demonstrated that people will usually value an item that they already have higher than an item they do not, totally independent of objective value. Give some people a pen and others a mug and ask if they want to trade; the pen group generally kept their pens, while the mug group kept their mugs. Which was more valuable? Apparently, it didn’t matter.

In sports fandom, the same can be true. We are situated so close to our beloved teams that it can become impossible to objectively analyze the value of players relative to their cost. In the case of Jaylen Brown — longest tenured Celtic, Finals MVP, hero of Boston and community stalwart — it’s almost impossible to break this desire to hang onto him.

There has been a lot of smoke rising over Brown’s name in the last 36 hours, and with the Celtics rapidly moving on from Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis, it’s only natural to wonder if something even bigger might be coming. But I’m not here to ask if Jaylen Brown will be traded; I’m here to ask if he should be.

Full disclosure: I love Brown. He was drafted when I was in 7th grade, and literally the first thing I ever wrote on the internet was an analysis of the Celtics picking him (I thought we should have selected Kris Dunn… so I have to live with that for the rest of my life). He’s been a player that’s given everything to me, a person that has fascinated me, and when asked last year in a parlor game, “who or what would you write a book about if you could,” I answered immediately, “Jaylen Brown.”

But the Celtics do not live in my world. They cannot view Brown as someone who deserves to be the last man ever to wear number 7, and keep him purely for posterity. Maybe they would have been able to do that in the 1990s, but Adam Silver and the Players Association have shown with their new collective bargaining agreement and second apron that keeping whole superstructures together is not their priority. Brown’s contract — all $300 million of it — is going to make keeping both him and Jayson Tatum extremely difficult going forward.

Reasons against trading Brown are obvious, but marks for trading him boil down to two main categories: the aforementioned financial reality and a sheer statement of value versus return. The CBA doesn’t mean we will have to trade Brown eventually, but it will force Brad…