The Growing Legend of Brad Stevens

On the first day of the 2023 NBA Finals, Brad Stevens endured an excruciating press conference at Boston’s Auerbach Center.

Not even 72 hours removed from watching the Boston Celtics scrounge a season-low 84 points in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals, he sat somewhere between rock bottom and the semi-encouraging belief that his team was one sprained ankle away from a chance at Banner 18. Stevens was as stoic as a person in his position could possibly be, splicing disappointment over his team’s catastrophically anticlimactic finale with pride over how deep it went.

He called out his team’s letdowns—from Games 3 and 5 in Round 1 against the Atlanta Hawks, to Games 1 and 4 in Round 2 against the Philadelphia 76ers, to the three wretched performances against the eighth-seeded Miami Heat—while recognizing its overall body of work. “I don’t want to overreact,” he said. “I look at it as: How can we be a little bit better? And yet, a lot of our times when we were playing, you could see that there’s a lot there. So it’s not far.”

Stevens was levelheaded with his reflections. But near the end of his 30-minute session, his frustration started to bubble up alongside a pinch of chagrin. “As I do the postmortem of the season, there are all these things that we’ve talked about. And then I go back to: If we’re over .500 at home, we would’ve had rest, and we would’ve been in the Finals,” he said, referencing Boston’s 5-6 record at TD Garden in the playoffs. “And I know that sounds too simple. But we need to be better on offense. We need to be better on defense … and we need to play better when we work all year for home-court advantage. So there’s all kinds of things, and that’s why the margin is so slim when you’re talking about doing a freaking end-of-the-season press conference or playing Finals Game 1 tonight. That’s one of the toughest things to swallow: how slim that is.”

In hindsight, this was the dawn of the most pivotal offseason in recent NBA history. After several seasons of coming up short, the Celtics faced some daunting questions: mounting pressure on their green head coach, the draconian restrictions of the league’s brand-new CBA, and the general composition of a roster that was extremely good but not quite good enough. But over the next few months, with staunch aggression, a little bit of luck, and one of the shrewdest front offices in the league, Stevens would steer Boston toward all the right answers.

The first reaction to last year’s regrettable end might’ve been the most controversial: Instead of replacing Joe Mazzulla with any number of seasoned candidates, Stevens supported the NBA’s youngest head coach by adding Charles Lee and Sam Cassell to his staff. Twenty-one days after that press conference, he sent the beloved Marcus Smart to the Memphis Grizzlies in a three-team trade that brought back two first-round picks and Kristaps Porzingis, a 7-foot-2 rim protector with 30-foot range. It was an emotional, calculating, identity-altering exchange that was made to enhance Boston’s two best players, one of whom, Jaylen Brown, was coming off of the worst playoff series of his career.

Then, exactly one month later, Stevens and Celtics ownership signed Brown to a supermax contract extension, making him the highest-paid player in NBA history. Two months later, when a conference rival traded Jrue Holiday to the Portland Trail Blazers for Damian Lillard, Stevens pounced, flipping Robert Williams III, Malcolm Brogdon, and two draft picks to the Blazers for a generational glue guy whom Stevens had coveted since he entered the NBA. The result was an unprecedented five-out offense with no weak links on the other end.

“Did I anticipate two major changes? I can’t say I did,” Stevens recently said. “We knew if we tweaked the team with small changes, or made big changes, there was going to be some real risk because we are a good basketball team. There’s risk in moving away from a team that functions well together. … None of it was the plan on June 1. If you told me Jrue would be a Celtic, I would say, ‘That sounds awesome, but how in the hell are we going to do that?’”

Fast-forward to June 17, 2024, the night Boston won its first championship since 2008. As green and white confetti fell from the sky, Stevens blended into a stage filled with players, coaches, trainers, executives, friends, and family members. Yet instead of stepping forward and addressing a gleeful crowd on national television, the 2024 Executive of the Year shunted any recognition or applause. Stevens always has been this way, a self-effacing basketball professor who detests praise in a field that’s populated by humongous egos.

The NBA is a player’s league that relies on talent. Nobody understands that better than Stevens. But the reality is few people are more responsible for Boston’s consistent success. Over an 11-year tenure that includes time on the sideline and in the front office, Stevens has become, in many ways, the reluctant face of the winningest franchise in NBA history. Monday’s title wouldn’t be possible without his brainpower, humility, and resolve—all traits that were embodied in the roster he built.

His modesty wasn’t surprising. “When I say I didn’t do anything, I didn’t do anything,” Stevens insisted later that night. “I sat and watched and ate popcorn in the suite for like a hundred games.”

When the Celtics traded Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce for a bunch of draft picks, broke up with Doc Rivers, and made the decision to rebuild from the ground up, Danny Ainge stunned the NBA by handpicking Stevens as the 17th head coach in Celtics history. A precocious, bland, imperturbable 36-year-old who had just led Butler University to two straight NCAA tournament championship games, Stevens was more than a relatively obscure name with no experience at the professional level. He represented the bridge to a new era, someone a wounded fan base could project their hopes and dreams onto.

On opening night of Stevens’s first season, the Celtics’ starting five consisted of Brandon Bass, Jeff Green, Avery Bradley, Gerald Wallace, and Vitor Faverani. Stevens’s first win didn’t come until his fifth game, a 10-point victory against the Utah Jazz. “I’m going to celebrate for a whole 12 minutes,” he said that night. “And then I’m going to start watching Orlando and trying to figure them out.” The Celtics won 25 games that season. They haven’t missed the playoffs since.

The following season, Boston drafted Smart, traded away Rajon Rondo, traded for Isaiah Thomas, and won 15 more games than it did in 2013-14. Boston improved again in Stevens’s third year, with a 48-win campaign that burnished his reputation as someone who could turn overlooked individuals into an overachieving collective. He worked to instill a team-above-self mindset while identifying and implementing roles that satiated each player’s personal ambitions. Traditional positional designations were replaced by a less antiquated understanding of what the NBA had become and the direction in which it was heading.

From Evan Turner (who resurrected his career and became a Sixth Man of the Year candidate) to IT (who went from a Sixth Man of the Year candidate to second-team All-NBA), myriad players became the best versions of themselves in Stevens’s system. From 2015 to 2017, only two teams assisted more baskets than the Celtics. Stevens’s persona through it all was flat: the ever-vanilla leader whose tactical acumen and egoless unflappability turned heads around a league that’s typically attracted to noise.

“He is very even-keeled, never blames things on the players, and never takes credit for the wins,” Celtics co-owner Stephen Pagliuca said in 2017. “He’s incredibly transparent and honest, and that has paid huge dividends for him. He knows the game is very important, but it’s not life or death.”

Over seven years later, that commendation was echoed by Mazzulla, who joined Stevens’s staff in 2019, after a coaching stint in 2016 with Boston’s G League affiliate. “I’ve always had a lot of respect for how he went about coaching,” he said. “How he kept family balance no. 1. How he treated people no. 1. That was always more important than whether there was a success or a failure. I think he spearheads the leadership, the temperature of the building.”

In 2016-17, after Al Horford became one of the most notable free agent signings in franchise history, Boston finished 53-29 and made it to the conference finals, where LeBron James and Kyrie Irving quickly dispatched the team in five games. Brown was a rookie. Jayson Tatum was a freshman at Duke. The Celtics were officially ahead of schedule.

A couple of months later, Irving, Gordon Hayward, and Tatum were all Celtics, too. The present was strong, and their future was bright, with a boatload of tradable assets that placed them in every superstar trade rumor under the sun. But then Hayward shattered his tibia on opening night of the 2017-18 season, Irving fled to the Brooklyn Nets after a disappointing 2018-19 season, and over the following two years, Kemba Walker’s body betrayed him.

After a wayward 2020-21 that saw the Celtics finish with a .500 record before Irving’s Nets steamrolled them in the first round, Ainge resigned and Stevens stepped into the front office—two startling moves that threw one of the league’s most cohesive organizations into a volatile situation as it navigated choppy waters.

From that point on, the Celtics shifted their priorities by recognizing the need to add more players who could really contribute without the ball. While many around the league openly wondered whether Brown and Tatum could flourish together, Stevens decided to double down, accentuating their strengths and accommodating their weaknesses. “The ability to make our wings better is going to be a huge part of the people that will be around them,” Stevens said at the time.

His first decision was to bring Horford back by trading Walker and a first-round pick to the Oklahoma City Thunder. A few months later, Stevens’s first trade deadline included a masterstroke: Boston plucked Derrick White from the San Antonio Spurs for Romeo Langford, Josh Richardson, a 2022 first-round draft pick (that became Blake Wesley), and a pick swap in 2028.

And sometimes it’s the moves you don’t make that lead you where you want to go. Boston ultimately held on to Brown. There have been sudden shake-ups and emotional turmoil. But Stevens’s ability to balance patience and progress—be it with Mazzulla, Smart, or Payton Pritchard, the half-court-heave hero whose trade request in 2023 was spurned in favor of an eventual contract extension—helped guide Boston to the mountaintop.

“I think Brad has been great in his role as GM,” Brown said. “He was a great coach. I think he just continued that by just being a great GM, being able to put the right pieces together. … He’s helped bring this organization back in terms of winning.” Since he was hired on July 3, 2013, only the Golden State Warriors have won more basketball games; since he became the president of basketball operations in 2021, Boston has won 30 more games than any other team, with the league’s highest postseason winning percentage.

The Celtics are extremely talented. They also fit together and are under contract for the next several years, with more organic growth on the horizon, committed ownership, and resourceful decision-makers. Tatum is 26 years old. Brown is 27. The window is wide open. But whether Stevens will admit it or not, the gas in their tank is his mindset.

One of his long-standing core philosophies is that if you focus too much of your time and attention on the results, you’re in trouble. It’s preached and believed throughout the Celtics organization, including/especially by Mazzulla. “We live in an expected world,” Mazzulla said, responding to a question about his team’s impressive statistical rankings. “So we didn’t pay much attention to the actual numbers.”

Process over upshot. It’s a critical point of view that Stevens breathes like oxygen. Growth is everything. Regardless of what happens today, it should not affect how you approach tomorrow.

“Even if we’re fortunate enough to someday achieve that 18th banner for the Celtics,” Stevens said earlier this season, “the next day we’re gonna be pursuing 19.”