Get past the unseasoned beef between Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown in Tuesday's Celtics-Sixers matchup, and reach instead for the real juice: a killer performance by Paul George, the player for whom Brown was traded. Though a single regular-season game in November is no way useful to assess a trade in its entirety, the contrast last night between those two wings was telling: Brown (keyed-up, foul-prone, poor decision-making) sat out much of a game where George (methodical, efficient, at ease in the flow of offense) flourished. Boston won, 123-101. More than anything, George's 36-point outing was a reminder of his eerily slick, timeless style could have plugged into every NBA roster constructed over the last decade, and how it distills Joe Mazzulla's Celtics squad to its spiritual essence.
Fair minds were skeptical that a star version of George would ever return. In two years with Philly, he seemed to have receded into a fog of lower-body injuries, mystery drug use, and inconsistent podcasting, playing just 78 total regular-season games. Meanwhile, Brown had just come off a workhorse campaign for the Celtics, logging 71 games while soaking up 36 percent usage on his way to an All-NBA second team. For all the hand-wringing about Brown's true value, both in a vacuum and within the Celtics system, he was clearly the more valuable player at the time of the trade. When swapping two seemingly onerous contracts for one another, each one asking somewhere between 32 and 35 percent of the salary cap for a wing who likely wouldn't live up to that price tag, it was the Sixers who had to sweeten the deal with draft picks.
Today, in 2026, with the enormous caveat of health, it doesn't seem farfetched that George could be a more valuable player than Brown over the remainder of his contract. The 36-year-old looked both incredible and incredibly well-suited to his his new environs. When he wasn't stepping into threes (6-of-11 last night) or profiting from the outsized attention on Tatum, George was posting up mismatched defenders, playing around in the surprising amount of studio space offered to him by Boston's scheme. This team has established a stark identity over the last three years: Doggedly decentralized, self-effacing, and floor-spacing, the Mazzulla Celtics grind out incremental advantages by churning through drive-and-kicks, finding the open shooter, and upholding their belief that 3>2.
Led by Tatum, these Celtics have lacked the on-ball dynamism of some of their competitors, but (mostly) make up for it with collective skill level and clarity of game plan. Paul George gives them a loyal cog in that machine, plus some surplus talent they've never had from such a cog, enough to improvise a little bit while respecting the overall superstructure. If George is superstar talent stretched into the shape of a 3-and-D role player, then he appears to have found his team-level analogue in Mazzulla-ball. He'll be able to scale his role up or down as needed on any given night, thriving on or off the ball. His defense looks back up to par, and he can switch and shoot the passing lanes. Some nights, he won't dribble more than 20 times and still emerge as the best player on the floor. Through 10 games this season, he's averaging 22 points on a career-best 63 percent true shooting.
Of course, George will always be assessed based on the player he replaced, and the differences between the two will always lurk in the mind. Brown could handle more on-ball usage for a team that at times badly needed it, driving headlong into the paint to drive mid offense, but George gives the Celtics better spacing and off-ball defense, bringing the whole team into cleaner alignment with Mazzulla's vision. Perhaps George will crumble; he hasn’t had a proper healthy season since 2023-24. Perhaps it'll turn out that Brown's anomalous traits were essential to this team, especially in the postseason. But maybe all Mazzulla wanted was another good soldier, 6-foot-8, switchable, and too smooth.
