The Boston Celtics traded Jaylen Brown for a lot of reasons.
There are off-the-court factors, such as Brown’s Twitch streams in which he made comments that may have bothered the team. For instance, he called the 2025-26 season his “favorite” of his career, despite the Celtics winning the NBA Finals two years before.
There’s also Brown’s analytical profile—his advanced metrics do not align with the public perception of him as a top 15 NBA player and a borderline MVP candidate. For example, Brown ranked 55th last season in the popular all-in-one metric Estimated Plus-Minus (EPM). Even if he is truly an All-NBA level player, the three years remaining on his five-year, $285 million contract is reason enough to pause at the notion of keeping him long-term.
But there’s another component that drove the Celtics’ decision to trade Brown to the Philadelphia 76ers in exchange for Paul George and a collection of draft picks. It also explains many other cost-saving transactions around the NBA this offseason. Put simply: teams have less to spend than they initially thought.
The NBA released final accounting on the 2025-26 season last week, revealing basketball-related income of $11.68 billion, up from $10.25 billion the previous year. Although money from the first year of the league’s 11-year, $76 billion national media deals helped prop up that total, revenue came in lower than prior outlooks due largely to the suffering regional sports network business.
As a result, the NBA’s salary cap is also now lower than teams’ previous expectations. The league set the 2026-27 cap, which is directly tied to total revenue, at $165 million—a 6.7% gain from $154.6 million for 2025-26. The early projected salary cap number for 2027-28 is $174 million, up 5.5%, according to a memo the league sent to teams.
In June 2025, Sportico wrote, “You can probably pencil in 10% increases to the cap and rookie contracts through the end of the CBA after the 2029-30 season, with the media deal in place at hefty annual increases.” The maximum salary cap increase allowed is 10% to prevent large spikes that drastically alter the cap space available to teams overnight, which happened prior to the 2016-17 season.
Although the NBA never told teams to project those 10% increases, some folks around the league operated under the assumption they would occur for the foreseeable future. “Teams had budgeted for another 10% rise, but now must change their projections downward for the luxury tax and aprons,” The Athletic’s John Hollinger wrote when the NBA first released its estimate of a 7% bump for the 2026-27 cap.
The league regularly informed teams of minor tweaks to that estimate over the past 12 months, but front offices plan 3-5 years in advance. Had the salary cap increased 10% annually, the number in 2027-28 would have been set at $187 million, $13 million higher than the new projection.
Franchises that have a large percentage of their cap committed to a few players via multi-year deals, like the Celtics, are left reassessing their long-term strategies. The combined salaries of Jayson Tatum and Brown the season after next would have totaled $124.5 million—72% of the cap—before the team filled its 13 other roster spots.
Long-term max contracts are set at 35% of the cap in year one, but instead of rising with the cap, they typically increase by a predetermined 8% each year. Superstar player salaries were initially expected to lag behind increases in overall payrolls, whereas now they will outpace the cap. Instead of earning 33% of the cap in 2027-28, as previously thought, Brown will earn 35.4%, according to Spotrac.
George’s max contract was signed a year earlier, which means his deal not only ends a year earlier but also pays a smaller salary. George’s cap hit in 2027-28 is $56.6 million, compared to $61.6 million for Brown.
That seems like a small difference, but the defending champion New York Knicks re-signed Jose Alvarado, who played a key role in the team’s Game 4 NBA Finals comeback, to a three-year deal worth less than $5 million per season. They also brought back Landry Shamet for $6 million annually.
Though owners are permitted to spend well above the cap, the 2023 collective bargaining agreement has forced teams to manage their finances with more scrutiny. Monetary penalties for exceeding the luxury tax threshold are greater than before. The second apron has added roster-building restrictions and reduced flexibility for overspenders, including limiting the types of trades they can make and potentially freezing future draft picks.
The Knicks didn’t retain backup center Mitchell Robinson this season because owner James Dolan said he didn’t want to go over the second apron under any circumstances. The Celtics themselves are familiar with this dilemma, as they traded starters Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzignis just 12 months after winning the 2023-24 title because their contracts were too rich.
Now teams are operating with smaller margins, and every dollar counts.
“When I looked at our team, and I looked at where the league was heading,” Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens said in a press conference after the Brown trade. “The path looked a little bit more challenging with 70% of our cap and such a high usage tied into two players.”
Indeed, when Boston won the championship three seasons ago, Tatum and Brown occupied just 47% of the salary cap. Only one of the past 10 champions has paid two players significantly more than even 60% of the salary cap combined: the 2022 Golden State Warriors, who blew through the luxury tax like no team ever had and partially inspired the league’s rule changes.
Teams are more reluctant to shell out money for a massive contract under the league’s new financial reality. The Detroit Pistons’ all-NBA center Jalen Duren is a restricted free agent, but the franchise has played it slow this offseason, waiting for the dust to clear from other moves instead of locking up the 22-year-old right away with a big offer. Granted, Duren struggled in the playoffs, averaging just 10 points per game, but the Pistons’ patience has also revealed a dry free agent market in which other teams are reluctant to take a risk on the big man.
In this new era of the NBA, the majority of transactions can be explained with a financial angle: a desire to get under the second apron, shed luxury tax, or improve flexibility down the road. With the salary cap inching, rather than leaping, upwards, those motivations have only become stronger.
