It's wild to even type this sentence, but here we are: the 76ers now roster LeBron James and Jaylen Brown, and both of them have a former team and a calendar date with their name on it. Brown got shipped out of Boston on July 2 in a blockbuster that sent Paul George and a pile of first- and second-round picks back to the Celtics. Reports at the time were clear that Brown never requested the trade -- this was Boston moving on from a franchise cornerstone, not a star forcing his way out. LeBron's arrival came separately, and later, once he saw what Philly had actually built.
The Brown-for-George swap changed everything about how James viewed the Sixers as a destination. According to his agent Rich Paul, Philadelphia was never seriously on the radar during free agency until the roster around Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey suddenly included an All-NBA wing. "We never heard from the Sixers because the Sixers never really thought it was even a chance," Paul said. "No, never even thought it was a chance." Maxey and Brown reportedly worked the phones to help recruit him, and it worked -- James signed with Philly, turning a good young core into a legitimate contender overnight.
Now the schedule-makers have handed both new Sixers a revenge game, and one of them comes on the league's biggest stage. LeBron and the Sixers head to Los Angeles to face his old Lakers team on Christmas Day, a matchup that's going to get a full national spotlight treatment no matter what Philly's record looks like by then.
Brown's return to Boston is arguably even bigger, given how the divorce actually went down. He gets his first crack at the Celtics on January 21, and the two teams are set to play four times this season between November and March -- with Paul George, of all people, making his own return trip to Philadelphia on November 10. Marc Stein flagged the January date as Brown's official return to Boston, underlining just how significant that night is going to be for a guy who spent his entire career there.
Kendrick Perkins previewed the Jaylen Brown-Jayson Tatum matchup, predicting both former teammates will play with an edge when they finally line up on opposite sides.
The Brown-Tatum angle is its own subplot inside all this. They won a championship together in Boston, and now they're rivals four times a year. Perkins isn't wrong to expect fireworks -- these two know each other's games better than almost anyone in the league, and neither is going to want to lose to the other.
Brown himself isn't exactly running from the awkwardness of it all. Asked point-blank whether the Celtics made the smart move trading him, he didn't dodge -- he just shrugged it off with a line that's already making the rounds.
Jaylen Brown was asked on Jimmy Kimmel Live whether Boston made the right call trading him, and simply answered, "I guess we'll find out."
That's the whole season in one sentence. Philly didn't just add two stars -- it added two guys with something to prove against the exact franchises that let them go, on nationally televised dates everyone's already circling. LeBron gets Christmas in LA, Brown gets Boston in January, and Sixers fans get a résumé-building schedule before opening night even tips off.