Brad Stevens and the Boston Celtics have reportedly moved on from their failed Giannis Antetokounmpo pursuit and are now circling Evan Mobley in Cleveland. The shift surfaced Tuesday night, when Boston’s search for an impact big man narrowed to a player who could change the front line immediately.
Chris Mannix said on NBC Sports Boston that Mobley was the name he had heard most over the previous 24 hours, and the timing matters because Boston is still trying to reshape the roster before the 2025-26 NBA season takes hold. That is why Rudy Gobert keeps coming up in the broader conversation around elite rim protection and size: the Celtics are not shopping for a depth piece, they are hunting a frontcourt anchor.
Mobley fits the profile. The third-overall pick in the 2021 NBA Draft earned an All-Star nod and won NBA Defensive Player of the Year in 2024-25, then followed with 18.2 points per game, 9.0 rebounds per game, 3.6 assists per game and 1.7 blocks per game with the Cavs in 2025-26. For a Celtics team that has been looking for more rebounding, more rim protection and a better answer for elite big men, those numbers explain why his name keeps surfacing.
The obstacle is the math. Mannix said a Celtics-Cavaliers deal would be complicated because Cleveland is projected to be in the restrictive second apron, which means it cannot simply stack contracts together to make the numbers work. Jaylen Brown would make $57.1 million next season, while Mobley’s salary is $50.1 million, and that gap would force Boston to build a package that clears the cap rules without a clean, easy path.
That is where the story gets messy. Boston continued to discuss Brown trades on Tuesday, according to two sources familiar with the talks, and some of those conversations were started by rival teams while others were broached by the Celtics themselves. Brad Stevens tried to steady the picture after Round 1 of the NBA Draft, saying, “Jaylen Brown is a big part of us,” but he also left the door open when he added, “I’m never going to predict the future, but, like, every indication, everything that I think about over the past few years has been building around those guys, right? So, obviously you never know.”
Boston is still searching for a deal that fits both its basketball need and the salary structure around it, and that is why the next move may matter more than the name attached to it. If the Celtics keep pushing for Mobley, Brown is the player who makes the conversation real; if Cleveland holds firm inside the second apron, the pursuit may end the way the Giannis chase did, with Boston still hunting and still short of the big man it wants.
