Jaylen Brown said it best on an 8 p.m., Eastern time, Twitch stream Thursday night. "I'm still processing everything, to be honest," the clearly conflicted forward said 26 hours after being dealt from the only team and city he's ever known professionally to a team and city he's been programmed to hate.He and Paul George are the ones most affected by the blockbuster deal between Boston and Philadelphia, but everyone is still processing this seismic shift in the Eastern Conference powers.Now that there's been some time to think about a new dawn of professional basket basketball, here is the first in a series of five thoughts on the reimagined Sixers.Mike Gansey's job is to pounce on opportunity, but this trade is a stroke of luckIt would be inaccurate to say Gansey walked into a pressureless situation, but he did not have a terribly high bar to clear as he walked into this job.If he did nothing at all, he'd have the excuse of being saddled with two contracts viewed as immovable preventing his front office from getting ultra creative with a new vision. It would be the fault of the guy he was hired to replace, a guy who had lost all approval he won from the Sixers faithful.And instead of doing nothing with a team that lacked the salary flexibility to be creative, he breathed new life into the franchise, trading in one of those immovable contracts for a player who is in the middle of his prime. He cast George off to Boston at the cost of two first-round picks. You could argue that it maybe only nets out to one first-round pick since the Celtics will ostensibly have to trade a first to incentivize someone to take on the remainder of George's contract.Gansey essentially swapped out huge contracts but got a player who is orders of magnitude better than the one he dismissed, and Philadelphia only compensated Boston to the tune of one first-rounder.Not a wall-scraping homer that lands in the first row. A Kyle Schwarber grand slam. One that sounds good off the bat and lands in the second deck.But let's be totally honest about how the Sixers arrived here.It took an incredible stroke of luck.It likely required Joel Embiid finding health long enough to send the Celtics home disappointed too early in the playoffs. Losing to a bitter rival in the fashion of a blown 3-1 series lead leaves a bad taste in anyone's mouth. And while the wounds were still fresh for Brad Stevens and the Celtics, Brown publicly admitted that he enjoyed last season more than he enjoyed any other season in his career—a clear message that the personal success outweighed team outcomes.It required Boston's decision-makers to trust an analytical model that devalued Brown enough to make him appear expendable.It then required the Milwaukee Bucks to choose the Miami Heat's offer over the Celtics' in the Giannis Antetokounmpo sweepstakes, something that did not involve Gansey or Philadelphia at all.At that point, Boston dangled a long-time star in trade talks twice in two summers. They made it clear that Brown was the one who had to go even though he led the team to the top of the Eastern Conference at a time when the Celtics were viewed as taking a gap year with Jayson Tatum out.Speaking of Tatum, he wasn't even able to get through a first-round playoff series healthy. And yet the Celtics made it clear that he was the favorite over Brown despite the risk that Tatum, coming off a torn achilles, could conceivably not top out as the same player he was prior to the devastating injury.Of course, they could've smoothed things over with Brown after using him as trade bait by simply offering him the security of a new contract extension when he became eligible for one.If the Celtics had any appetite for that, it would've been a far more palatable option than to turn him over to a historic rival for the price they received.And that brings the sequence of events to the last two weeks.Boston must have perceived Brown as an internal threat. What would it be like in their building if he came into the season with no new contract to serve as a peace treaty, knowing that management would always choose Tatum over him, knowing that they were trying to trade him for basically anything?It required Celtics brass, one that has become so used to its own culture and acclaim, to feel so threatened by the mere idea that Brown could be upset that they needed to get out of the relationship now. Not a few months from now. Not at the trade deadline. But in the first week of July.That is how low the risk tolerance clearly was.Those are all forces completely external to the Sixers that landed this opportunity in their laps.Like stealing candy from a baby.Sign up for our free newsletter and follow us on X and Bluesky for the latest news.Add us as a preferred source on GoogleFollow