The Celtics’ owners announced a gift of more than $200 million to Boston Children’s Hospital on Thursday, made together with the team and the Boston Celtics Shamrock Foundation. The hospital called it unprecedented, and its CEO, Dr. Kevin Churchwell, said it is the largest gift in the hospital’s history, per Boston.com.
My take: this is the best thing Bill Chisholm’s group has done since it bought the team, and the reason is the model. Co-owner Rob Hale called the Red Sox and the Jimmy Fund a blueprint, and it’s the one to copy: one team, one hospital, for decades. It also doesn’t settle how fans should judge this ownership on the basketball side, and nobody should pretend it does. Those are two separate ledgers.
What the money pays for
The hospital’s release lists five priorities. The first is building what it calls the nation’s premier pediatric mental health facility, along with earlier help for kids in crisis. The other four: lab work on new treatments for sick kids (and on where adult illnesses begin), higher-level training for the hospital’s nurses, a fund for new ideas in children’s health, and family programs built around healthier living in local neighborhoods.
The mental health piece is the anchor. The Boston Globe’s Shirley Leung and Jon Chesto put the price of the new behavioral health campus in Brighton at $640 million. It sits on the campus of Franciscan Children’s, which joined the Boston Children’s system in 2023, per the hospital.
“Families come to us in their most challenging moments, looking for answers for their kids,” Churchwell said in the release. He also said the gift’s significance “will ultimately be measured not by the record it sets, but by the lives it will save.” That standard applies to the donors as much as to the hospital.
How the owners got to $200 million
Half of this has been public since last December. On Dec. 10, 2025, Boston Children’s announced a $100 million gift from Rob and Karen Hale for pediatric behavioral health, the largest in its history at that point, which will name a building on the Brighton campus. Patch reported that Thursday’s total includes that gift.
The rest of the ownership group then matched it. “That December gift inspired the rest of the ownership team to chip in and ultimately match what the Hales gave,” Leung and Chesto wrote. The Globe listed Sixth Street, Aditya Mittal, Andrew Bialecki and Bruce Beal Jr. among the owners, and the individual amounts weren’t disclosed.
I don’t think the Hale half makes Thursday any smaller. The Hales set a bar, and the rest of the group matched it. That is how a group decides what it wants to be known for.
Copy the Jimmy Fund
“The Jimmy Fund and the Red Sox are a wonderful blueprint to absorb and learn from,” Hale said, per the Globe. The Red Sox have raised more than $198 million for Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Jimmy Fund over several decades, per the Globe. The Celtics’ owners reached a comparable total less than a year after the Hales’ gift.
The comparison is fair, but the number isn’t what makes the Red Sox model work. Time is. The Jimmy Fund partnership means something because it has lasted for generations of Red Sox teams, through good rosters and bad ones. If the Celtics want the same standing at Boston Children’s, the measure is whether this is still going in 2040, long after everyone on the current roster is gone.
“Everyone came with a real interest in the Celtics, just the passion for the team,” Chisholm said, per the Globe, “but I think with an understanding that there’s just more to it than the team on the court.” In the release, he added: “We all win when we invest in our children’s futures.”
The team side starts this week
Several young Boston Children’s patients joined the Celtics at practice on Thursday, WHDH reported. One of them, 12-year-old Aileen McNearney, told the station she was first diagnosed with leukemia when she was five. “It’s going to be transformative,” Celtics senior vice president Dave Hoffman said of the gift.
The celebration moves to TD Garden on Friday, when the Celtics host the Bulls in an NBA Cup game at 7:30 p.m., per the Celtics schedule on Basketball Reference. The release says the night will include in-game moments for current and former patients, families, staff and others connected to the hospital. Boston comes in at 3-1.
It doesn’t settle the payroll argument
Chisholm’s group took over after a $6.1 billion purchase that the NBA’s Board of Governors approved in August 2025, per ESPN. For me, the basketball decision that defines it so far was about money. When Brad Stevens explained the Jaylen Brown trade in July, he said “the path looked a little bit more challenging with 70% of our (salary) cap, and such a high percent of our usage tied into two players,” per the Associated Press on NBA.com. Chisholm denied giving any directive to keep the payroll at a certain level. “This was all about basically trying to win, and really trusting in our process,” he said.
That argument is still open. Brown went out and George came in, and the money is still concentrated at the top. Boston’s listed salaries this season total $198,722,406 on Basketball Reference’s contracts page, and Jayson Tatum and Paul George account for $112.6 million of it. I went through what that squeeze means for the rest of the rotation in why Payton Pritchard’s cheap deal is the one Boston has to use now, and George’s own stakes in why the Celtics have to guard Paul George’s minutes.
A hospital gift doesn’t excuse a roster, and the owners shouldn’t get a pass on spending because of it. The payroll fight shouldn’t make anyone cynical about Thursday, either. More than $200 million for kids’ mental health care in Boston is good on its own terms.
The owners get judged on the roster in April. They get judged on this one over decades, and Hale already set the bar for his own group: the Jimmy Fund. Hold them to it.