Jaylen Brown’s intuition was correct: The NBA was not pleased with his controversial dunk celebration during Wednesday night’s Celtics win.

The league fined the Boston star $25,000 on Friday for his throat-slash gesture directed at Detroit Pistons big man Isaiah Stewart.

An NBA statement said the fine was for “making an inappropriate gesture on the playing court.”

Asked after Wednesday’s game whether he expected to hear from the league about the play, Brown replied: “Oh yeah.”

“Just caught up in the moment, I guess,” said Brown, who dunked on Stewart late in the first quarter of the Celtics’ 130-120 win at TD Garden. “Big play. I think that the NBA and the (players association) are sensitive about the gestures and things like that, so I’ve got to be mindful of that.”

Brown, who finished with 28 points, nine assists, six rebounds and three steals against Detroit, was the first Celtics player to receive an NBA fine this season.

Holiday rest

Starting guard Jrue Holiday returned to action Friday after sitting out the previous two games with a knee injury (left knee tendinopathy, according to the team).

“It feels good,” Holiday told reporters at Friday’s morning shootaround. “I had a couple of days of rest to kind of rehab, and it feels like it’s ready to go. … It’s newer for me. Just having the long offseason playing, I’ve been doing it for a while — probably the last four years — and then just doing the best to take care of my body.”

Holiday isn’t on the same management plan as Kristaps Porzingis and Al Horford, who typically do not play back-to-back nights during the regular season. But at 34 years old, the Celtics are wise to scale back the veteran guard’s workload when possible, especially after a summer that included an Olympic campaign.

Jayson Tatum (knee) also returned against Milwaukee after missing his first game of the season. Porzingis was not in the lineup against Milwaukee, and Horford was, meaning that likely will be flipped when the Memphis Grizzlies visit TD Garden on Saturday.

The Celtics entered Friday with the second-best record in the NBA (18-4) despite having their full roster available for just one half of one game: their Nov. 29 win at Chicago, during which Derrick White suffered a foot injury early in the third quarter.

“I think having the team that we have, that definitely is a luxury,” Holiday told reporters. “We play so well. We have guys that step up, and we just try to be as healthy as possible, especially to get out there and play.”

Middleton debuts

The Bucks, meanwhile, had their headlining trio of Giannis Antetokounmpo, Damian Lillard and Khris Middleton available Friday for the first time this season, with Middleton making his delayed season debut after undergoing offseason surgery on both ankles.

It was just the ninth game Antetokounmpo, Lillard and Middleton had played together since Doc Rivers took over as Milwaukee’s head coach midway through last season.

Rivers said Middleton likely wouldn’t start in his first game back and would be under an unspecified minutes restriction.

“It’s not easy, obviously,” the coach said pregame. “We’re whatever amount of games into the season, but I still want him back. Whatever the minutes are, we’re going to use them all up if he can handle them. Maybe he’ll get out there and we don’t like the way he’s moving, and then we’ll have to make that determination. But he looks good. I’m looking forward to seeing him on the floor.”

Middleton was a key cog in the Bucks run to an NBA title in 2021, but he’s been hammered by injuries in recent years, missing nearly 100 regular-season games since the start of the 2022-23 campaign.

“It’s not like he didn’t know how to play basketball,” Rivers said. “So he’s going to play basketball. As far as continuity, he’s just not going to have that. … But I will say that the couple times Khris has played for me and he’s missed a big chunk of the games, he’s come back and he’s looked amazing – probably as well as any player I’ve ever seen when he does come back. So I’m hoping it’s that Khris Middleton tonight.”

Friday’s meeting was the third of the season between Boston and Milwaukee – and the last until a potential playoff matchup in the spring. The Eastern Conference foes will not play each other over the final four months of the regular season.

“It’s strange,” Rivers said. “… You could look at it in the positive way for us: ‘We don’t have to play Boston the rest of the year.’ And if we see them again, it’ll be in the playoffs, and we’d be happy about that.”

Smart’s return on deck

One longtime Celtic will play his first game back at TD Garden on Saturday. Marcus Smart was shipped to Memphis last offseason as part of Boston’s wildly successful trade for Porzingis, and he missed last season’s lone Celtics-Grizzlies matchup in Boston with an injury.

Smart spent his first nine NBA seasons with the Celtics and was the emotional heart of a team that repeatedly fell just short of a championship. The scrappy point guard was the NBA’s Defensive Player of the Year in 2021-22, when Boston reached the NBA Finals for the first time in more than a decade but fell to Golden State in six games.

Trading Smart allowed the Celtics to transition to a new backcourt (Holiday and White) that brought even more defensive ferocity without Smart’s offensive volatility.

The 30-year-old Smart played in just 20 games in his first season with Memphis and has a new role this year, coming off the bench in most games for the first time since 2017-18. He’s coming off one of his most productive games of the season, scoring 18 points on 5-of-9 shooting (4-of-8 from three) with five rebounds, four assists and two steals in a 115-110 win over Sacramento on Thursday.

The Grizzlies have had very little success against the Celtics of late. Boston has won six straight and 16 of the last 17 in the biannual series, with Memphis’ lone win coming in overtime in 2021. Tatum has never lost to the Grizzlies in his career, going a perfect 16-0 in games he played in.

“(Expletive) got to end,” Grizzlies guard Desmond Bane told The Commerical Appeal.

Memphis has been one of the NBA’s hottest teams of late, winning seven of its last eight.