Brad Stevens' busy summer rolls on, with the new President of Basketball Operations locking up Robert Williams for four more years at $54 million dollars, according to ESPN.
Williams has ascended to being a key piece for the Boston Celtics, though he has suffered a variety of injuries, mostly in his left leg. Hip injuries cost him time over the past two seasons and turf toe cost him in the late season and playoffs, but Stevens clearly isn't bothered by that, handing Williams a deal with an average annual value of $13.5 million per year.
Williams has had an interesting path to this extension. After his first two seasons were derailed by circumstances often beyond his control, like being forced to stay in Boston as an emergency center while Al Horford and Aaron Baynes worked through injuries rather than spend time honing his skills in the G League, Williams started to earn more minutes as his skillset expanded.
By the end of the last season, Boston’s offense ran through a healthy Williams, who displayed a natural passing ability that made him dangerous with the ball in his hands in the high post. It quickly became evident that the ball-movement, read-and-react style Stevens wanted was best achieved through Williams and his ability to make quick decisions and find cutters.
Add to that his freakish ability to sky for lobs, and Williams had proven himself to be a very valuable part of the team. The pressure he puts on the rim on pick-and-rolls has the ability to suck in all five defenders, opening up space for everyone to operate.
However, his biggest strides came on the other end of the floor. Where he once relied on those physical gifts to block shots out of seemingly nowhere, he has since improved his positioning and footwork to better prevent shots from even being taken. Slowly, he began protecting the rim with his presence rather than his jumping ability. And while he will still come out of nowhere to alter shots, his ability to slide laterally rather than turn his hips and run after attackers is what serves him best defensively.
Obviously, the elephant in the room is his injury history. The hip issues on his left side were problematic enough to not only cause him to miss a big chunk of the 2019-20 season, it returned in the 2020-21 season and caused the Celtics to manage his minutes earlier in the year. By making a commitment like this, the Celtics are signaling that they don’t fear this as an issue that will linger.
It’s hard to imagine that Stevens, who has had intimate knowledge of the type and severity of Williams’ injuries, would commit to five full seasons of him at the center spot if he was overly concerned about them.
As for the nitty gritty of the contract, the actual details have not been released, but you can expect a four-year deal with 8% raises start around $12 million and jump to just over $13, $14, and $15 million in years two-four. It puts Williams in the upper half of the league’s centers, but also in tradeable territory.
When it comes to trades, this extension puts Williams in an interesting category called "base year compensation," in this regard commonly referred to as a “poison pill.” This little beauty of a CBA clause complicates any trade of Williams this season by changing how his value is calculated in salary matching.
Any team acquiring Williams would use the average of all remaining years on his contract, including this year, for salary matching while Boston would only use this year’s salary. So a team trying to acquire Williams would be using about $11.5 million as their salary matching number while Boston would use $3.6 million.
That complicates things.
Obviously, Boston isn’t committing to four more years of salary to turn around and ship a guy out, but stranger things have happened. And of course, the NBA CBA is full of brain-melting clauses that make everything a tad more difficult. This is one of them.
For now, it appears Williams is not only going to be in Boston for a while, but he’s going to be the team’s starting center. A four-year extension and big financial commitment for a guy going into his fourth season is enough to signal Boston isn’t bringing him off the bench.
Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown like playing with him, he has good chemistry with the recently extended Marcus Smart, and clearly a feared defender who changes how opposing offenses run when he's on the floor.
Williams is their center of the future.