Celtics media day is at the end of the month, which means practices and preseason games are coming up quickly. With that in mind, and with the Celtics entering the season with the highest expectations, we’re spending the rest of the month looking at 10 big questions for this team heading into training camp.
Question Number 4: Will Brad Stevens feel compelled to make an early move?
The Celtics are one of the favorites to get to the Finals as they stand right now. They have an MVP candidate in Jayson Tatum, an All-NBA candidate in Jaylen Brown, and the reigning Defensive Player of the Year in Marcus Smart. Ime Udoka is already on the radar as a potential Coach of the Year, and they added the highly-respected Malcolm Brogdon, who could become a Sixth Man of the Year candidate, while keeping most of the rest of the rotation intact.
That's a team that will make some noise. However, they do have things they need to address.
They came into the season with an obvious hole backing up Robert Williams and Al Horford. Then the “Hospital Celtics” returned when Danilo Gallinari tore his ACL, costing Boston their mid-level addition for the season.
The team has signaled that it will start camp with the players in place and give them a chance to compete for open spots. Luke Kornet will get his chance to be a third-string center. Sam Hauser will get a shot at being a bigger floor spacer. Other camp signees, like Noah Vonleh, will get to compete to see if they can fit in with this group and contribute.
On the surface, that feels like a fair starting point. Considering the top seven players on the roster are all set, opening up the competition for spots eight, nine, and 10 with the players in camp seems like a decent idea. There's no harm in checking out some former cast-offs whose skills might fit better in a lesser role around this particular group.
It’s not uncommon to see guys who have trouble in other stops figure things out. Joe Ingles was famously cut by the Clippers only to join the Jazz and watch his career take off. He went from wondering if he would make it in the league to nearly $70 million in career earnings. While that's obviously an extreme case, there are plenty of guys who have struggled in one spot and thrived in others.
Then again, there are plenty of guys who have struggled in one spot and then struggled again in others. The Celtics may feel it’s prudent to wait and see if one of the already signed players can step up in order to avoid having to spend more tax money (which, at this point, would multiply the cost of most players by four) in search of a solution, but they are also under a bit of pressure.
The Cavs and Sixers have gotten better. If things go right for the Nets, they’ll be a contender as well. The East is deeper and stronger than it was two months ago, which means there is less time to spend figuring things out. If any team slips out of the blocks in this race, they may never make up ground. Everyone will be gunning for the big boys in the East, so teams at the top will rarely have an easy night.
Where Stevens once may have felt comfortable waiting until the trade deadline, it’s possible he will feel the need to make a move earlier than usual. If the Celtics are awarded a Disabled Player Exception for the Gallinari injury, Stevens will get about $3.2 million in short term money to find a replacement. He also has a couple of Traded Player Exceptions to play with, as well as a few interesting trade pieces already on the roster.
There are options for the Celtics, and options Stevens can lean on to make relatively quick moves.
One interesting aspect to watch for is the Grant Williams extension. If he and the team come to an agreement by the mid-October deadline, then he can feel safe on the roster. But if the Celtics push the talks off into next season, it’s possible that part of that motivation is to protect Williams’ trade value.
If he signs the extension, he becomes a “poison pill” contract in a trade. Cap master Larry Coon explains the poison pill:
“When this happens, the player's trade value for the receiving team is the average of the salaries in the last year of the rookie scale contract and each year of the extension. The sending team uses the player's actual salary when calculating their total outgoing salary.”
So let’s pretend Williams gets a three-year, $30 million extension (I’m making the math easy more for myself than for you). This year, Williams is making $4.3 million. In a trade, the receiving team counts Williams salary as just under $8.6 million while the Celtics use the $4.3 million number.
That unnecessarily complicates things. This isn’t to say that Williams should worry about being traded if they can’t come to a deal, but keeping things simpler is more helpful, and Williams at $4.3 million is a high-value player. Also, teams like to sign their own contacts with players, so that would also be a plus.
It will also be interesting to see how the Celtics handle Gallinari’s situation. His $6.5 million is basically dead money, and at the current tax rate that equals about $30 million in actual cost sitting in the training room. As unfortunate as it is for Gallinari, the Celtics might decide to use that money as a pseudo-TPE, and use it to match a deal for someone else. It might seem harsh, but business can be tough in the NBA.
How quickly Stevens leans on these maneuvers could tell us how much pressure this team is feeling to win early in the season. A November veteran-minimum signing like Carmelo Anthony would be a sign that the team doesn’t really trust who they have. A December trade would mean the guys on the roster aren’t getting the job done. The earlier the move, the more urgent the fix.
No moves until trying to bolster the team at the deadline would be the best case scenario, because it would mean the guys who walked into training camp held down the fort. For a team looking to climb to the top of the conference early and stay there, getting early contributions from guys on the floor in September would go along way to still being on that practice floor in June.