The Celtics are hoping this summer can bring the moves, staff hires, and internal improvement to get them the next couple of steps forward needed to win a title. This series looks at questions that need to be answered for that to happen.
Question 1: What the hell is the new CBA going to do to this roster?
I’m going to put this as plainly as possible.
The Celtics are getting screwed here.
They're not the only team. There are plenty of others who are in a similar boat, but this is an accurate depiction of the situation. This isn’t the Titanic hitting the iceberg. Someone screwed up to make that happen. This is the CBA suddenly putting icebergs on the radar when there weren’t any before.
Under the old agreement, Boston was following the exact plan laid out by many teams before them. Get bad, get picks, draft good players, build around those players, get good. The top three Celtics in minutes per game last year were guys they drafted. Five of their top eight guys were homegrown talent.
When you grow your own talent, you’ve got to water your plants, and that means paying those guys, and that gets expensive.
The Golden State Warriors did a great job of finding the right players, plucking their three superstars with the 7th, 11th, and 35th picks overall. They added castoffs who became massively important, made shrewd deals, got lucky with a cap spike, and have maintained a contender for the better part of a decade.
It cost a lot to keep that together, but it didn’t matter much to Joe Lacob, who built the Chase Center as his own personal ATM machine to fund the massive tax bills for the team. When the league got sick of him -- and Steve Ballmer with the Clippers -- pouring ungodly amounts of money into the team, they set out to create a system that keeps these payrolls in check.
The Celtics, notorious for spending but only when the championship window is wide open, decided to dive into the deep end of the tax pool, but they got swept up in the sting.
Okay, fine, the league wants to move in a different direction. That's not even the biggest issue right now for Boston. It’s that the league surprised everyone with this new direction and basically told teams they have one summer to get their affairs in order. They put a 55-mile-per-hour speed limit on the autobahn while cars were going 115 and put a cop behind the next overpass.
Teams like Boston, who had been following the old playbook perfectly, suddenly have tough decisions to make. Penalties that had once been strictly financial shifted to the front office and the ability to build and maintain a team. Two owners’ ability to flick the tax burden off themselves like a mosquito has put the rest of the league in a bind.
The new rules push everyone closer to the middle because talent is going to be too expensive to keep and rosters impossible to improve after a certain point. The Celtics, with Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum both about to enter supermax contract territory over the next three seasons, are staring down the barrel of major decisions that have to start being made this summer.
It starts with Malcolm Brogdon, who may simply be too expensive to keep around another season, especially as the Celtics look for, perhaps a better fit. Lineups with Brogdon, Tatum, and Brown were a -3 this season according to CleaningTheGlass. Take Brown out of the mix and Brogdon/Tatum lineups were a collective +12.2. Some lineups with Brown worked, though, albeit in more limited time. The most used lineup with him and Marcus Smart (with Brown, Tatum, and Al Horford) was a -10.4, but a lineup with Grant Williams subbed in for Brown was +8.5. A different lineup with Brown on the floor and Derrick White in for Tatum was a +8.6.
So Brogdon was a wonky fit with some lineups that he was supposed to help. He was good enough to be Sixth Man of the Year, and I’d say he had about an 85% good season, but at $22 million, they can sacrifice some of what he does in the name of more efficient spending.
Grant Williams has been rumored as both a sign-and-trade target and likely to stay in Boston, so there's no telling what his future is. If a Brogdon deal nets a power forward type, then Williams can possibly be moved for cheaper role players or an expiring contract.
Are these the types of team-building moves Brad Stevens wants to be making? Not one bit. Ideally, Brogdon would come back, work with Stevens and Joe Mazzulla on a plan for how they want to play next season, go through a training camp with a fully healthy (presumably) roster that includes Robert Williams from the start, and go about playing next season with some tweaks that make the fit a little better.
Now Brogdon will likely be one of the first victims of this new CBA purge. That is, unless ownership directs Stevens to simply run it back with Mazzulla and his new staff taking a full summer to come up with a roadmap for the season. They could follow in Phoenix’s footsteps in a sense by saying damn the torpedoes and forging ahead with the current roster.
It feels doubtful, though. Boston values flexibility, and it seems like a team with this many potential injuries on the roster would be foolish to enter a season with virtually no ability to adjust midstream. They have no choice, it seems, but to start making moves now in preparation.
It’s an unfortunate spot for Boston, but it could come with a potential silver lining if they find the right mix of role players with specific jobs. One thing Miami and Denver taught us this spring is that talented teams with guys in very specific roles is valuable. Positional versatility is good, but the Toronto Raptors showed us that there are limits to that concept, so maybe it’s for the best that Boston downgrade a position or two in overall talent in order to find guys who are happy filling a specific role.
No matter how it goes, the new CBA is going to change this roster in ways Steven didn’t anticipate a year ago. This is not where anyone thought the league would be at this point, and the minimal time to adjust will lead to some interesting decisions. How Boston emerges from these financially-motivated decisions will play a massive role in whether the TD Garden cleaning crew is breaking out the wet vacs to pull champagne out of the home locker room carpet next June.