Brad Stevens and the Celtics front office has gotten a little creative with their end-of-bench contracts in a way that allows them to pounce on an upgrade even though it looks like their roster might be set.
Svi Mykhailiuk’s deal is a partially guaranteed deal which, according to Keith Smith of Spotrac, has two different guarantee trigger dates. He’s getting $200,000 for showing up to camp. He’ll get another $1.2 million if he makes the opening night roster. And then he’ll get another million if he’s on the roster on January 10 (the date when all NBA contracts are guaranteed for the season).
Svi Mykhailiuk's one-year contract with the Boston Celtics is partially guaranteed for $200K, a league source tells @spotrac.
— Keith Smith (@KeithSmithNBA) September 5, 2023
If Mykhailiuk makes the opening night roster, his guarantee increases to $1.2M. The deal becomes fully guaranteed on the league-wide date in January.
Dalano Banton has a similar guarantee structure in his contract, with $1 million guaranteed if he makes it out of camp and $2 million triggered on January 10.
I don’t want to overstate what the front office has done by staggering the guarantees of two end-of-bench contracts. I’m not trying to gush here about how they're handling Banton and Mykhailiuk like it’s a masterstroke that checkmates the rest of the league. In the end, it’s just creative guarantees on likely expendable players.
But the thought process shows a few things, and I think it creates another level of trust in a front office forced to pivot in the face of a new financial reality.
The first thing it does is give Boston some flexibility. The opening night trigger date is important because it gives them up until the very last minute to wait out other teams in the league in case a surprising cut is made somewhere.
The Oklahoma City Thunder, for instance, have three players too many, and the NBA vultures are swirling to see which three get cut and when. Because front offices like to be fair to players and agents so as to engender goodwill in future negotiations, the chances are OKC’s cuts will come fairly early in the process. If Boston is able to snap up a surprisingly available young player, they can do so with minimal repercussions.
They have one open roster spot, so they can carry 15 into the season and then, if someone comes along they feel they need to sign, they have a small, medium, and large salary option to cut to minimize the damage (Luke Kornet’s $2.4 million is non-guaranteed in full until January 10).
They can not only still be on the market for an upgrade to this year’s team, but they could also be on the market for some cheap help moving forward. By staggering the guarantees, the Celtics allow themselves to pivot their strategy some in order to get a player now who might help more down the line.
Again, in the OKC scenario, Boston could give guaranteed money to a player who might need a year of seasoning before making an impact and, again, pivot away from another non-guaranteed player later if an upgrade becomes available or if an unbalanced trade requires someone to be moved.
The Celtics can completely remake the end of their bench in a pinch, and it would only cost them $200,000, which would amount to a Mykhailiuk signing bonus. The Celtics staggering their guarantee triggers allows them to walk through stages of the season and still make decisions to improve the team without worrying quite as much about the second apron. Each step along the way will get a little more expensive, but they now have ways to play with the roster to avoid hitting the second apron and being more limited in what they can do.
Yeah, it’s a little thing in the grand scheme of team building, but these little things add up. And if they can pull something off with this maneuver, then they might end up a step ahead of where they’d otherwise have been. It all matters when flirting with this second apron.
And it matters when it comes to trusting your front office to be able to pivot when things change. Boston is one of the teams most impacted by this new deal, and it derailed a pretty steady adherence to the old team-building rules. Stevens and his front office group were playing the old CBA very well, and now they're dealing with this curve ball.
A little thing like the staggered guarantees shows how closely they're paying attention to every little detail. We’ll see if the decisions are right or wrong in the long run, but when it’s clear they're at least trying to root out every little advantage they can find, it’s easier to trust the decisions they make.
I get a little more in depth about this topic in the latest Locked On Celtics Podcast: