None of this is much fun for anyone.
It’s not fun for Celtics fans, who are now being inundated with reasons why this team is about to be torn apart, possibly unrecognizably, over the next 12-15 months.
It’s definitely not fun for me, a word guy who got into this business partly because of a severe arithmetic allergy.
And it’s not fun for Brad Stevens, who did brilliant work to construct a roster that won a championship and should just be some tweaks away from staying a contender.
But here we all are, way out of our comfort zones, with talk of aprons and repeater taxes everywhere. The league is getting what it wants: A good team’s talent will be redistributed elsewhere, and fans everywhere get to talk transactions, which is the most popular NBA topic by a mile.
Stevens’ job is to be a sort of basketball oncologist. The second apron is malignant and will do what it’s intended to do, but Stevens is hoping to prolong this iteration of the Celtics in the face of that, finding some way to get more meaningful time out of this team before it succumbs to the inevitable.
It is a very tough needle to thread. There are a lot of ways Stevens can go with this team. There will be cuts, but how deep those cuts are is yet to be determined.
“You don't want to make decisions that are rash or emotional,” Stevens said at his season wrap-up press conference. “We've got a lot to sift through and sort out and think about, and we'll do that. So there'll be a lot of us in the room and we'll take the time over the next, you know, couple of weeks to do that.”
Stevens said the north star is to build a contender, but he has entered an era of diminishing returns. It’s almost guaranteed that whatever team he assembles for next season will be at least slightly worse than last year’s team. And then the team he puts together for the following season will be even less talented. There's no getting back to what the Celtics had on this roster, talent-wise. That's what makes this season’s failure so painful.
So the question truly becomes how much longer can this north star point Boston to pursuing the short-term championship goal versus pivoting to a longer-term rebuilding or re-tooling?
One key element to all of this is teams don’t need to be under the second apron until the end of the season. Stevens’ work to maneuver his team’s way under the second apron doesn’t necessarily have to happen in July. He can get halfway there this summer, wait to see how the team looks and how Jayson Tatum is recovering, and then start the next wave on December 15.
And if, somehow, things are going so well that breaking the team up further would almost fall under malfeasance, then Stevens … with the new ownership group’s blessing … could just let it ride one last time and still have enough runway to shake the penalties associated with it.
“These are all phased-in rules, so I think there's been a little bit of mixed-messaging with how the rules work,” Spotrac.com’s cap expert Keith Smith told me on the latest Locked On Celtics podcast. “Let’s say they don’t get out of the second apron … as long as you're out for three of the next four years, your draft pick becomes unfrozen and it frees back up. If they're out for the next (three years), the pick un-freezes and it goes back to where it should be in the draft order.”
The Celtics would still have to pay the exorbitant tax bill, but it’s still an option. Whether they pursue it might depend solely on Tatum’s recovery. The ultimate health of his Achilles tendon could be what pushes Stevens down the gradual route or makes him rip the band-aid off entirely.
Stevens doesn’t want to make a rash or emotional decision. What qualifies as such is up for some debate. Would one more run with a presumably healthy Tatum, Jaylen Brown, and most of these guys be too emotional a decision? Or is dumping half the roster because they biffed a winnable playoff series the rash one?
Maybe it will take a few weeks in isolation, and with it a little perspective on what the rest of the league is doing, to find the true answer here. The Celtics will never be the same, but how different they are next season depends on a lot of unanswered questions. Reason will prevail, but the reasoning for it is still up in the air.
