The Celtics’ trade for Kyrie Irving appears to be winding to its inevitable conclusion with Cleveland looking to soak Boston for another asset or two before letting the deadline for vetoing the trade on medical ground pass. No one seems to believe that there’s a serious threat of the trade falling apart so now, after a weak week delay, we can focus on what this trade may mean for the team in the coming season and beyond.

On Tuesday, the Westgate Las Vegas Sportsbook released their over-under lines for the season. They installed Boston as the Eastern Conference favorite, and second favorite in the NBA, with a line of 56.5 wins. Meanwhile, Kevin Pelton’s analytics-based projections (Insider paywall) peg the Celtics as a 45-win team. If you take those two numbers at face value and assume there must be space above an over-under line for it to work, and Pelton’s projection is somewhere in the middle of reasonable outcomes, we have a huge range of possibilities for the 2017-18 Celtics. Anything from the low-40’s to high-50’s is well within the realm of possibilities for those two projections.

I don’t gamble, and wouldn’t recommend anyone else does, but there are multiple reasons to doubt the Celtics touch that 56.5 win total. Boston won 53 games in 2016-17 but had the point differential of a 48-win team. It’s believed that the ability to over-perform point differential is more a function of luck than some inherent ability that a team has, and it’s definitely true that point differentials have been better at projecting future performance than win totals. That being the case, to add four wins onto last season’s total would mean that this summer’s acquisitions would have to add a lot of value over last year’s team, and they would still have to have a repeat of at least some of that good luck.

This is never an exact science, but if we map player roles from last season to next and compare the Box Plus-Minus (BPM) based Wins Above Replacement (WARP) from FiveThirtyEight.com’s CARMELO projection system, it’s hard to make a case that this team will win more games than they did last year.

Even if you believe that these types of models significantly overstate the value of players like Jae Crowder and Amir Johnson, there has to be some reason that the team played so well with them on the court. If you think that it was just blind luck, the players taking their spots on the team next season would have to either also be as lucky, or play at a level so far above them as to effectively replace that luck.

If you add in less quantifiable variables like “time to jell” (gel?) and the impact of better coaching on certain players you might personally want to push the team in one direction or the other, but there is simply a lot of ground to make up for the team to better last season’s win total. It may be that the team inverts their course from last season and gets better moving from the regular season to playoffs, but barring a historic improvement or debut from a player, or another major trade, I don’t think anyone should consider this team a title contender in 2017-18. A repeat of last season could be considered a significant success.

Beyond this season, it’s going to take a level of improvement well above historical averages for the this group of players to win a title. That isn’t a bad or surprising thing, though. No one gets to the top spot of a 30-team league without that. Even if a team has a load of prime draft picks, if those players only hit the average performance for their slots you’ll never raise a banner. I have significant reservations about this trade because I think it limits the Celtics’ avenues to acquiring the generational talent that title teams almost universally have, but there was no “easy” path to that, regardless.

It seems reasonable that this group of players should have “make the NBA Finals” as a goal within the next three seasons. It may be that they get there only to be the Eastern Conference lambs sacrificed on the alter of the Western Conference gods, but that’s at least a starting point. If the NBA title isn’t your only goal for the franchise, this trade is easy to like. If LeBron leaves Cleveland after this season and heads West, the Celtics could be favorites to advance to the Finals as soon as next year.

If that does happen, it looks like it would be more like how the Iverson-led 76ers or Jason Kidd’s Nets teams did it in the early 2000’s, riding through a weak conference before being smacked down by a dynastic champion. The luxury tax is unlikely to take apart the Warriors for a few more years and they won’t be aging out of their primes for at least that long. It is, of course, possible to get to that level and then benefit from the bad injury luck of an opponent, but that’s a very long-shot and if pre-Finals injuries laid the Warriors low there will be other teams out West that are still better than Boston to replace them.

Before the trade, I thought the franchise’s most likely path to a title was working to pry open a window starting in 2020. With this current group, the title window may be 2020. If the front office believes that Jayson Tatum was deserving of the number one pick in a highly regarded draft, they should also believe that he can be an All NBA caliber player by his third season. That’s the traditional marker for the level of player needed to lead a title team, and lines up with the probable ends to Gordon Hayward and Al Horford’s contracts. We have to assume that Irving will have re-signed in Boston; if he leaves or has taken his final year option it means things have gone very wrong. The team does not project to have cap space for years.

If Tatum reaches that level, Kyrie maintains his offensive production and improves on defense, Brown becomes a “super role player” and Hayward just continues his trajectory, the 2019-20 team would look like a “normal” title contender. We’re currently in an abnormal time for what it takes to seriously contend, but three seasons is a long time and eventually age and the luxury tax will take a toll on the current super teams. That’s a lot of “ifs” but none of them are impossible and, again, no one wins a title without hitting on multiple developments like that.

The “go-forward” foundation from this group is Kyrie at lead guard and Hayward, Tatum, and Jaylen Brown as a versatile, athletic, modern three wing set. Horford is the answer at the primary big man spot for now, but he’s the one player who’s career arc doesn’t align with the others. Beyond 2020 he probably won’t be on this team, or not a focal point. Without replacing him with a high-level solution, the team could peak in 2020 and then regress, unless one of those four building blocks makes a further jump to perennial MVP-candidate, or they find a way to add another top-flight talent.

There was probably no way to avoid taking a lateral or backwards step for this season once Paul George got traded too early, and even that path would have led to some questionable outcomes. Isaiah’s incandescent offensive season would have been almost impossible to reproduce, even if he were healthy. The trade off of medium-term improvement for a loss of long-term upside can be a reasonable one in that circumstance.

The “beyond 2020” is where this trade hurts. There were tax concerns if both the Nets and Lakers picks conveyed as high selections, but if that happened the franchise could have been set up for a decade. Now it feels very important that the Lakers pick does convey, as the draft is not just top-heavy, but heavy in high-end big men. That’s going to be the position of most need if Kyrie-Jaylen-Gordon-Jayson is the core moving forward, and that player will be needed sooner than later. In the pursuit of Anthony Davis, which is not likely to end anytime soon, it would also be very helpful to have a top-5 pick to replace the departed Nets selection. Five years from now, we may see he biggest winners of this trade being the Timberwolves, 76ers, and Bucks who are left standing as the franchises playing for the longest term and highest upside.

Ultimately, a person’s view of this team now hinges heavily on how you see Kyrie Irving and Jayson Tatum. If you believe Kyrie was stifled by LeBron and poor coaching and will now jump from All Star to MVP candidate, and that Tatum was a Tier 1 draft prospect, you should feel very good. If you think Kyrie is more hype than production and that Tatum is a Tier 2 prospect, this has been a troubling summer. After four years of being a “choose your own adventure” team, Danny Ainge has made his choice. The title window looks more defined, but also more narrow, and two massive bets have been placed on two divisive players.

You can follow me on twitter @dangercart