The calendar has turned to August which traditionally signals the end of the busy period of the offseason. Russell Westbrook just signed an extension with the Thunder so this month isn’t always a dead period, but things should be quieter now. That means it’s time to look back on the past few months and try to learn lessons about the state of the franchise and where things are headed.

The summer signing frenzy played out well for the Celtics but still feels like a bit of a “what if.” It’s been clear that the team was doing long-term planing for this summer with the implicit intention of pitching Kevin Durant and a second max-tier free agent on teaming up in green. The signing of Al Horford makes the summer an unequivocal win but I’ll always wonder if Durant would be a Celtic if Draymond Green hadn’t been foolish enough to get suspended for Game 5 of the Finals. While the team still has a bright future, and multiple options for how to proceed, there is no longer a clear moment on the horizon where a nexus of opportunities exists like it did this summer.

The fact that the plan seemed to exist at all shaped a lot of how we should have thought about the team in the past. Most teams are not executing such coherent medium-term planning. The series of moves that made the Durant sales pitch possible extends back years, meaning that the Celtics were able to simultaneously maintain a big-picture “process” while also putting a winning team on the court. With that sales pitch in the rearview mirror we need to adjust our understanding of the team’s priorities and map that forward.

Team Philosophy

For, in effect, the entirety of Danny Ainge’s tenure as GM he’s told anyone willing to listen what his philosophy is. The Boston Celtics just want to hang banners. The best way to do that in the modern NBA is to acquire a fully-formed superstar in their prime. The second best way is to draft and develop multiple superstars together. This isn’t news, but most of the teams around the league really aren’t pursuing either of these objectives. At any given time, about 20 teams are muddling around trying to sell tickets and hoping to fall into something better than what they currently have. The other ten-or-so teams are either already contenders or are really trying to execute something big. I would say that for most of the past eleven years the Celtics have been in that group of ten.

Having signed Al Horford, who is a very good player but not a league-shifter, and missed out on KD, will that situation change? Could the team move into a phase where being very good is good enough? I don’t believe that it will.

The moves that the Celtics executed in the immediate run-up to free agency and in the aftermath of the Durant decision indicate that there has been no shift in policy. Finding the paths to the ultimate goal are harder, but the idea of keeping options open by not committing to mid-tier assets is unchanged. If the Celtics were happy with pairing Horford with Isaiah Thomas, Jae Crowder, and the rest of the Celtics’ merry band they could have locked that team together. A long-term signing for a mid-tier free agent, possibly aided by the removal of Amir Johnson and re-signing of Jared Sullinger, could have incrementally improved the team in 2016-17 at the expense of future flexibility.

The maintenance of flexibility above immediate gains means we should continue to state the team’s philosophy, and use that philosophy to analyze future options, as:

The Boston Celtics will make no moves that close off possible options, even seemingly unlikely ones, for a transformational move that creates a championship contender.

League Landscape

Boston has the advantage of continuing to play in the land of contented mediocrity, the Eastern Conference. For the 328th consecutive season, a bevy of Eastern Conference teams made moves hoping to lock themselves into being decent. Orlando, Detroit, Washington, New York, Indiana, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Charlotte all made exactly the types of decisions that Danny Ainge’s Celtics never do. They committed to multi-year deals for players who don’t really matter in the grand scheme of the league. Teams with promising young players chased middling acquisitions, or burned future money to retain their own underwhelming known quantities. Big market teams with theoretical appeal grabbed past-their-prime “stars” for big contracts even, in some cases, at positions where their young assets already play.

As long as the conference consists primarily of teams who think there’s a major difference between winning 42 and 48 games, the path to the Finals will be more open to Boston than to building teams in the West. The opportunity can be fool’s gold, though. For an example of this, look north to Toronto and their capped out conference finalists that no one believe will ever win a title. The Celtics have a chance to supplant them as the Joe Biden to the Cavs’ Barack Obama, but that will not mean that they are particularly close to the ultimate goal. Moving up the standings is still just a means to a potential end at this point. Making the conference finals makes Boston an even more attractive free agent destination but not much more than that (yet).

Supplanting Cleveland would still take an acquisition the size of Kevin Garnett, or enough time for LeBron’s bionic exoskeleton to begin to rust. The easiest way to do that, and to challenge the Warriors, is to hope for some kind of meltdown (on or off-court) in the Bay Area that puts KD (or Steph Curry) back on the market. That’s highly unlikely, but unlikely is not impossible. The remainder of the next free agent class, beyond maybe Blake Griffin, is a collection of very good players who aren’t going to turn anyone into a contender.

Choose Your Own Adventure

Salary Cap Projections (If no star player is acquired) 2016-17 2017-18 2018-19 Estimated Guaranteed Contracts 91 62 65 Estimated Non-guaranteed Contracts 0 11 15 Estimated Cap Holds 2.7 40 40 Estimated Salary Cap 94 102 108 Estimated Easily Accessible Cap Space 0 30 30 All numbers in millions

The Celtics did well, as always, to manage acquisitions up to the salary cap. Having locked up Horford, the path to double-max cap space in a near-term future season would now require a major exodus from the team. The sales pitch to future free agents will no longer be the ability to build their own super team, but to be the final piece in an existing squad. Recent league history tells us that, counterintuitively, the “blank slate super team-up” is actually a more attractive pitch. For whatever reason, two players joining together has sold more players than one player joining an existing second banana, unless the team they’re joining is already established as a true contender, or plays in the player’s home state.

Acquiring a single max-tier free agent in either of the next two offseasons is reasonably easy from a cap management standpoint if we accept the above team philosophy between now and then. To sign that player out in 2018 may require a difficult sacrifice of an established player, but nothing you would likely be too devastated by if you were adding, for example, Russell Westbrook. The window for adding the second transformational free agent is closing, though. The further you go into the future, the more trades overtake free agency as the likely path to major acquisitions. More than that, the “build through the draft” scenario grows in likelihood.

A max free agent is easy enough to fit next summer; the logical time to make a major trade would be that same summer or the following deadline. The summer of 2018 would be a last roll of the free agent dice before possibly deciding to move on from veteran players in favor of a burgeoning youth movement.

August 2016 to February 2017

With Westbrook off the table, by rule, for six months there’s no major move I can see the team making until near the trade deadline. The need to cut down the roster is well trod ground; the front office will be looking to get small assets for the back of the roster options instead of just cutting players like Ben Bentil outright.

The Celtics only extension eligible player this summer is Kelly Olynyk. Ainge rarely gets deep into rookie extension negotiations. The team hasn’t had anyone worth locking in to a max deal and when that’s the case, a team under the salary cap is better off keeping the player’s cap hold on the books through the early stages of free agency instead of locking in a long-term contract and having that eat up space. Kelly will be looking to make more than his $7.7M cap hold and so there’s no impetus to get something signed. The Celtics have done very well in recent restricted free agent negotiations; the only real risk here is that a new CBA could change the dynamics of restricted free agency. Kelly is a good player, but not good enough for that to be a major concern.

If the Kings, once the deadline for season ticket refunds has passed, decide to talk about moving DeMarcus Cousins the Celtics will be involved. All the other standard options are still there too, but unlikely to materialize. Talks will happen in December when most new signings become available for trade and continue through February, but it’s doubtful that anything good enough to live up to our team philosophy will come up. The team we see now is, very likely, the basic team we’ll be watching in March.

May to June 2017

If the Celtics have not made a major in-season acquisition, talks will start to heat up again as soon as their season ends. The Nets look likely to be bad again but, as with last season, Boston’s star-hunting nature means their pick is hard to trade before the lottery. The Celtics are more willing to accept the lottery risk in pursuit of upside than most franchises and so it’s worth more to them than to most trade partners.

If the pick lands in the range of a “Tier 1” prospect it would possibly be an inflection point for the franchise. Star player pursuits via trade and free agency would diminish in favor of a build more aligned to the new draftee, Marcus Smart, and Jaylen Brown. That type of build could result in trades, but where Boston is the “seller.”

Anything below that range of pick, paired with building time pressures, could push the franchise in the opposite direction with them more willing to listen to the “King’s Ransom” trades that they have so far been unwilling to take. If Smart and Brown are looking like good-but-not-great prospects and the ping-pong balls are cruel, shifting the team philosophy in favor of a short-term run at the top of the second tier of teams may be more attractive.

Early July 2017 (hopefully)

Even if there is poor development from the young players, paired with a bad night at the lottery office, I don’t think the team would be quite ready to make that shift to happy bronze medalists at the 2017 draft. The possibility for a free agent score would still be right around the corner (or maybe a little farther in the future it there’s a lock-out).

If the team reaches this point, we may look back on the 2016 draft as a rather smart one. To pursue a max-level free agent the team would probably have to make sacrifices in front-court depth. Jonas Jerebko, Tyler Zeller, Johnson, and Olynyk would all potentially be allowed to walk to free up cap space. Cheap big-man depth would then be a need and the planning to have those players in the draft-and-stash pipeline could pay off. Ante Zizic, in particular, has the “high-energy rebounder” profile that fits for a depth big who can contribute right away.

Sticking with our team philosophy, I don’t think Ainge would be playing in the second tier of free agency. Gordon Hayward is a popular fantasy signing, mostly because of the Butler/Brad Stevens connection, but is a team of Hayward, Horford, and Thomas really going to achieve something substantial, barring a massive draft score to go along with them? Paul Millsap, Danilo Gallinari, and Serge Ibaka are exactly the types of players that we have been unwilling to chase in the past.

The only major player below the Steph/KD/Blake group I see as being a realistic target is Nerlens Noel, who could be priced out of Philly if Joel Embiid and/or Jahlil Okafor ascend. I’ve never been high on trading for Noel because giving assets and then paying him is not smart, but if it’s only a matter of paying him it makes much more sense. A signing like this could fit into a draft-and-develop build, or even the less enticing “middle ground” route, especially if Philly wants to play on a sign-and-trade.

Late July 2017

The looming issue next July is renegotiation requests from Thomas and Avery Bradley. They’ll become eligible for a renegotiation on July 12 and 15, respectively. Contracts are only allowed to be renegotiated for a higher salary, and can only be done out of cap space. The easiest way around having to even consider renegotiations is, therefore, spending all of the available cap space before July 12. If Blake Griffin is a Celtic, it would be hard for either of them to complain too much about it.

The issue with renegotiating and extending contracts is that you’re not only committing to players earlier than necessary, but also losing immediate cap space and converting future moderately sized and renounceable cap holds for guaranteed salaries. If the renegotiations are worked out, I would expect them to look one of two ways:

The team spends some of their cap space but then has some left with no obvious use. In a show of good will and as a down payment on the following summer, they give each player a modest increase. Having missed out on worthwhile free agent targets, the team renegotiates their 2017-18 salaries up but then their future salaries back down to around what their cap holds are scheduled to be.

Option 2 would look like what the Nuggets did with Gallinari, but in the current extreme sellers’ market, I don’t think Thomas would agree to do that. Would he take $12M extra (so an ~$18M salary) in 2017-18 but then have to play for a $12M salary in 2018-19? At his age and production, no, I doubt it. Avery Bradley would seem a more likely candidate for this type of renegotiation. Would increasing Avery’s salary but not Isaiah’s go over well? Probably not.

If the team has max cap space sitting unused on July 12, I still don’t think they use it to max out Thomas, even if he has another All Star season. The flexibility through the following summer is too valuable and IT4, for all his wonderful attributes, is not irreplaceable if it makes him mad enough to want to leave in 2018.

To Infinity and… We Might Already be Beyond

If the team enters 2017-18 without having acquired the prime age top-10 player they’ve been chasing, priorities really start to adjust. There’s still a window through the trade deadline and maybe the draft, but the highest value draft assets will have been converted into players and those players will be pushing for bigger roles. If the Horford, Thomas, Crowder core is performing at a high level in February of 2018 there’s a last opportunity to cash in future assets for immediate gain.

If the franchise reaches the 2018 draft as an upper middle class team at the end of an unfruitful three year search for a foundational star, they would have to seriously think about going the other direction. They’ll potentially have Marcus Smart (entering RFA), Jaylen Brown (two seasons in), the 2017 Nets pick (one season in), and be ready to make the final Nets pick. Add in some lesser lights from past and future drafts and your team profile looks like one transitioning up from a traditional draft-and-develop rebuild, not one searching for the final piece of a title contender.

Celtics Expected Future Draft Picks 2017 2018 2019 2020 Higher BKN/BOS 1st BKN 1st MEM 1st BOS 1st MIN 2nd BOS 1st LAC 1st MIA 2nd LAC 2nd BOS 2nd BOS 1st BOS 2nd CLE 2nd DET 2nd BOS 2nd

Thomas and Bradley would be entering free agency at this point, barring an extension the prior year, and Horford will have one guaranteed and one player option season remaining. This would be the time to change the complexion of the rebuild by trading Horford and turning the backcourt over to younger players. That’s not to say you gut all the veterans from the team, but two years from now it’s easy to see Ainge breaking up a not-quite-good-enough team before it gets stale.

Taking the Pulse

The last two months have been a continuation of The Nearly Year. Jaylen Brown isn’t quite the level of prospect that you structure a franchise around. Al Horford isn’t quite the level of free agent that elevates a team into the top tier. The long-term plan to lure Kevin Durant so nearly came off.

After at least 18 months of planning for this summer, the Celtics will enter the fall in limbo. Not good enough to hang a banner but not bad enough to strip it for parts. Thanks to diligent planning and good luck they aren’t stuck in limbo, though. The team continues on, prizing flexibility and preparedness. It continues to be much easier to see this team (somewhat secretly) in a long-term youth development cycle than as a Lakers-style free agent shell game or Hornets-type contented non-contender. The short-term will be fun and rarely boring, but the players doing the majority of the work on the court may not be the ones who ultimately drive the franchise forward. Still, the Celtics remain on the dance floor, looking for a partner.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

You can follow me on twitter @dangercart.