Another entertaining and successful Celtics season has come to a close. This happened later than most people expected once Kyrie Irving was shut down for the season which is great, but also means the busiest time of the off-season is right around the corner. Despite the successes of the season, the business of building and maintaining a high-level NBA team never really stops.

In the immediate aftermath of Kyrie’s season ending surgery I sent out a tweet that raised the ire of some people.

The Celtics don’t have as many big and obvious questions as in the last two summers, but there’s no shortage of decisions that will shape what this team looks like for years to come. An argument can be made to just “run back” the Celtics as-is but this franchise has an opportunity to contend for the next decade. It’s just a fact that the league has a (soft) salary cap and a progressive luxury tax scheme that are both usually increasing more slowly than the salaries of the best players. Contracts are shorter and richer than they’ve ever been and players are exerting more power over their careers.

If a franchise stands pat with their roster it can mean an acceptance of losing players in the near future without recouping any value beyond their current contract. At times this can be justified, just like trading for a “rental” player with limited remaining contract time can be the right choice for some teams. The Celtics certainly appear to be closer to “the top” than on the day Kyrie was shut down. However, if your goal is to emerge, and then sustain, as a true top-tier contender you always have to be looking forward and weighing the immediate opportunity against the long-term.

This post is not an attempt to predict what the Celtics will do. I’ve done that enough times in the past, with spotty success, but this offseason has too few clear “right” answers to go down that path. Instead, this post is an attempt to lay out the majority of decisions that the front office faces and the pros and cons of some of them. There’s also an attempt to sew some of the topics together as few of them exist in a silo.

Baseline Numbers

Cap and Tax Projections

The NBA has a system built on a soft salary cap which affords teams operating under the cap a wide variety of options for acquiring players. Team operating above the cap are much more limited in their options; they work with a collection of “cap exceptions” designed to allow them to retain players already on their team and to acquire some new players with limited salaries. The Celtics will be operating as an above-the-cap team for the foreseeable future. That’s not an inherently bad thing. The franchise once went 18 years without ever going below the cap and most of that time was managed under Danny Ainge.

The Celtics’ immediate salary constraints are not tied to the salary cap, which is projected to be $101,000,000 for the 2018-19 season, but the luxury tax. Unlike “hard cap” leagues such as the NFL, an NBA franchise, through creative use of exceptions, can carry a payroll far above the cap. In those cases they’re subject to a luxury tax system. The original NBA luxury tax was a dollar for dollar method, meaning that if a team carried a payroll of $10M over the tax threshold they would owe the league an additional $10M payment at the end of the season. In an attempt to increase league parity the system was changed two collective bargaining rounds ago to a progressive tax where the dollar rate increases with each $5M a team goes beyond the tax line. Additionally, if a team ends the season over the tax line in three out of four seasons, they are subject to a repeater tax which adds an additional $1 tax for every $1 over the line. The projection for 2018-19 sets the luxury tax threshold at $123,000,000.

For this post, I will be using a $101M cap projection for the coming season and the league’s $108M projection for 2019-20. After that there is no official league projection so I’ll just add $4M/season. For all seasons I’ll scale the tax threshold to stay tied to the salary cap which isn’t exactly how things work, but it’s close enough to work in the abstract.

One hot topic of the moment is the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to allow states to legalize sports gambling. In the long-term this could increase the popularity of the league and generate entirely new revenue streams. Gambling revenues are already written into the CBA to be a part of the salary cap calculation, but it seems unlikely that it will make a major change to league revenues in the immediate future. The new CBA did not include a “cap smoothing” provision so it’s feasible that there will be another major cap spike in the medium-term future but it doesn’t seem particularly likely and so I’m not going to make any assumptions on that front. For planning purposes, it’s better to be conservative in cap projections, anyway.

Team Budgeting

Barring a major run of bad luck, the Celtics are going to pay more in luxury tax over the next decade than the large majority of their competitors. That’s just a reality for this franchise but every team does have a budget and we don’t know what that is. The more the team achieves the higher that budget may go, but if we imagine an annual average budget of $10M above the tax line (meaning $16M in non-repeater tax on top of all salaries) the challenge quickly comes into focus.

As soon as four seasons from now it’s possible that just Irving, Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum, and Gordon Hayward will have total salaries exceeding the luxury tax. In six seasons those four players alone could exceed our hypothetical budget, at a time when they would also likely be in the repeater tax, meaning that the actual budget will need to be far higher than that. That includes nothing for Al Horford beyond his current contract. It doesn’t include Marcus Smart or Terry Rozier or Guerschon Yabusele (roll with it). It doesn’t include the hopefully high salaries of the players selected with the future Kings or Grizzlies picks.

If Boston’s core players stay healthy and as productive as they are even now, let alone with projected development, they either can’t all stay together, will have to want to take salary discounts, or will require a budget far beyond what any team has ever paid. This is not a question of ownership looking to the future and deciding to be cheap; it’s ownership looking to the future and deciding if they can spend as much in salary and tax in a single season as the team cost to purchase, and then to do it multiple years in a row.

Those problems are likely not going to be resolved this summer, but they do need to be kept in mind. It would be helpful to stay below the luxury tax this coming season to stave off future repeater status. That could potentially be managed at the trade deadline, based on how well the team’s title chances look, but it’s worth monitoring from the start. Thinking through how future contracts will define team needs is also important. We don’t know the actual budget for the team, but there is a budget at some level.

Roster Decisions

Al Horford Succession Planning

The most significant question facing the franchise may be what to do when Al Horford is no longer Al Horford. It’s a testament to how good of a position the roster is in that a main question is about a player who will soon be turning 32 and is signed for at least one more season, plus a player option for a second, and is currently playing as well as he ever has. It’s worth remembering that Kevin Garnett turned 32 during his first season in Boston and then went on to make four more All Star teams and still had substantial trade value at 37 years old. Horford isn’t in the same class as Garnett, but 32 years old isn’t nearly as old in NBA-terms as it was 20 years ago.

Still, Horford’s age and contract don’t easily align with the rest of the roster and when the foundation of your long-term aspirations are a 26, 21, and 20 year old, you have to start thinking about these things early. As highlighted above, if you simply keep all of Irving, Hayward, Tatum, and Brown and they’re making their max salaries, they take up everything to the luxury tax two seasons after Al’s current deal ends. Keeping all five players at or near their maxes is almost certainly a non-starter. With Al being the oldest of the bunch, it would seem like he’d be the most likely to need to be replaced at some point.

The problem is that he’s basically irreplaceable in the current NBA. The list of players who can do all of defend the rim, post, and in space plus shoot threes, finish as a roll man, and pass both as a primary facilitator or on the short roll can be counted on one hand. They’re star players who become even more valuable in the playoffs as they pick at the weaknesses of more traditional big men. If you count down the list of players “like Al Horford” you may get to guys like Daniel Theis before you run out of toes, and there are 30 teams in the league looking for them.

It’s of course possible to win without an Al Horford-type, but he’s central not only to the direction of the NBA in general, but specifically to how Brad Stevens wants to play. He’s shown little inclination to want a Clint Capela-type pure roll/dunker. I’m sure he could make it work, but it doesn’t seem to be what he deems ideal.

The most obvious player to fill Horford’s role once his current contract ends is of course still Al Horford. There’s no law saying that he needs to be the odd man out; the Celtics could trade away any of the other core players or decide to re-sign Al at 33 or 34 years old with the plan being to let Hayward go around the same time.

If both Al and the Celtics do want to make this a long-term commitment, this summer he becomes eligible to sign an extension. It would be nice if he were able to opt out of the final season of his deal and then sign something with more seasons at a lower salary to replace it, but the CBA doesn’t allow extensions predicated on a player opting out to start at a lower salary than what was just declined. That would mean any extension would really begin in 2020-21, which isn’t likely to be part of the planning this summer.

The team and Al’s agent could begin discussing a de facto extension that involves him opting out, though. No one would have to make a decision this summer, but if plans were put in place for Al to opt out after next season and then sign something like a three year $60M contract it would help the team at least plan for what comes next. A deal like that would end with him turning 36 years old and having made $220M in his career. If Horford’s goal is to stay in Boston for the rest of his career, which is probably his best available path to winning a title and making the Hall of Fame, starting to have these discussions now would be a solid start.

Even with that, the need to have a Horford replacement in the pipeline is coming into focus. This draft class has a lot of big men and if the Celtics’ brass value any of them particularly highly and see them slip down the lottery a bit, it could be worth trying to trade up to grab one. That would depend a lot on how the prospect evaluations shake out, but also when they believe Horford will either leave the team or start to show a serious decline. Depending on that, it could still be a year early to really want to start grooming a replacement. You don’t want to expend a bunch of assets trading into the top-10 of the draft just to create a Jimmy Garoppolo situation three years down the line.

It’s a topic that can’t be too far from the minds of the front office.

Marcus Smart or Terry Rozier (or both)?

The most immediately pressing question for the team is what to do with Marcus Smart’s free agency and how that impacts their thinking on Terry Rozier.

One of the first administrative tasks this offseason will be to extend Smart his $6M qualifying offer to make him a restricted free agent. After extension talks failed to produce a deal last fall, Marcus will be walking into a historically tight free agent market with the Celtics looming as an obvious threat to match any reasonable offer sheet that another team extends to him. That means it would be in everyone’s best interest for the two sides to just resume talks and see if they can come to an agreement before Smart even has to take meetings with other teams.

If rumors are to be believed, it seems unlikely that Marcus gets paid as much as he previously turned down, though it only takes one competitor to fall in love and make a big offer to change that. There just aren’t many competitors with the cap space and positional need to do that, though. With the way teams deploy the mid-level exception and the fact that the Celtics would almost certainly match any MLE offer after forcing the offering team to wait a few days, it could be difficult for him to even get that on the open market.

If the Celtics want to keep Marcus long-term, or at the very least keep him on the team to play until larger decisions lead to a trade, it would be a reasonable decision to just make him an offer above the MLE for three seasons and see if he’s willing to take it. If he wants into the mid-teens per season, forcing him to go get that offer from someone else is probably the correct strategy.

In the immediate aftermath of the Conference Finals, Marcus said that he thinks he’s “worth more than $12-14 million” which means that he could be in for a rude awakening in the next few months. It could become a question of if he thinks playing for this Celtics team is actually holding him back personally, which I believe was a valid question in the first few years of his career but I doubt is any more. He said that he’s worth that much because of what he provided beyond scoring, but scoring is still the goal of the game.

If nothing materializes and he decides to take the qualifying offer and play out one more season before becoming unrestricted, that’s also not the end of the world. It would give him a no-trade clause for the year, but would make it much easier to stay below the luxury tax for another season while they make a push for the title. It would also align with Terry Rozier’s free agency, allowing the team to functionally stage an open competition for one longer-term roster spot. Qualifying offer seasons can be acrimonious, but Boston would still hold his Bird Rights at the end of the year and money usually talks.

Rozier won’t be a free agent until 2019 but he is eligible to sign an extension before the start of the next season. If Smart re-signs on a multi-year contract it would decrease the odds of Rozier extending. If Smart signs with another team and the Celtics don’t match it would make an extension much more likely. There’s an open question of if Terry would even want to sign an extension, though.

I’m not a selfish guy. Obviously, I don’t want to be off the bench my whole career. That’s the only thing. I’m not trying to push nobody out, I’m not trying to try to put pressure on the organization or anything like that. That’s not me. I like to win. I like being here. I like the organization and the fans. I love everything about the Celtics. If this is the perfect situation next year, I’m down with it. I like winning. -Terry Rozier, to Boston Sports Journal

That’s a completely reasonable position for Rozier to take; that he’s willing to play a role next season and not complain but wants to be a starter beyond that. Barring a major roster shake-up that’s not going to happen in Boston. That ultimatum doesn’t publicly exist for Smart. Marcus seems more willing to play his role as super-sub who is always on the floor in the biggest moments to close games, as long as he’s being paid like a starter. Even that crunch-time spot may not hold much longer, but he’s at least not openly talking about it yet.

Keeping Rozier through next season with the acceptance that he’s going to get an offer that the team can’t/won’t match in 2019 isn’t necessarily a bad idea. When a team trades for a one year rental player and then doesn’t keep them, they’re often praised for “being willing to go for it.” It’s only when a player who you’ve had under contract for longer walks away that the criticism of “losing a player for nothing” hits.

If the Celtics think that they have a real shot of winning the NBA title next season, and that Rozier materially changes the odds of that happening, keeping him even with eyes wide open to the fact that you’ll likely end up letting him go without recouping any value is ok. Making a real difference on a title team is the most valuable thing a player can do; you wouldn’t trade Tony Allen off the two Finals teams he played on just because you know he won’t stay beyond them.

All that being said, the Celtics have rarely traded for rentals or willingly let players go in free agency. They dealt with that more during the last title-winning era (Ray Allen, Tony Allen, James Posey) but the foundation of the current roster is a steadfast belief in rolling value forward. The question with Rozier may be: Do you believe that 2019 is the time to truly go for it, or is this team building to a crescendo a few seasons down the road?

If it’s the latter, trading Terry around the draft and re-signing Smart would be the obvious play. Last year, Utah traded Trey Lyles and the 24th pick for the 13th pick and selected Donovan Mitchell. Rozier is better than Lyles but has a year less on his contract. By my pick value card, the difference between 24 and 13 is only as good as the 30th pick. You wouldn’t trade Rozier for 30 even if you thought the odds were very high that he’d leave at the end of his contract.

Still, trading up almost always costs more than it “should” and if you could offer Rozier and 27 to get into the mid-to-late lottery it would continue the practice of not losing assets for nothing and could also be a step towards developing that Horford succession plan. We also know that Ainge can get very aggressive on draft night if a player that the team values higher than the drafting teams starts to slip (*cough* Winslow *cough*). If that were to happen with a specific target, offering Rozier plus the 2019 Kings or future Grizzlies pick could come into play. There could also be multiple piece package deals discussed that are too hypothetical to get into.

If Rozier does get all the way to restricted free agency with the intention of forcing his way to a team where he can start, it doesn’t mean that the Celtics will lose him for nothing. He could be moved in a sign-and-trade, though the Celtics budgetary concerns and the fact that non-guaranteed contracts don’t work for salary matching any more makes that a tough sell. The pick that they might get for facilitating the S&T probably wouldn’t be worth the contract they’d have to eat to make the dollars match. They could just match the offer he gets and then try to trade him within the year, though that’s a risky play and the same budget concerns crop up.

I’m not making predictions here, but the plurality vote does seem to be that Smart is on the team as a super role player filling multiple gaps for at least a few more years, even if that starts with an accepted qualifying offer, while Terry has at most one more season in Boston. If that is the case, trading Terry at the draft wouldn’t be a surprise, nor would playing it out to the trade deadline so you can assess your full title chances. A lot can change between now and then; it would make things easier if a team with a good draft pick has fallen in love with Terry and Marcus has come to terms with signing for closer to the mid-level than the extension offer he turned down.

Renting or Selling Marcus Morris?

The questions around what to do with Terry Rozier can basically be repeated with Marcus Morris. If Jaylen, Jayson, and Gordon are all Celtics beyond the coming season it’s very hard to see Morris getting another contract from the Celtics beyond his current one. The league is desperate for wings who can defend and make 35% of their threes. Whatever his faults may be, Mook is due for a raise in his next deal and Boston just can’t fit that in the budget. He’s technically eligible for an extension now but it’s very hard to see that happening.

Even more directly than with Terry, the question is if it’s worth treating Morris as a one-season rental or trading him now to keep the talent pipeline flowing? In the regular season that honestly seems like an easy answer. With the three main wings in place plus Ojeleye, on top of Kyrie getting some minutes off ball and not wanting to play all of Horford’s minutes as a center, there just isn’t enough floor time or shots for Morris. On paper he’s great injury cover, but normally teams don’t have injuries like this year’s Celtics did.

The playoffs are where it becomes an interesting question because a team with aspirations like this one needs to plan for going through LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Ben Simmons, Paul George… basically a lot of big wings who you have to have multiple defenders to throw at. There’s also an open question of if he could be a back-up small-ball center, lining up opposite guys like P.J. Tucker and Draymond Green at the absolute highest level.

Is it worth renting Morris for one more year and hoping he stays happy enough in the regular season playing 16 minutes and getting eight shots on a bunch of nights, just so you’ve got him in reserve in the playoffs? Probably not. Hayward is a good defender and Ojeleye will hopefully develop. Tatum will also get stronger. Keeping Morris isn’t a bad idea, but this is where that “stagnation” concern comes into play. Once you start putting a lot of eggs into single-season baskets you’re asking for trouble.

It may be that no one values him like this and so you hold onto him because there’s no reason not to, but if you can move him for a pick in the low-20’s I think you do that. If you look at players who have been traded for that type of pick in the past, he fits right in.

The obvious trade partners would be Minnesota, Utah, Indiana, and Portland who are drafting in the right range and have a need for the type of player Morris is (honestly, most of the league has that need). This trade would be a lot easier to put together under the old CBA because partial/non-guaranteed contracts like that of Cole Aldrich and Thabo Sefolosha would be perfect pieces to make this work. With the new rules only their guaranteed salaries count for matching, and it’s their 2018-19 guarantees that count even at the 2018 draft.

Boston would like to be cutting salary while moving Morris to help avoid the tax but that’s not easy to do. Minnesota has an awful roster to try to work trades with if those are your goals; increasing Cole Aldrich’s guarantee up to $3M and making a trade a week before the draft could work. Portland would be perfect because of their trade exception but they’re probably trying to cut salary, not add. It takes more creativity than ever to work trades.

Ainge probably wouldn’t want to actually add two more rookies, but if they were to extract a pick like that they could take another foreign stash player, or make it easier to move up if they do decide to also trade Rozier. It simply seems like you don’t want to take Hayward’s minutes away from the Jays, and Ojeleye’s contract control makes investing development minutes a priority, which leaves Morris as the obvious candidate to move in the interest of keeping the roster turning over.

The Easier Decisions

Not every decision with this roster is a fine balancing act. The team will need to decide on the non-guaranteed contracts of Ojeleye, Theis, Abdel Nader, and Jonathan Gibson. Semi will obviously not be waived; minimum salary wings who can defend Giannis in the playoffs are good to keep around. Theis is an equally easy call unless he has some major injury setback.

Nader has a $450k guarantee and it wouldn’t surprise anyone if he’s waived. He looks like a classic “Quadruple A” player who can light up the G-League but doesn’t have a role in the NBA. If they do decide to move on he could catch on with another NBA team (wings are just so scarce) but longer-term my guess is that he becomes a very productive and well-compensated player in Europe. If they do waive him, the team could decide to take the whole $450k hit in 2018-19 or stretch it over 5 ($90k/year) or 7 ($64k/year) seasons. If they think there’s any chance of avoiding the tax this season they would probably choose to stretch it over the full seven seasons. If not, just take the hit now. That decision doesn’t have to be made until the end of July.

Reporting on Gibson was a bit strange as he signed under the hardship exception granted after the Celtics injuries piled up. It was reported as a rest-of-season contract with a second non-guaranteed season. Players signed with that exception are not eligible for the playoffs. Normally he would have had to be released following Marcus Smart’s return, but I’m unsure of if that still applies in the playoffs. His waiver did not come across the wire so I’ve listed him here.

Kadeem Allen is on a two season 2-way deal and so will start 2018-19 in the same status as he played out 2017-18. Jabari Bird only signed a one season 2-way deal and so is now a restricted free agent. His qualifying offer is just another 2-way deal. The Celtics don’t currently have a second round pick and so they could try to get Bird back on another 2-way. I think he showed enough in short stints last season to be worth just signing to a minimum salary full NBA contract, though. He’ll already be 24 years old, he’s 6’6″ and can shoot the ball and didn’t look overawed when Brad put him out there. I would sign him to a 3-year deal out of the Taxpayer Mid-level with year two non-guaranteed and year three also a team option, so as to preserve the ability to put him into restricted free agency at that point. That’s a good use of the final roster spot, especially if they decide to waive Nader.

Dancing with the Bear?

Before next season begins the team will also have to make a decision on Guerschon Yabusele’s 2019-20 option. That year he would be due $3.1M and while I think he showed enough for it to be worth picking up, I’m far from 100% certain on that. The team will be deep in the tax that year, unless Kyrie walks in free agency, so the difference between Yabu and a minimum salary ring-chasing vet could be north of $5M in salary and luxury tax.

We just don’t have enough information on Guerschon. If Stevens thinks he’s a player in the future you obviously just pick up the option and keep him. Terry Rozier didn’t look like a definite NBA player after his rookie season; lots of rookies don’t. If he showed enough in the G-League and practice, great. He’s a big body with nimble enough feet who can hit threes and (theoretically) pass the ball a bit. No one is going to mistake him for a Horford successor, but those skills in that body type can be very valuable. Still, if the team doesn’t think there’s any “there” there, they could decline his option on budgetary grounds (they would first try to trade him to someone with a different evaluation, of course).

Kyrie Irving Extension

Like Horford and Morris, Kyrie is now eligible to sign a contract extension. The contract he could sign, starting at just over $24M and lasting four seasons, is so much less than what he’d be in line to receive after a healthy 2018-19 season that I’m not going to bother going into the details. If he wants to take a major discount to lock in a future in Boston, I’m sure the team would be more than happy to oblige. It seems so unlikely to me that his section comes after the ones on Abdel Nader and Guerschon Yabusele.

Draft Considerations

The 27th Pick

Boston’s own pick in this draft is 27th and will be paid around $1.64M next season. Rookie scale deals are no longer a pre-set number so the exact deal won’t be known until the official salary cap is set. If the Celtics don’t move off the pick and feel that they can stay under the tax line, they could go the draft-and-stash route here. That would clear the salary off the cap sheet for this season. There’s not really an open roster spot for a rookie of that level, anyway.

I’m far from a draft expert, and don’t know if anyone is actually a draft expert, so I won’t play with hypothetical picks here. All that leads to is people with way-too-strong opinions telling me that we should be taking someone else who I’ve also never seen play. A fun fact is that the 27th pick has kicked up a ridiculous amount of talent. The last five picks are Kyle Kuzma (the pick Boston sent to Brooklyn to swap into #1), Pascal Siakam, Larry Nance Jr, Bogdan Bogdanovic (the Sacramento Bogdanovic), and Rudy Gobert. Add in DeMarre Carroll, Arron Afflalo, Kendrick Perkins, Elden Campbell, and Dennis Rodman and you have a blessed pick.

Trading In/Up

I’ve already addressed some of the questions about trading into or up to a higher spot in the sections on Rozier and Morris. If the last three drafts have taught us anything it’s that the Celtics keep their own counsel on draft prospects. If there’s a player who they think is worth the third pick sitting there at eight, they’ll make an offer commensurate with the third pick and trust their evaluation. Ainge clearly has the trade chips to make major or minor draft moves if the opportunity presents itself.

One weird challenge here is determining a willingness to trade with Philadelphia where you give up a more win-now piece. Rozier and Morris would both be players who they could be interested in if their grander schemes don’t come to fruition. I don’t think they would trade 10 for Rozier and 27, or 26 for Morris, at the draft because they’re playing the cap space game with LeBron and PG-13. However, the guys taken in those spots could be in play later in the summer if they end in a spot of basically rolling the same team back. In general I’m for taking the best deal and not worrying about trading with rivals, but this is might be an extreme case.

Moving Forward

Beyond this draft, the Celtics hold way more draft capital than a team in their position has a right to. When the 76ers were revealed to have the 10th pick in this draft it meant that Boston would be receiving the better of the Kings or 76ers picks next season, unless one is the #1 pick in which case they receive the worse of the two. The Celtics likely preferred to get the pick in this draft because it’s foolish to turn down a top-3 selection, but it does open the door to staying below the tax line.

By way of the 2015 trade of Jeff Green, Boston also owns Memphis’s 2019 pick, protected for selections 1-8. That protection weakens to 1-6 in 2020 and becomes unprotected in 2021. All things considered, the best outcome for Boston is probably watching that pick roll all the way to unprotected status in 2021. It’s hard to predict what Memphis will do this upcoming season but entering a prolonged rebuilding period is a definite possibility.

The Celtics’ final future pick from a different team is a top-14 protected Clippers selection in either 2019 or 2020. Making the playoffs in the West is tough, but there’s a decent chance that the Clippers qualify in one of the next two seasons. If not, it converts into a single 2nd rounder.

One thing to look out for is that if the Celtics do make trades over the next nine months they could be looking for picks farther out into the future. That’s worked out extremely well for them in the past and the franchise has the assets and flexibility to build a stream of supplemental talent all the way out into Tatum and Brown’s prime seasons.

Free Agency Possibilities

Bruising Big

Last summer Aron Baynes signed a one year contract for the Room Exception. The Celtics now wish they could have got him on a two year deal after he played nearly 1,500 regular season minutes as a top-tier defensive specialist and then started raining threes in the playoffs. At their best the Celtics are playing Horford at center but everyone seems to agree that it’s not worth the toll on his body to do that for 82 comparatively meaningless games and so someone like Baynes is a necessity.

What All of Australia did this year is basically the ideal thing the team is looking for and so I imagine that they would like to bring him back. His Non-Bird Rights cover a re-signing for up to nearly $5.2M, just below what the Taxpayer Mid-Level is expected to come in at. If the team could get him for around that I think they would. I’ve seen people talking about him being priced out of Boston’s range but I doubt that’s the case, unless teams really believe he’s now a 50% shooter from the 3PT corner. There are too many centers on the market and not enough teams with even the full MLE available, let alone cap space.

If they can’t come to terms, or decide that it’s better to expand Theis’s role and sign a minimum salary center to help with the tax question, there are no shortage of available free agent options. None of the ones in the C’s price range are likely to be as good as Baynes though, so I hope they’re able to work things out. The MLE and Bi-annual Exception could be on the table for signing a replacement, though using the Taxpayer MLE and avoiding invoking a hard salary cap around $129M seems like a more prudent choice.

One other thing to consider is that if Baynes can’t be retained, trading Morris for a backup center could help in balancing the roster. Wings are way more valuable than Baynes-esque bigs, and there aren’t a ton of great options at a salary match, but it could happen.

Guard Depth

Pending the decisions on Smart, Rozier, Kadeem Allen, and the draft the Celtics could also be looking for a Shane Larkin replacement. Like Baynes, Larkin signed a one year deal and will be an unrestricted free agent this offseason. He could return in the same role but with how many playmakers the team already has that’s probably not a good choice for the team or player. Larkin showed that he’s at worst a quality 3rd PG and Boston might not be able to give him a role even that large.

If Rozier were traded at the draft, bringing Larkin back would become much more likely. If not Shane, someone like him would be a good addition to the back-end of the bench. It’s hard to imagine spending more than the minimum on any new (non-drafted) guards, though.

Mid-level Structures

The Celtics will enter free agency with the full Mid-level Exception and the Bi-annual Exception at their theoretical disposal. The full MLE allows for contracts up to four seasons and the 2018-19 total value will be around $8.6M. However, if a team signs anyone to a four year deal, or uses more than approximately $5.3M of the MLE, they become subject to a hard cap of ~$6M above the tax line. If a team is hard capped they can’t ever have a payroll above that line during the league year.

If a team limits their exception contracts to the parameters of the Taxpayer MLE, that three years and ~$5.3M, then they do not have to wrestle with the hard cap. If Boston plans to stay all the way under the tax line, it’s still a good idea to not use the full MLE. You never know what opportunities will arise in season and the difference between a “full MLE player” and a “tax MLE player” is very little.

Even if it’s a player like Aron Baynes who you know is a good fit in your team, I’d be hesitant to use more than the Taxpayer MLE.

Bi-annual Exception

Boston also has access to the smaller Bi-annual Exception this year. As the name indicates, this is an exception that a team can use once every two years. The BAE also invokes the hard cap and so, even though the team probably won’t even have access to it next season due to being nearly assured as a tax team, I wouldn’t expect it to be used.

If the team does not re-sign Marcus Smart, both the full MLE and the BAE become more viable tools as they would have a lot more wiggle room under the tax and hard cap.

Aside: Avoiding the Tax

I said I’m not going to make too many predictions in this piece but I’ve mentioned avoiding the luxury tax for this season a number of times so I think it’s only fair to show what that could look like, without making any wild moves. This is just an example of the types of decisions that would have to be made…

Trade Marcus Morris to Indiana for the 23rd pick in the 2018 draft and Alex Poythress. Indiana would make the pick for Boston, sign him on July 1, and the trade would be made official one month later using the draftee’s salary as part of the contract matching. Poythress’s contract would become guaranteed in the process. Use the 27th pick to draft-and-stash a player in Europe Re-sign Aron Baynes for a 2 year $10M contract with ascending 5% raises using his Non-Bird Rights Re-sign Marcus Smart to an 3 year $35M contract with ascending 8% raises using his Bird Rights Sign Jabari Bird to a 3-2 (I want to make this the accepted nomenclature for a three year deal where two are non-guaranteed) contract for the rookie minimum using the Taxpayer MLE Sign a ring-chasing veteran to a one year veteran’s minimum contract Waive and stretch Abdel Nader’s $450k guarantee over seven years (you could also keep Nader and not make the final veteran minimum signing)

Those moves would land the Celtics a snug $13k below the projected tax line. There isn’t a lot of flexibility to work with from there, though different decisions could be made or delayed along the way. If healthy, that team could stay under the tax line for another year while still running at least ten players who could play in the playoffs.

Of course, staying under the tax would be a goal but not the top priority. If it comes down to losing Smart and Baynes, or they deem Morris a necessity to get through the playoffs, they would just accept the costs and out-year consequences and cross that line.

Holding Out for The Big One?

Hovering over much of the Celtics’ planning is the question of if the core of this team is now relatively set, or if they’re still positioning to acquire an MVP-level player to make them look more like a traditional title winner. It’s still true that Kyrie doesn’t have the profile of a normal “best on a champion” player but it’s becoming conceivable that Jayson Tatum will, and in the not too distant future. Dwyane Wade and Kawhi Leonard both won Finals MVP in their third seasons.

If Tatum reaches that level, Kyrie may not be in the upper reaches of the “best on a champion” rankings but he’s near the top in the “second best on a champion” charts. Add in what Hayward already was before the injury, what Horford is doing now, and what Jaylen looks to be becoming and this could all work wonderfully.

However, that’s a lot to hang on the shoulders of a now twenty year old. It’s also possible that the sheer depth of talent can overcome being a little short in the Player A role, though the number of champions to follow that model are a lot smaller (they certainly do exist). If the front office still feels like the team isn’t quite up to the level of the best in the West, even fully healthy, then the game of trying to be positioned for the next superstar trade rolls on.

With contracts as they are, if Kawhi or Anthony Davis or Giannis do shake loose in the next few years it might no longer be Tatum being offered but Hayward or Horford with picks and Brown or maybe Rozier. The idea of trading Kyrie is becoming popular among talking heads on TV and the radio, but it oddly seems to disappear any time Rozier has a bad game. If the Celtics had won Game 6 it would be an insufferable summer conversation; losing the way they did in Game 7 probably kills that.

Jaylen’s improvement has been stunningly positive, but if it comes down to it I think it’s still clear that Tatum is the near untouchable.

The Challenges of Trading Salaries

If the team is still keeping an eye on Davis’s status in 2019, re-signing Smart becomes slightly more of a priority. Unless the plan really is to move Hayward or Horford in a mega-trade like that, you would need a decent sized salary just to make the math work. Getting Smart on a ~$12M/year deal makes it less likely they can stay below the tax this year but would open up better trade possibilities down the line. A few months ago that seemed like a good idea; with how the team has done since then you could make an argument that it’s unnecessarily chasing a fantasy.

Work the Calendar

If you think that this team is good enough to hang a banner right now, you can probably remove Kawhi and Davis from the reckoning. If Leonard moves via trade it will be this summer; if by free agency the Celtics won’t have the cap space. If Davis moves via trade it will probably be next summer; Boston could get involved but you’d have to get there in a more organic manner than doing player-specific planning that could short-circuit the current group.

Karl Towns is a fascinating possibility if he wants off the T-Wolves, amid reports of internal strife. It could be worth tens of millions over his career to get to a new team during this season because if he’s traded on his rookie deal, the team he’s traded to would still be eligible to give him the super-max contract when he hits eight seasons of experience. Towns is still younger than Joel Embiid was on the day Embiid made his NBA debut but already has over 5,000 points and 2,500 rebounds on 60+% true shooting. If there’s even a hint of availability, every team in the league is obligated to do their due diligence on the situation. He’s perfectly aligned age-wise with the young core of the team. Remarkably, because of their contract statuses, the Celtics might not trade Tatum for KAT straight-up. It would at least be a defensible decision. Throwing a player like Towns into an already volatile NBA summer would be amazing.

The hunt for superstars never really ends. Even if you want to give this group a few seasons to make their run, eventually the salary bills come due and the tax takes it’s toll. Horford will decline and there are always injuries to contend with. Egos will build and clash. The Greek Freak could be a disgruntled superstar right as the current Celtics core starts to feel stale, if they don’t ever get to the top of the mountain. Hopefully they just become champions and no one has to think about these possibilities for years to come.

Bright Future, Difficult Decisions

For the last few years the offseason has started with the Celtics being in a great position to build for the future. Today, they’re in position to win now. The title window for this group opens as soon as Kyrie and Gordon retake the floor. Tatum and Brown have forced it open wider than expected, earlier than expected. The West is still full of monsters but the Celtics have comfortably joined their ranks.

The challenges the franchise faces are no longer ones of attracting talent. They’ve signed two All Star free agents, had a third force his way to the team via trade, and are developing two players who look like they’ll join that group soon. The decisions now are about how to support them and, eventually, which of them to keep. The NBA’s system is built expressly to keep a team like Boston’s from staying together. It wants to break up deep cores of stars and spread them across the league. It does that by strangling off the avenues to adding supporting talent and putting severe financial pressures on ownership.

Stagnation is death if you’re not already atop the league not because a team like Boston’s can’t win but because the league doesn’t give it many chances to. Making the tough decisions between Smart and Rozier is a given. Down the road will be decisions between Hayward and Brown, or Horford and the great unknown. All a team can do is plan for those eventualities as best as they can. A great front office is realistic, progressive, and keeps the talent pipeline flowing.

The Celtics may be champions next season. They may be champions five years from now. They may be champions ten years from now. It’s the rare franchise that earns that spread of opportunities.

A Personal Note

This is my last post as editor of CelticsHub. It’s been an interesting 2+ years. I never intended to write for a blog, let alone edit one. I hope you enjoyed reading my thoughts. I appreciated your feedback along the way. I don’t know what I’ll be up to next, aside from having a new baby and trying to not get fired from my actual job. I created a little placeholder site for myself and will continue to waste time on twitter.

Thanks to Brian Robb for offering the opportunity and to everyone who has written here (Daniel, Griffin, Sam, Dustin, Graham, Grant, Jesse, Bryan, Christopher, Gavin, Nick, and I hope I didn’t miss anyone) during my time as editor. Special thanks to Ryan Mahanna for being deputy editor and Cameron Tabatabaie for keeping things together both before and while I was here.

Go Celtics!