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Nick Wass/Associated Press

There'll be calls for the Boston Celtics to rank higher than fifth, but let's evaluate a few things first.

Gordon Hayward is a net positive when weighed against the key losses of Avery Bradley, Kelly Olynyk and Amir Johnson. That isn't controversial.

Marcus Morris came over in that Bradley deal, and he tips the transactional scale even further in Boston's direction. Aron Baynes helps, too.

But the Celtics were merely a 53-win team with a suspect defense and exceptional clutch performances last season. Assuming they'll be worlds better in 2017-18 means adding a few wins from the Hayward acquisition and then banking on a pair of other key variables.

The first is a repeat from Isaiah Thomas, who made his first All-NBA team and posted a career season, highlighted by the incredible clutch combination of a 65.4 true shooting percentage and a 46 percent usage rate.

It's no great risk to say he won't post those rates again because no one in the league came close to matching them in 2016-17. That's a quintessential outlier. An unreliable anomaly.

Thomas may still be great, but we have to scale back expectations a bit, especially with him coming off a hip injury that ended his postseason early.

In addition, we can't just assume Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown are ready to explode in their first and second seasons, respectively.

Boston is better and more versatile than last year, but the improvement might feel greater on paper than in practice.