The Boston Celtics are historically good. They’ve won 125 regular-season games over the past two seasons. Last year, they had the best offense in NBA history and the fifth-best net rating the league has ever seen. They’ve done this, in part, because of their incredible top-end depth.
They aren’t built around one or two MVP-caliber players, but rather, five All-Star-caliber players. When CBS Sports ranked the top 100 players in the NBA before the season, Boston did not get a player into the top five. However, five Celtics made the top 40: Jayson Tatum (No. 7), Jaylen Brown (No. 15), Jrue Holiday (No. 32), Derrick White (No. 36) and Kristaps Porziņģis (No. 40). To put this in perspective, only two other teams even got three players into the top 40. One of them is the Oklahoma City Thunder, and two of their picks (Jaylen Williams and Chet Holmgren) are on rookie deals. The other team is the Minnesota Timberwolves… who proceeded to trade one of their top-40 players (Karl-Anthony Towns) because they deemed keeping three top-40 players on market-value contracts to be untenable.
Well, the Celtics don’t have three top-40 players on market-value deals, they have five of them. Those five players are all earning at least $20 million this season, and next season, they all stand to make at least $28 million. Combined, before any other players or luxury taxes are factored in, they will make just over $198.5 million next season. That’s more than all but two entire teams this season: the Timberwolves and the Suns. Once you do factor other players and taxes, the numbers get staggering: cap expert Yossi Gozlan projects a $493 million payroll next season before signing at least a 14th and potentially a 15th player. Doing so could take them above half a billion dollars. As Al Horford remains unsigned, they could potentially bolt even further beyond that if he is retained.
If that sounds untenable to you, well, you’re not crazy, because it is apparently untenable to the Celtics as well. ESPN’s Shams Charania appeared on the Pat McAfee Show on Thursday and reported that teams around the league are bracing for the Celtics to make trades this offseason for financial purposes. “Sources have been telling me for weeks now that the Celtics will be exploring trade options in the offseason. This team, this iteration is just not going to be sustainable for this team. No one around the organization from players to staffers would be surprised if there are changes coming to this roster, because when you think about the new collective bargaining agreement, there’s restrictions that come with trades, restrictions that come with the freezing of draft picks. That’s all stuff that they’re dealing with right now.”
Further complicating matters here is the somewhat unusual transition between owners. Wyc Grousbeck is selling the team to Bill Chisholm, but reportedly with the caveat that he will remain governor of the team, and therefore retain decision-making power, through the end of the 2027-28 season. How exactly this will work on a granular level is not clear. If the team loses money, who pays for it? How much official power will Grousbeck cede to his successor? These situations can get messy. When Mark Cuban sold the Mavericks, he expected to retain control of basketball matters. One year later, Luka Dončić was traded to the Lakers.
Before you ask, no, none of this means that Tatum will be joining Dončić in Hollywood no matter how many purple and gold voodoo dolls that front office seems to have stashed in the bowels of Crypto.com Arena. It does mean, though, that there will be some cost-cutting measures coming in the near future. The question here is how they can go about saving that money. Remember, they have a 27-year-old three-time First-Team All-NBA player in Tatum on their roster right now. It would be easy for a franchise as historic as Boston to take this for granted, but windows with players that good and that young are really rare. If they play their cards right they can keep winning with him for the better part of a decade. Miss and his window could close this summer. So let’s look at three of the possible steps they could take to trim the budget in the near future.
Option A: Trade a core player this offseason
This is the obvious step available to Boston. They have five very expensive players… but those players are expensive because they’re very good. Other teams are going to want them even if they aren’t going to give the Celtics fair value back for them if Boston is trading them for financial purposes. The question here is who it makes sense to trade, and what they could get back for that player. We’ll start with what should be obvious: Tatum is off-limits.
Derrick White is the least sensible to trade because he’s the cheapest. Aside from potentially Tatum, he is the only one of these players who is arguably earning below market-value. We live in an NBA that prizes shooting and defense above all else. He does both at absurdly high levels and has grown significantly as a playmaker since arriving in Boston, yet when his new contract starts next season, he will still only only be the 20th highest-paid point guard in the NBA. He’ll make less over the next four years than Immanuel Quickley. Who would you rather have? It would be fiscally irresponsible to trade White. At 30, this contract should take him through the end of his prime.
Jaylen Brown is better than White, but he’s much, much more expensive on a supermax deal, and he’s having a down year. That he is a versatile wing almost makes him tradable on both fronts: to the Celtics, he is potentially a tad redundant, at least at his price point, to Tatum. But other teams are desperate for wings.
Take the Memphis Grizzlies, for instance. They’ve spent years trying and failing to find a suitable long-term small forward. They’ve carved out around $17 million in potential cap space this summer in an effort to renegotiate-and-extend Jaren Jackson Jr., but what if they instead used it to swap Desmond Bane, who will make around $17 million less next season, straight up for Brown? Memphis gets its All-Star forward. Boston saves money. The Celtics get smaller, obviously, but Jrue Holiday can defend wings, so Brown’s absence wouldn’t be felt as acutely defensively as it might on a normal team. Bane’s shooting would obviously be welcome, as this deal wouldn’t force the Celtics to compromise their five-out style. Moves like this, in which the Celtics downgrade slightly but save a bunch of money, make sense where Brown is concerned.
Speaking of Holiday, though, he is probably the preferred trade candidate here because he is older and has a long-term deal. The Celtics gave Holiday a four-year extension before the playoffs last year. He rewarded them with a title, but he’s now in line to make over $37 million three years from now, in his age-37 season. If there’s a chance to move him now, it could save the Celtics a lot of long-term pain. Fortunately, his defense remains quite valuable to win-now teams. Phoenix wanted a Jrue Holiday-type badly enough to ask Bradley Beal of all people to play that role for them. Surely they’d be interested in the genuine article, right? Perhaps the Celtics could sneak their way into the Kevin Durant trade, sending Holiday to Phoenix and getting cheaper players back from whoever lands Durant.
Even if they take back similar salary overall, they could aim for shorter contracts. Any defense-need win-now team qualifies as a possible Holiday fit. The Lakers, the Knicks, the Nuggets, whoever. Boston probably wouldn’t get too much player value back for him because of his age, but he’d have an obvious market. Outside of his basketball value, it should be noted that he is an enormously valued locker-room presence around the league. He is the only three-time winner of the Twyman-Stokes Teammate of the Year award, and in the only year in his four-year run of getting those trophies that he didn’t actually win it, 2021, he won the NBA’s Sportsmanship award instead. Oh yea, he won that in 2025 too. Even if he declines as a player, he’s a human being teams would want.
Porziņģis is the trickiest trade option on the board here because of his injuries. Any team that wants to unlock Boston’s five-out offense would want him, but he’s missed at least 25 games in seven of the past eight seasons. It would have to be a team desperate for that specific archetype. Here’s a crazy idea: the Nets have max cap space and might try to trade for Giannis Antetokounmpo. Antetokounmpo needs a spacing center. Porziņģis would be an easy fit, and there would be two plausible ways to pursue him.
The first is a straight-up center swap: Porziņģis for Nic Claxton, who will make around $5 million next season, but has three total years remaining on his deal that descend in salary with each passing season. Boston couldn’t play five-out with him, but it could affordably fill the center slot. The second option would be something a bit closer to a cap dump. As Brooklyn has that cap space, the Nets could simply absorb Porziņģis and send the Celtics back a cheap bench player or two, potentially with draft capital involved as they have plenty of it.
Could the Celtics aim for something smaller with a reserve? Sure, but the savings would obviously be smaller. Payton Pritchard is much too valuable to be moved on his staggeringly cheap four-year, $30 million deal, but Sam Hauser will make $10 million or so next year and is locked into similar money for the next four seasons. Someone with either cap space or a mid-level exception would eagerly take his contract if offered for free. Considering the progressive nature of the luxury tax structure, especially where repeaters likely Boston are concerned, just dumping a $10 million salary without taking money back would yield enormous luxury-tax savings.
But this approach is a band-aid. The Celtics aren’t just trying to save money next season. They are trying to build a sustainable overall salary structure. That means, in the long run, at least one of these five players has to go. It just doesn’t necessarily need to come through a trade.
Option B: Let Porziņģis walk at the end of next season
Brown, Holiday and White all have at least three years remaining on their deals after this one. Porziņģis only has one. That creates a somewhat simple solution: pay the piper next season, try to win another championship with this group, and then just accept that Porziņģis leaves as a free agent. The financial ramifications of doing so would be enormous. Next season, the Celtics are slated to be roughly $42.7 million above the luxury-tax line. Their 2026-27 books, without Porziņģis yet, are currently only around $6.4 million about that season’s projected tax line. We’re talking about potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in luxury-tax savings here just to let a single player leave.
Boston is 52-13 without Porziņģis over the past two seasons. They can certainly win regular-season games without him. But remember, they’ve had Al Horford over that stretch. The Celtics don’t have an obvious replacement center in the pipeline, and Horford is going to retire relatively soon. They’d have to find one somehow, and any decent one is going to be reasonably expensive. That means making a trade.
Here’s where we loop back to what we covered above, but with a slight twist. Say Boston plays out this scenario and keeps Porziņģis and Holiday next season. Afterward, however, they could attempt to trade Holiday for a replacement at center and then simply insert a cheaper player like Pritchard or Hauser into Holiday’s perimeter slot in the starting lineup. Holiday would be a year older, and therefore a year less valuable from a trade perspective, but keep in mind: Boston has retained most of its future draft capital. The Celtics owe a 2028 swap to San Antonio and a 2029 pick to Portland or Washington, but otherwise have their first-round picks at their disposal. If they need to attach draft picks to Holiday’s contract to get a new center, they can do that.
Trading Holiday for a center probably doesn’t make sense this offseason. Why jump the gun if Porziņģis and potentially Horford are still on the team? This would be a planned reboot for the summer of 2026, one that would entail paying the gargantuan 2025-26 payroll and luxury-tax bill, but would then reset the books to a more manageable salary range afterward. That it opens the door to running back a possible two-time defending champion for a possible three-peat makes it all the more appealing.
Option C: Consolidate talent with a blockbuster trade
One of the problems with having five very good players instead of three exceptional ones is that exceptional player salaries are capped while very good player salaries are not. If you have a player who generates $25 million in value, you should expect to pay that player $30 million. If you have a player who generates $55 million in value, you should expect to pay that player $55 million. But if you have a player that generates $100 million in value, you would still only expect to pay that player around $55 million because he is bound by the limitations of the max contract. Case-in-point, Tatum will make only around $1 million more than Brown next season, but the difference in the value they generate is much bigger.
This cuts to the core of Boston’s problem. Outside of Tatum and Pritchard, they’re mostly just paying a fair price for a lot of good players. But what if they could pay an unfair price for a great one, thus generating enough surplus value to offset whatever is lost in the name of trimming salary? Consider this: Brown will make only around $1 million less next season than Giannis Antetokounmpo. However, Antetokounmpo will likely produce tens of millions of dollars more in value next season than Brown will.
So imagine the Bucks, in the aftermath of Damian Lillard’s torn Achilles tendon, are finally forced to consider offers for their franchise player. How many teams could put forth a better offer than, say, Brown, White and several first-round picks? Brown and White combine to make over $81 million next season. Antetokounmpo makes closer to $54 million. But if you ask most teams, “would you rather have Giannis Antetokounmpo or Jaylen Brown and Derrick White,” they’d take the two-time MVP. That would especially be true for a team that employs the reigning Sixth Man of the Year on a bargain contract that happens to have a skill set that perfectly complements the MVP in question. Pritchard could slide right into the starting lineup and thrive.
We are of course talking about a very basic trade structure. The specifics get much, much more complicated. The Bucks couldn’t just take back an extra $27 million in salary, for example. They’d have to send money back too just to match, though it could come in the form of expiring contracts like Bobby Portis and Pat Connaughton, who have player options. Boston could let those contracts expire, or if desperate enough to save money immediately, waive-and-stretch one or both. But either way, they’d be turning two long-term contracts into one with the hope that the one is so immensely valuable he provides as much as the two would have.
The greater complication in a scenario like this would be the second apron. Aggregating salaries generates a second-apron hard cap which the Celtics are not currently equipped to handle. As of right now, Boston is almost $23 million above that projected second apron. They’d have to duck below it entirely, either within the trade or with a separate deal beforehand, for something like this to be legal. That means either shipping those extra Bucks salaries to other teams with space or cap exceptions or somehow dumping the money owed to another core player like Holiday or Porziņģis.
Pulling off either such maneuver would be tricky and require extra assets. This is a hypothetical that would require masterful cap maneuvering, the details of which it would be reckless to speculate about. This is just a thought experiment, a way for them to potentially keep a similar overall level of talent on the roster but consolidated within a smaller number of players and contracts to help save some money. The same basic principle could be applied to Kevin Durant, though his age probably makes it too risky and Phoenix’s presence in such a trade as another second apron team would make the cap gymnastics even more difficult. Pick any All-NBA player that potentially becomes available this summer and it’s at least worth the conversation.
This is by far the least realistic route. The apron-induced restrictions ensure that. But the Celtics have one of the NBA’s most creative front offices. If this is something that makes sense to them in basketball terms, it’s something they’d have a chance to figure out financially even it takes multiple teams. More likely, Boston’s financially motivated moves revolve around Holiday or Porziņģis. But now that we live in the post-Dončić trade world, we have to at least consider crazier alternatives.