With the way the player market has performed this season, you would never know that the trade deadline is less than two weeks away. Normally, this is the tenseest time of year, but a number of the players we anticipated to be dominant have already made moves. Before February even hits the calendar, James Harden, Pascal Siakam, OG Anunoby, Terry Rozier, Bruce Brown, Immanuel Quickley, and RJ Barrett may be the greatest group of players to have ever been traded.
This takes away from the deadline’s excitement to some extent. Simply put, the caliber of talent on offer isn’t as high as we would normally anticipate. However, that increases the pressure on the teams trying to make a deal at this time. One of the vendors has completed the majority of
We’ll need to use our imagination to locate upgrades, so let’s see what we can come up with.
We’ll look at the goals that each team has for the trade deadline down below. What benefits do they provide? What is required of them? And how are they going to acquire it?
Tradeable first-round selections are available until 2027. After that, the selections are either spoken for through trades (2029), swaps (2028), or the Stepien Rule (2030). In the 2024–2027 window, Boston may trade any two first-round selections, provided that they are not consecutive
Salary matching: Not very much! Apart from their core group of six players, no other Celtic earns more than Payton Pritchard’s estimated $4 million. Because of the contract extension he signed this summer, Pritchard himself has a poison pill in his deal, which thankfully doesn’t significantly complicate things. Because they are an apron team, the Celtics can only spend 110% of their salary. To put it another way, they can only really group together low salaries, and it would take multiple of them to find a player who is marginally more expensive.
Goal for the trade deadline: Regardless of position, add a seventh trustworthy rotation player.
How they can achieve that objective: Boston is a challenging trade team due to its low matching salary. Basically, only players making $10 million or less are eligible to play for the Celtics. For that reason, Boston is among the teams that should be going after Alex Caruso. They can offer Chicago multiple first-round picks, stack Pritchard and two minimum salaries to afford him, and his meager salary for the upcoming season will have a significant impact on their tax bill. Monte Morris could offer some stability in his bench ball handling, and Delon Wright would achieve a similar result at a lower pick price. If nothing else, keep an eye on backup centers to provide some injury insurance for Kristaps Porzingis and Al Horford. Two players are Andre Drummond and Nick Richards.
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