Welcome to the offseason’s dry period, where the lasting impressions of Summer League hoops have come and gone, left in the rearview by LeBron’s final “decision” and a rumor mill that at this stage in the summer, feels more like bored gossip than true reporting.
But we recently did get a Celtics-related nugget from reporter Jake Fischer, who took to a Bleacher Report live stream to talk about potential happenings around the league, including that of 33-year-old free agent Bradley Beal.
“I was told
today that Bradley Beal’s decision is not exactly being held up by LeBron, but is being impacted by it,” Fischer said. “I do think there’s some Miami interest there, and I would not rule out Boston for Beal because of the connection with Jayson Tatum.”
Okay so, obviously that’s still just a speculative guess based around Beal’s long-standing relationship with Jayson Tatum. Probably not something to put all that much stock in, but we’re already here, so let’s talk about it.
Around this time last offseason, it was rumors of Ben Simmons interest that got us talking in the dead heat of the summer, even if they ultimately came from an unreliable/fraudulent Twitter source in which nothing came out of it.
In a nutshell, this is the same conversation. A former All-Star with the baggage of being glued to one of the worst contracts in the league and consistently marred by injuries is now available for the low, low price of a bag of chips and a ham sandwich (also known as the veteran minimum).
The logic is the same as the Simmons discourse last year. You take all that baggage into account, but at the end of the day, a vet minimum contract makes those concerns significantly less grave. Player perception is important, and Beal, like Simmons, has terrible perception among the fan community, further dug in by an immediate season-ending injury 6 games into the 2025-26 season.
What’s also worth mentioning is that, as it currently stands, singing Beal would put Boston back over the dreaded tax line they’ve worked so hard to avoid. However, another move can be made to get back under the tax, so that’s not as dire as it sounds.
But what do you get from Beal in his current state? A left hip fracture took him out six games into his season with the Clippers, and he played 53 contests in each of the prior two seasons, but he hasn’t played 60 or more since 2020-21.
Last year doesn’t give us much to work with in terms of on-court contributions, so let’s move to the previous season, where the Suns got Beal for 53 regular season games and four in the first round of the playoffs.
Despite sharing his high shot volume with two other All-Stars, he was exactly what we’ve come to expect over his 14-year career.
It was the lowest shot volume of his NBA career outside of his rookie season, but he was efficient in those opportunities (50/39/80 splits). He was also a fine playmaker (3.7 assists to 2 turnovers) and a negative defender (his -1.0 Defensive Box Plus-Minus is right on par with his -0.9 DBPM career average).
He’s still an impressively skillful shot creator that can work well on and off the ball, but what he offers outside of that is mostly a bare cupboard. And I say this as someone who has had to watch a lot of Beal basketball over the years, both because the Wizards are my local market team and because I interned for a media company that had me run Beal’s website for a year (they made me refer to him as “Brad” or “BB” a lot in those posts, I never got used to that).
The biggest thing I’m considering is what Beal would look like on the floor next to someone like Tatum, a star that can completely dictate the game and draws significant defensive attention into his orbit.
Beal has always been a strong off-ball shooter. He’s good on pindowns and flare screens as an off-the-catch threat, and he wraps around handoffs with the intent to attack, showing consistent touch on pull-ups in the mid-range.
In his final season in Phoenix, he maintained positive scoring efficiency across the three levels of the halfcourt. He was a 74% rim finisher (85th percentile according to Basketball Index), a 46% shooter on mid-range pullups (77th percentile), and a 39% shooter on threes (37% above the break, 41% on catch-and-shoots, and 41% from the corners). Even as his stock as a star has plummeted, Beal is still, at the end of the day, a more than capable bucket-getter.
I feel confident that Beal would be a plus offensive presence, but I’m also confident that you’d actively have to hide him defensively. No available name on the market is perfect at this point, but if you can’t hold up on the defensive end when there are other wings and backcourt options on the roster that have proven to be capable on that side of the floor, do we think Joe Mazzulla would trust that the good on offense outweighs the bad on defense?
Whether you fall on the side of “why not, sure” or “God no,” I think what we can all agree on is there are no handcuffs in this scenario. Beal on a veteran minimum is possibly the easiest thing to move off of. A signing today does not mean a roster spot past the trade deadline. If you’re bringing Beal onboard to provide a bench scoring boost and it doesn’t work out, chances are you won’t have to deal with it for too much longer. And if it does work out? That’s a professional scorer on a good short-term contract.
We shouldn’t pretend that Bradley Beal in 2026 moves the needle significantly in either direction, but the Celtics could use more scoring punch off the bench and they could afford to add another cheap backcourt option.
If I’m being honest, it feels unlikely that this move will happen, especially if it ends up as a decision between Boston or Miami.
Miami provides a more guaranteed opportunity for high volume and is kind of desperate for proven scorers to round out its roster. Boston is not in a desperate place. Signing Beal would be a small-scale luxury move with low risk/high reward potential.
In Boston, he wouldn’t be brought in under the expectation of being a 20-point scorer. He’s more likely to be asked to be a 20-minute player (he played exactly 20.2 minutes per game in his brief Clippers stint).
I enjoy narratives of character redemption or shifting perceptions. Beal would have that opportunity to change the tune around the back-half of his career with a good season in Boston, and I can support that.
So what the heck, sure.
