Oh boy, welcome back to our annual Socratic seminar about “should the Celtics make a trade this year?” A tradition unlike any other, it’s one of the most important questions for each Celtics season — answering
it can reflect the state of the team, the direction and goals for the coming playoff run or tanking extravaganza. In some ways, it’s the defining concept of each season. To trade or not to trade, that is the question.
Yeah… except it’s actually a stupid question.
Presenting this discussion as a binary between “the Celtics should stand pat with their roster” or “the Celtics should go out and try to improve their roster” is the easiest answer since you asked your 4-year-old niece if she wanted ice cream or not. Of course the Celtics should try to improve their roster! What is the point of paying front office executives and scouts millions of cumulative dollars if you’re not always trying to improve your roster? That would be like asking that same 4-year-old niece about ice cream and you literally own an ice cream shop.
The Celtics are always going to try to get better. The real question is “is it possible to improve this team without needlessly hamstringing its future flexibility?” which is, of course, not a stupid question and one we can actually try to answer. Trading Anfernee Simons to get under the first apron of the luxury tax seemed like a mortal lock until he went sicko mode in the last month and is now very reasonably a Sixth Man of the Year candidate.*
*side note: what the heck is up with the Celtics printing 6MOYs? Brogdon, Pritchard, and now maybe Simons? It seems like there’s a real infrastructure here that we need to dissect. Maybe I’ll get to that in the offseason.
I’m still in favor of trading Simons due to the simple fact that he is capital G Gone at the end of this season. He’s on the final year of a reasonably sized expiring contract, and unless Jayson Tatum can come back, be actually, literally, unequivocally, 100% and the Celtics can compete for a title this year, it seems silly to lose him for nothing. They definitely won’t be able to pay him after this year, so forget about that.
The issue is that the above Tatum situation is still an open question. Tatum launched the mother of all press balloons by staging a full workout in front of reporters, quite intentionally getting the conversation going about whether he’ll be back sooner rather than later. And while it makes me uncomfortable, I’ve long resigned to not judging Tatum and the team’s decision on when he returns. Oh, what, do I have better medical info than Tatum and the team doctors? No, I don’t, so I’ll stay out of it.
We don’t, unfortunately, have any indication of when/if Tatum will return, which also, unfortunately, means we have a classic Schrödinger’s Simons situation. If Tatum returns, I don’t want to trade Simons. If he doesn’t, I do.
For Simons, this is kind of a great situation. He’s playing great and making the case that he should get a decent-sized contract this offseason, and he’s probably okay if that doesn’t come from the Celtics. If Boston trades him somewhere, he might be able to work on an extension with them or start planning his future (which he’s probably already doing).
For the Celtics, this is awkward, because I am unable to responsibly answer the Simons question without more Tatum info. Maybe we’ll get some soon, but for now I’ll punt on that one. Dealing Simons would remove an offensive creator, yes, but that should be made up for by Derrick White figuring out whatever slump he’s in. Couple that with how much future flexibility it will give Boston financially, and it’s probably worth it. But the larger question of “is it possible to improve this team without needlessly hamstringing its future flexibility?” remains unanswered. I’ll speculate anyway.
Save for a Simons deal, I think it probably is not possible to do better than this without doing something irresponsible.
Because of the misfortune that befell Tatum and the rest of last year’s roster, we can imagine this Celtics season as life giving us limes and making limeade (which clears lemonade btw). Now, the limeade we made is insanely good, and each individual lime has managed to produce more lime juice than the top Lime-ologists previously thought possible. As I’ve discussed at length, this team is playing way over its head on so many levels.
Transactions, then, are pretty likely to reduce the quality of the limeade. Say the Celtics packaged Garza and Hauser and a pick for some “better” player. What are the chances that player will immediately assimilate and produce what those two have managed for the Celtics this year on aggregate? Pretty low. Sure, in theory the Celtics are a porous team with lots of growth areas, but that simply hasn’t borne out in reality.
I’m ready to start taking this team seriously as a collection of serious basketball players that work well together, rather than treating it like a fantasy football team that will regress to the mean and thus we need to “sell high.” The sample size is too big for that kind of argument; this works, so I say let it work.
