Brad Stevens knew trades like these were coming. He said guard Jrue Holiday and center Kristaps Porzingis weren’t blindsided, either.
In Stevens’ words Tuesday, the Boston Celtics had to get out of the “penalty box.”
Stevens, now going on his fifth season as Boston Celtics president of basketball operations, succinctly explained the reasoning behind the Celtics shipping off Holiday and Porzingis — former All-Stars and key pieces of Boston’s 2024 title team — this offseason.
“The second apron’s why those trades happened,” Stevens said. “I think that those are pretty obvious. The basketball penalties associated with those are real.”
The second apron is a financial threshold for front offices. More specifically, it’s a limit to how much a team can spend above the NBA’s soft salary cap and luxury tax line without facing the highest level of penalties.
The Celtics have been dealing with those penalties, both financial and basketball-related, the past two seasons while they, first, won it all and, second, ran it back to try to defend their NBA championship.
If the franchise was to bring everyone back from last season, its tax bill alone would have likely been more than what its players’ salaries cost, as outlined by Boston.com this May. As for the basketball-related penalties, staying in the second apron would continue to prevent the Celtics from using the mid-level exception and using cash in trades, among other restrictions.
Getting under that handicapping second apron was a priority, if not a necessity, for the Celtics. It was probably always going to be that way this summer, even if star forward Jayson Tatum hadn’t torn his Achilles in the Eastern Conference semifinals.
Stevens wasn’t tasked with the same kind of urgency to get Boston completely out of the luxury tax, though. Incoming team owner Bill Chisholm appears to be offering some flexibility there.
“Bill has been pretty clear from the get-go that he wants to make sure that we’re prioritizing basketball assets and the ability to retool this thing at the highest level that we can,” Stevens said Tuesday.
“And, again, the most important acquisition that we’re going to be able to make in the next couple of years is getting Tatum out of a [walking] boot. We’re not beating that one. So that’s going to be the best thing that can happen for us.”
With Tatum out most, if not all, of next season, wing Jaylen Brown — a four-time All-Star and the 2024 NBA Finals MVP — will be in the spotlight of a new-look Celtics squad.
Stevens isn’t lowering the expectations after trading two starters and losing another to injury.
“My expectations are always the same: Compete like hell to win the next game,” he said. “That will always be it. And that’s the way that we’re going to try to put our foot forward. We’ve got some new guys, we’ve got some guys that’ll have to take on extra in their roles, but we believe in the guys that have been in the building and we look forward to getting the guys that haven’t and all working together to try to create a team that functions well together and plays hard as hell. And that’ll be it.”
Stevens emphasized that this year’s Celtics team is “retooling” not rebuilding, the latter of which is a term he said he’s never really understood.
“You’re always building and growing towards something,” Stevens said. “And, for this group, we’ve got so many guys back that are really good players that [‘rebuild’ is] not going to be part of the lexicon in our building.”
Stevens heaped praise on the players his team is bringing in. He sees a steady scorer in guard Anfernee Simons, who Stevens believes was overlooked nationally while he played in Portland. Stevens likes the competitive spirit and 3-point shooting of veteran forward Georges Niang.
Plus, he sees upside in recent signees Luka Garza and Josh Minott, frontcourt pieces who previously played, albeit sparingly, for the Minnesota Timberwolves.
“I said this when I was coaching all the time,” said Stevens, who coached the Celtics from 2013-21. “I’d never put a ceiling on any team. We were fortunate to have a number of teams there as we led up to this kind of window that were really fun, and that I thought never really cared about ceilings and had a chip on their shoulder.
“And I expect that this team will, too.”
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