Yeah as for this year, sadly enough I do see the Celts being one of the worse 3 teams in the league after Philly and maybe Utah.
Not sure I see any reason to believe otherwise.
What keeps tripping me up is, why would we be expected to do worse than last year? We've lost no key players, and our rotation guys are either likely to improve on last year (Rondo, Sully, Olynyk, etc) or at least not drop off (Green, Bradley, etc). And we've added some rotation caliber guys (Smart, Zeller, Turner, in theory Thornton).
Unless Wallace is considered a significant part of the team, all of our main guys should be as good or better than last year. And they've had more time to adjust to Stevens, and Stevens to the league. That's still not enough to be a playoff team or anything, but barring injury I'd expect the team to improve as a whole.
But the roster is horribly unbalanced.
It is unbalanced -- definitely far too many SG-types -- but compared to last year?
I agree with foulweatherfan that, relative to last year, I don't really buy the argument that the team is worse than last year.
Last year, we started the season we exactly zero true centers on the team and exactly zero true, veteran, starter-caliber point-guards. So, whatever you think of Zeller or Rondo -- both are immediately huge upgrades over what we started the season with at those two positions.
The only real 'downgrade' from last year is that, well, Humphries did play pretty solid defensively at PF and offensively at both PF & C. But I fully expect that the natural progression of Sully and/or Humphries should surpass what we got out of him in his minutes at PF. And defensively, he was not very effective against opposing centers. Zeller is young and not at defensive 'stopper', but his defensive numbers against opposing centers was far better than any of our bigs last season.
At wing, I don't expect downgrade from Green (especially given it is a contract year) and and while Bradley struggled with efficiency during his tryout at PG and with taking too many mid-range 2s early in the season, by the end of the season he was a legitimate 3PT threat who should be able to really provide much better spacing of the offense this coming year.
So, yes, we are still unbalanced overall when you look at the total roster -- but most of that problem is with depth.
As far as our starters and top rotation bigs go:
Zeller/Olynyk/Sully
Sully/Olynyk
Green
Bradley
Rondo
is, on paper (and if healthy), far superior to what we put on the floor last year.
Our top 5-man units last year were seriously awful by comparison. Seriously, here are the two 5-man units that we played the MOST last year:
Bradley-Crawford-Green-Bass-Sullinger (372.5 minutes)
Rondo-Bayless-Green-Bass-Humphries (124.2 minutes)
Yick! In the first lineup, Green is literally the ONLY player with a physical matchup advantage over his typical opponent at his position. In the second, just Green and Rondo. And the second features the ultimate defensive sieve that is Bayless at SG.
The other problem aspect to last year is indicated in the minutes for each of those units. For the 'top 2' units, those are very small minutes for any team. Only one other 5-man combination last year got over 100 minutes. All the rest were below 90. And there were a LOT of different combinations. That is indicative of the constant, churning roster and rotation chaos that we endured last year. That is NOT a recipe for good basketball.
If the above 6 players (Rondo, Bradley, Green, Sully, Olynyk & Zeller) get the major chunks of minutes -- and in regular rotations with each other -- that will be significant upgrade over what we put on the floor the majority of the time last year.
I'm not going to claim that's a title-contending top-6. We probably still will struggle to get out of the lottery. But it should be a lot more competitive than last year's team.
Barring injury and assuming Danny and Brad prioritize 'winning', of course.