Veteran Leadership & Bench Strength

[GreenlyGreeny]

This bench is hot garbage. Following our acquisition of the Super Jay Bros., the so-called “assets” became wasted picks on guys who might not even be in the league in 2-4 years. It’s time to stop grossly overvaluing those players and time to bring in veteran leadership/build bench strength, so let’s “change the faces”:

1) Ship out Kemba and Timelord for Horford and Hill:

https://tradenba.com/trades/FpuBMRY4x

2) After the Pistons buy-out Griffin, sign him to the veteran minimum of $1.62 million since this would likely be his best opportunity to shine the rest of the season/playoffs. This is not essential to the rest of this thread, but it would be nice to have.

3) Trade Langford, Nesmith, and G. Williams for McDermott assuming McDermott commits to an extension with us (seems most probable since not a lot of teams would have cap space for him and we would have his rights):

https://tradenba.com/trades/Fe5S-hHCv

4) Trade two second-rounders and our Hayward TPE for Rubio:

https://tradenba.com/trades/EYKVtNBnG

5) Trade Edwards, Green and the heavily protected OKC and CHA 2nd rounders for Ellington:

https://tradenba.com/trades/Sct7pGEiZ

6) Trade Teague and two second-rounders for Grayson Allen:

https://tradenba.com/trades/z99-HoZUB
 
Aggregated to illustrate cap impact (Allen/Teague salaries offset):

https://tradenba.com/trades/rzWNTF_BU

Add the Griffin signing to the above and we’ve upped our salaries by $16.5 million, so we would be at $132.3 million and just shy of the luxury line.

Our roster for a serious playoff run:

Rubio/Hill/Pritchard
Smart/Ellington/Allen
Brown/McDermott
Tatum/Theis/Ojeyele
Horford/Griffin/TT

Remaining youth: Tatum, Brown, Pritchard and Allen (Smart and Ojeyele are still quite young, too). Still have all of our first-round picks, and the Memphis 2025 2nd rounder, so we can rebuild our youth over time if we draft well this time. Most importantly, we now have veterans who can ball and provide much-needed leadership/bench strength (re-sign McDermott, Ellington, Theis and Ojeyele in the off-season if the team gels this year). Use the next 1-2 months getting ready to gel for a serious playoff run with some of these vets having a lot on the line come playoffs, unlike our current youthful joke of a bench who don’t seem to realize how close they are to being out of the NBA for life and in jobs that pay a minuscule fraction of their current salaries...

[footey]

Wyc would fire you before you picked up the phone. Thank God.

[GreenlyGreeny]

Two facts of Celtics Blog in 2021: 2nd round picks are grossly overrated, and some of us refuse to accept that we have the worst or second worst bench in the league in terms of top 20 teams.

Give Stevens a great bench, where we’ve diversified our reliance away from Kemba and now have 6-7 players other than Tatum/Brown who could go off on 10-20 points on any given night with better defense than Kemba, and we’d be 20-6 instead of 13-13.

These are just my ideas on how to trade everyone except Tatum, Brown, Smart and Pritchard (and Theis, Ojeyele and TT given my love of Theis/Ojeyele’s hustle/value, and it’s a horrible look trading a guy like TT in the first year of a two year deal.).

So who’s next with an alternative way to move and improve half of the team?