He’s a good player, and perhaps worth the contract he just signed. But that doesn’t mean it would have been the right move for the Celtics to sign him.
First, the team would have gone into the tax this year. The problem with that is the threat of the repeater tax in future years, which has been so burdensome that even the most generous owners have had to dismantle teams as a result.
Second, the team has the threat of cap space right now. This is useful because it can either sign a max free agent without giving up any assets, or it can dangle its cap space coupled with a free agent’s intention to sign with the Celtics as an inducement to the player’s current team to execute a sign-and-trade, thereby allowing the Celtics to retain Smart and/or R Williams.
Right now it looks bad, but luckily for us the Celtics’ front office aren’t making decisions with right now in mind. Neither are they worried about whether or not they’ll be better than the Bulls or Knicks in 2021-22. Their goal is to build a multi-year contender in the class of Brooklyn, Milwaukee, etc. For those reasons I’m content with how they’ve gone about this.