Tatum and Brown just entered their prime. KP is 28, D- White is 29. Jrue just turned 34, but he?s been pretty durable and should have few more good years in him. If D-White signs an extension and the C?s are able to keep that core together, how many championships do you see them winning?
Depends how much tax Wyc is willing to pay and how long they are prepared to live above the second apron. Being above the second apron is fine when you have a perfect team and don't need to add or remove anyone...it gets problematic when you do, like the Suns right now. They're very limited in who they can trade for, they can't aggregate salaries which limits who they can send out, their draft pick will be frozen if they remain up there and they can't use cash in trades.
I posted this in the
Derrick White extension thread to see what our cap might look like in 2025-26, 2 years from now, if we kept the gang together:
As an intellectual exercise let's say we paid everyone, which we can because they are all our players we have Bird rights to. Blew through the salary cap, the luxury tax, and the 2nd apron. Say we paid JT his 5 year supermax, matched an offer for $50m a year for 4 years for Derrick, paid Sam $10m and paid Al $5m, and everyone on the roster vet min. Say we got rid of Svi, JD and Drew Peterson. Our hope would be that everyone keeps performing.
So we would have 14 players on the roster before signing a couple of two-ways as bench fodder, this roster would cost us
$268m (plus $4m in cap holds for Blake and Kabengele). We would be
$113m over the salary cap, $84m over the luxury tax so based on my calculation, using standard luxury tax rate starting at $1.25 for the first $6m we are over the tax, increasing by 50c for every $6m we are over, topping off at $8.25 for the last $6m of our $84m, we would pay a total of
$414m in tax in 2025-26. And this is using standard tax rates...the repeater tax rates are higher. So our roster would cost Wyc
$682m. (Celtics2021 and Jambr and other CBA experts are welcome to see if I did the calculations right, based on being $84m over the tax and using a tax bracket of $6m and the tax rates based on the CBA at
https://nbpa.com/cba page 184).
Let's assume we did it. We would then be locked in to this team for at least a few years, since we can only trade like for like and can't aggregate, and the shortest major contract would be KP's which would run to 2026-27. How long would this be sustainable? Would Wyc be ok with this?
The answer to this question will be the answer to whether we can be a dynasty or not. And can Brad sign the right contract sizes to be able to trade those players when they only starting to decline, on their own without having to aggregate anyone else.
But the most important thing right now is that Brad controls the team's destiny. He can choose to extend players or not, he's not saddled by any bad contracts right now. Even the Jrue contract that people were concerned about...well after how Jrue did in the playoffs I think we would find plenty of takers if we wanted to ship his contract out next year. Same with Jaylen, since a lot of people were upset about his $300 supermax and worried he wasn't worth it. After East and Finals MVPs I'm sure there will be plenty of takers for him if Brad wanted to get rid of him. So Brad's in a good position in terms of the assets he has on his balance sheet right now.
As for Wyc, I think he will pay...for a while. While the team is winning, and there's no obvious deterioration, I think he will swallow even paying $500m in luxury tax. But they will be on the lookout for any drops in player performance that might be indicative of age...they won't want to be in GS's position, paying $500m for an aging, injured squad that didn't make the playoffs and struggled all season.
Topic: The Beginning of a Dynasty? (Read 23660 times)