Just a reminder that Brad and ownership punted the season by needing to get under the tax. We traded a better player in Simons and decent pick for Vucevic to save money when we could have kept Simons (and his valuable scoring) and brought in an impact Center with our TPE.
It?s great that Chisholm will get back some tax dollars from the league, but that doesn?t help us this season. And it?s not going to help us next season when we very obviously are going to duck the tax again in order to reset the clock.
All this whole Tatum and Brown are in their primes.
Not sure I agree with this logic, to be arguing that BOS should not have traded for Vucevic in a thread about how the frontcourt is the team's biggest weakness.
The pick is a future 2nd round pick, some value, yes, but I am not worrying about that. What this trade did was trade from a position of more depth (guard/backcourt) for a position that had much less depth (Center/frontcourt). The team is better for the trade in my view, not worse. I like the trade and I believe BOS will go farther in the playoffs as a result of the trade. It is hard to say if Simons is a better player than Vucevic, I don't see it that way, but maybe. I thought he was fine, but he may not be better than Scheierman. The point is BOS didn't need another guard. They needed a Center.
As to the cost savings, that to me is the other thing that is true about this trade. It did save the team money. Maybe that is why the 2nd round pick had to be included, to convince CHI to take on the extra money. If that is the case, I am fine with that. BOS has plenty of 2nd round picks, more than they will ever use. To me, this is a good use of a 2nd round pick.
I think his bigger point was we could have had Simons AND someone like Vucevic had they used the big trade exception.
But the biggest point might be that this is how people talk when hope is slipping away. After just three games, 2 of which the Celtics won, there is some sentiment that if we just hadn?t been cheap, we could have been actual contenders.
Yeah, I wouldn't say that I have no hope, I just find it annoying that we didn't put together the best possible roster (while also staying under the 2nd apron) in what looks like a wide open field. I'm not sure being in the tax should really matter to us as fans at all.
Imo, our postseason hinges on Derrick White finding his shot again. We can't have our 3rd option shooting 29%FG and 20%3PT. If we were also able to keep Simons, then we'd have another legit scoring threat out there along with Vucevic (or whatever Center we could have brought in with the TPE). Or we could have just kept Jrue Holiday. You know, the two-way veteran who helped us win a Title.
I'm a bit of hypocrite on this issue since I have talked about Brad's impressive maneuvering to get under the tax and the benefits of restarting the clock, but honestly, from a general fan's perspective, I don't see any real benefit to it.
This is true. As fans our only priority is for our team to win games. Anything that puts them in a more difficult position to do that is not something that the average fan should worry about or care about. Aprons that impact draft picks and roster building, yes. Luxury tax to save a billionaire owner a few bucks? Who cares? They bought the team they should spend whatever it takes to deliver wins to the fans.
The dissonance for us as fans comes from the fact that the people who make decisions have skin in the game, unlike us...so someone like Brad, being the employee of Bill, might always be thinking in the back of his mind "I know Bill said we have an open checkbook, but if I get the chance to save him some money why not? That might be looked at favorably when I have to ask him to extend all these vet min guys to much higher contracts in two years". Or, if they decided to not duck under the tax and end up being a repeater team at the time of those extensions, he - and Bill - might think, "Walsh needs to be extended, we could give him a $7m contract, which after the tax would be something like $25m, and if it was the repeater tax might be around $35-$40m. Now all of a sudden they start thinking, is Jordan really worth that?"
This is where following things as a fan can sometimes create frustration with your team's ownership or front office, because their decision making might be driven by different things to us. We just want this:
If we get to the Finals and lose in 7 games, I guarantee you Brad will be under the hotseat for "punting away the season and giving us a trash team and product", and Chisholm with him. Tatum's injury and how we all felt in June 2025 will be a distant memory
Topic: Frontcourt Is Going To Be An Issue This Postseason (Read 1900 times)