Butler, Horford, Durant Question

[TheSundanceKid]

Simple answer. To afford Durant and Horford we would need to waive rights to all FAs, Amir and Jerebko.

So in a trade for Butler you must give up as much salary as you bring in. IN your example we bring in Butler's $17,552,209 and ship out $13,175,000 + the salary of the #3 pick, which I doubt is $4m. You can't include Jerebko's contract as that would need to be waived anyway.

So basically no you would fall just short. Moving Rozier and Hunter would clear enough space I believe on top of what you propose

This isn't completely true.  Due to having cap space, we could trade for Butler with no (or almost no) salary going out.  If the deal would bring us over the cap (i.e. we had already signed Horford and Durant), we would need to send out at least 80% of what we'd be bringing in (so, $14.04 million, less than a million more than the proposed deal), keeping in mind that if the rookie scale for the #3 pick in 2016 is $3,952,500 and Ainge usually gives rookies 120% of the rookie scale (so $4.743 million)

Jerebko could be included in the deal if we made the deal before adding Durant and Horford or if we made cap room without getting rid of him (which is unlikely)

Now we just wait for saltlover to come in and give us all the answers

Well it depends when the trade happens. If it is finalised on draft night then salaries need to match under this years cap rules. If it is finalised after the moratorium then we can absorb him in cap space. But them you couldn't sign Durant and Horford as FAs

[saltlover]

This needs to be clarified further.  Trading for Jimmy Butler, in a situation where we also acquire KD and Horford, is very complicated.

For starters, if the salary cap is $92 million, we would be about $600k short of the room needed to sign Horford and KD to max deals, even AFTER getting rid of Amir and JJ (and John Holland), and renouncing all of our free agents.  So someone has to be moved out.

If Butler is traded for, there are two ways.  Firstly, he could be traded for on draft night.  This is an easy trade to make for salary matching purposes.  However, it means he'd already be on our roster when KD and Horford are signed, so you'd need to send out 2016 salaries that equal his 2016 salary (or actually exceed by $600k, as described above). Furthermore, he has a 5% trade kicker, meaning his 2016 cap his is a little over $18.3 million.  So we'd have to send out approximately $19 million in salaries to fit him and have room for the other two.  That's a LOT to send out.  Bradley, Rozier, Hunter, Young, Mickey, and #3 combined are not enough.  You're still short by over $2 million in salary (since you'd now have 9 players on the roster and need to allocate a $547k cap hold for each roster slot below 12).

Alternatively, you can sign KD and Horford (remembering you still need to clear $600k), and then trade for Butler.  In this scenario, you have to send out $13.3 million in salaries to match.  However, the #3 pick (or #16 or #23) DO NOT count as part of this $13.3 million, unless the trade is made 30 days after any of the picks are signed (which is why the Wiggins deal was completed in August 2014 instead of July).  In this scenario, Bradley would have to be traded with all four of Rozier, Young, Hunter, and Mickey for it to work.  But recall you've also had to shed $600k salary already, so presumably it's been one of the kids who's been moved.  Now you don't have enough salary to trade for Butler, since if you've dumped Hunter, who's the cheapest, you're short by $147k in matching salaries.

So the other choice is to trade for Butler in August, but if you're using the acquisition (or pending acquisition) of Butler to lure KD and Horford, that isn't an option either. 

It's really difficult to trade for Butler, and the cost is very steep to make the salaries work.  Bradley, Young plus the three rookies, the #3 pick, and something else to create the appropriate room.  Is it impossible?  No.  But it is not something we should expect.  And given the cost, I'm not sure it's something we should hope for, either.  Our roster would consist of KD, Horford, Butler, IT, Crowder, Olynyk, Smart, the #16 pick, whomever we could sign with the room exception of $2.9 million, and a host of players in minimum contracts, be they our second rounders or veterans.  It's really a nice top of the rotation, but it's really shallow, and very small in the frontcourt.  It'll be tough to even carve out a 9-man rotation of non-replacement level talent.

TP for the info on the trade kicker. Didn't know about that. That certainly does make things a little more difficult.

But where are you getting that we'll have to shed around $600k in order to sign Horford and Durant? From my calculations using http://www.basketball-reference.com/contracts/BOS.html,
we'd have $34,161,569 in salary after waiving JJ and AJ. Given that both are 9 year vets, they can each command 30% of the cap, which if set at $92M is $27.6M apiece. That would leave us at $89, 361, 569M.

So what am I missing? Were you counting the draft picks that we'd have, too? Because I don't think those would be a problem to move, especially in a deal.

Yes, I'm counting the draft pick holds.  They exist until they are moved.  They are not impediments to signing Durant and Horford, but they can't be ignored.  The cap hold for #3 is almost $4 million, for instance.

Also, due to quirks in the CBA, a 30% max salary will be right about $26 million at a $92 million cap.  Adding in the holds for al three draft picks is gets us to $92.6 million.

Okay, I saw that $26M salary somewhere else, too, and it confused me. Well, we could trade away number 23 then and be under the cap to sign both Horford and Durant then. We'd just have to convince both of them that a bigger trade is coming in Love or Butler.

However, if the two teams were intent on getting a trade done, I don't see why waiting the thirty days for the contracts to count as actual salary would be a problem. The Wiggins trade set precedent for that. And unless we wanted to almost COMPLETELY gut the team, we'd need those salaries to count, especially whoever is picked at third, to keep some semblance of a supporting cast around our new additions. That'd probably be the difference of keeping one of Bradley or Crowder rather than shipping them out, which is huge.

I do think it's a bit different than the Wiggins deal.  There the teams were negotiating on a trade after the free agency period had pretty much ended, and had a wink-wink going on that either could have backed out on -- it also seems that the structure wasn't finalized, because the Philly-Thad Young portion seemed to be talked about much closer to the actual time the trade occurred.

That's a lot different than telling Durant and Horford on July 1st that Jimmy Butler is coming along, but he won't be there until August 15th.  It brings in complications because the #3 pick would have an agreed upon salary of 120% of his slot value, to fit into a trade, which means that his cap hold should increase to that amount.  While NBA teams rolled their eyes a little bit with the Love deal, it wasn't really preventing them from making their decisions, because none were really trading for Love.  You think Atlanta and OKC would just shrug that the Celtics were using a promise of a deal 40-45 days away to lure their star/franchise players?  I don't.  I think they'd try to get the NBA to prevent the trade.

I think what makes most sense for the Celtics is to just try to sign KD and Horford, and sell that if another move needs to be made, Ainge will work his tail off to make that happen, and that they have all the nice trade components to do it.

[Irish Stew]

This needs to be clarified further.  Trading for Jimmy Butler, in a situation where we also acquire KD and Horford, is very complicated.

For starters, if the salary cap is $92 million, we would be about $600k short of the room needed to sign Horford and KD to max deals, even AFTER getting rid of Amir and JJ (and John Holland), and renouncing all of our free agents.  So someone has to be moved out.

If Butler is traded for, there are two ways.  Firstly, he could be traded for on draft night.  This is an easy trade to make for salary matching purposes.  However, it means he'd already be on our roster when KD and Horford are signed, so you'd need to send out 2016 salaries that equal his 2016 salary (or actually exceed by $600k, as described above).  Furthermore, he has a 5% trade kicker, meaning his 2016 cap his is a little over $18.3 million.  So we'd have to send out approximately $19 million in salaries to fit him and have room for the other two.  That's a LOT to send out.  Bradley, Rozier, Hunter, Young, Mickey, and #3 combined are not enough.  You're still short by over $2 million in salary (since you'd now have 9 players on the roster and need to allocate a $547k cap hold for each roster slot below 12).

Alternatively, you can sign KD and Horford (remembering you still need to clear $600k), and then trade for Butler.  In this scenario, you have to send out $13.3 million in salaries to match.  However, the #3 pick (or #16 or #23) DO NOT count as part of this $13.3 million, unless the trade is made 30 days after any of the picks are signed (which is why the Wiggins deal was completed in August 2014 instead of July).  In this scenario, Bradley would have to be traded with all four of Rozier, Young, Hunter, and Mickey for it to work.  But recall you've also had to shed $600k salary already, so presumably it's been one of the kids who's been moved.  Now you don't have
 enough salary to trade for Butler, since if you've dumped Hunter, who's the cheapest, you're short by $147k in matching salaries.
So the other choice is to trade for Butler in August, but if you're using the acquisition (or pending acquisition) of Butler to lure KD and Horford, that isn't an option either. 

It's really difficult to trade for Butler, and the cost is very steep to make the salaries work.  Bradley, Young plus the three rookies, the #3 pick, and something else to create the appropriate room.  Is it impossible?  No.  But it is not something we should expect.  And given the cost, I'm not sure it's something we should hope for, either.  Our roster would consist of KD, Horford, Butler, IT, Crowder, Olynyk, Smart, the #16 pick, whomever we could sign with the room exception of $2.9 million, and a host of players in minimum contracts, be they our second rounders or veterans.  It's really a nice top of the rotation, but it's really shallow, and very small in the frontcourt.  It'll be tough to even carve out a 9-man rotation of non-replacement level talent.

Great information and analysis. It seems to me that if you just substitute Olynyk for Mickey in the proposal that I highlighted, then we could do what we need to do. For the present, Mickey or probably Crowder becomes our starting 4. I prefer to keep Olynyk, but if that's the price of doing business, so be it. Sure our roster would be top heavy and very thin, but we would have done the heavy lifting. Finding the best complementary players that fit under the cap over this offseason and next would not be easy, but it would be a lot easier than adding three star players. 

[D Dub]

What if we sent Chicago #3, Crowder & Amir? 

That should cover Butler's trade kicker and still leave us roughly half of the $90M cap for KD and Horford to split. 

Keeping Bradley to go along with KD & Butler would be ideal.  Along with IT and Horford, that'd be a pretty incredible looking team.