The Celtics are not quite championship contenders. Yet.

https://www.sbnation.com/nba/2020/1/16/21067004/boston-celtics-analysis-jayson-tatum-kemba-walker-nba-finals




The Celtics are not quite championship contenders. Yet.



The Celtics’ window is cracked open again, that alone should be reason to celebrate their season.



By Paul Flannery  

Jan 16, 2020, 10:28am EST



The Boston Celtics are building, but no one is sure to what yet.



The Celtics have lost four of six including Wednesday night’s abomination against Detroit, during which the exceptionally mediocre Pistons shot 60 percent on Boston’s home floor. The C’s were porous at the point of attack defensively and out of sorts on the offensive end.

Adding injury to insult, Jayson Tatum missed the game with knee soreness and Jaylen Brown sprained the thumb on his shooting hand. All of that comes just in time for a showdown game with the Eastern Conference leading Bucks on Thursday night.

Perhaps this a bad time to take a holistic view of where the Celtics stand vis-a-vis the rest of their competition, but it’s important to remember that they entered the season with little fanfare and muted expectations. Despite replacing Kyrie Irving’s production with his statistical doppelganger and polar opposite in Kemba Walker, they were hamstrung in finding a suitable replacement for Al Horford who left in free agency.

Gone were the days when the Celtics could dream about putting together an ad-hoc superteam. Competence and competitiveness would have to replace championship considerations. The C’s would still be good, sure, but more like, maybe-win-a-playoff-round good, rather than championship timber.

Fittingly, there were more esoteric goals in place. This was a low-pressure opportunity for Brown and Tatum to get their development back on track. And for Gordon Hayward, this season would be a chance to get his own career back on solid footing.

Essentially, the 2019-20 Celtics had one job: to restore confidence in the direction of the franchise. Or, as coach Brad Stevens put it: have a team Boston would root for again. They nailed all of that before Thanksgiving, playing an appealing brand of ball rooted in a swarming defensive style.

Despite their recent funk, the C’s are on pace to win 55 or so games and finish with a top two or three seed in the East. The Bucks are the prohibitive favorites and the Sixers are a matchup nightmare*, but Boston’s unexpected regular season success has changed the postseason calculus ever so slightly.


*Quick aside: Even if Horford doesn’t find his rhythm with the Sixers, his defection to Philly has turned that matchup on its head. That alone is worth the price of his deal.

The question we have before us, then, is this: are the Celtics championship contenders? The easy answer is, Yes, of course. They have the second-best record in the East, a trio of players who could be considered All-Stars, and a leading contender for Defensive Player of the Year, to go along with a top-5ish offense and defense.

Give them a little seeding luck -- placing them somewhere far, far away from Philly -- along with a clean bill of health this spring and there’s certainly a chance they could get to a conference final. That’s a contender, right?

In the NBA, the longer answer is, No, not really. What the Celtics lack is a top-5 player, a superstar who can carry a team through the gut-wrenching pressure of the postseason. There is no Kawhi Leonard, LeBron James, or Kevin Durant here. Throughout NBA history, teams with those kind of players are the ones who win championships.

In the last four decades, there has been only one exception that proves the rule. That team was the 2004 Pistons, who made up for a lack of top-end talent with a bevy of All-Stars and a coaching legend at the top of his game. That’s how that story gets told, but in retrospect those individual Pistons didn’t get the credit they deserve.

Ben Wallace was a second-team All-NBA center and had a strong case for Defensive Player of the Year (he finished second). While limited offensively, Wallace’s contribution to winning basketball games was superstar caliber.

Underrated as he was, Wallace was Detroit’s lone All-Star participant despite strong campaigns from Chauncey Billups and Rip Hamilton. Additionally, the Pistons went 17-3 with Rasheed Wallace down the stretch after acquiring him at the trade deadline. That team wasn’t limited. It was loaded.

The Pistons also caught a handful of breaks including a weak Eastern Conference and a Laker team hellbent on imploding. If that’s the formula for a non-superstar team to win a championship, then it’s an awfully high standard. If you squint hard enough, however, you could see it taking place in Boston. Real hard.

What the Celtics lack in transcendent starpower, they make up for in quantity and quality. Like Billups in his day, Walker is all NBA-caliber guard having another typically excellent campaign. Tatum and Brown are also coming into their own as cornerstone players and making solid arguments for All-Star inclusion.

Additionally, Marcus Smart is the Ben Wallace of this equation. Smart is an All-Defense game-changer who will make an interesting case for DPOY consideration. Finally, Stevens is an exceptional coach working with exactly the right kind of team for his style, a la Larry Brown with the Pistons.

It could happen. It’s just not that likely.

The wild card is Hayward. After flashing huge promise in the first few weeks of the season, Hayward missed 13 games with a broken hand. That time away allowed Brown and Tatum to emerge as lead scorers. The C’s were just fine without Hayward, going 9-4 during that stretch. Still, the premise of this Celtics team was having multiple shot creators on the wing and Hayward’s playmaking is an integral part of the formula.

More concerning was the time Hayward missed recently with a sore foot. Since returning to the lineup, Hayward’s been solid most nights, yet inconsistent on others. If this is the best version of Hayward the Celtics get, it’s still an upgrade over last season’s frustrating campaign when he was coming off his catastrophic leg injury.

Still, if this is the best Hayward they’ll see, and if the long-term health of the franchise depends on maximizing Brown and Tatum’s abilities, then it makes sense to at least entertain the possibility of a trade that swings the pendulum toward title contention. This would be tricky for a number of reasons.


Hayward has another year left at his option on the max contract he signed in free agency during the summer of 2017. Given his injury history, the assumption has long been that he would exercise that $34 million option. That seems less certain considering he has once again established himself as a quality player, putting him in line for one more lengthy contract.

There’s also not a clear target in view. While Andre Drummond appears interesting on paper, the Celtics have done just fine of filling the center spot on the cheap with Daniel Theis and Enes Kanter. It’s also not clear that Drummond would be the defensive upgrade his counting stats suggest.

At one point, Kevin Love would have made a lot of sense, but not with three years left on his deal. Additionally, Tatum has excelled as a small-ball four man. Perhaps Cavs teammate Tristan Thompson would be a better fit, but while the Celtics are flush with draft picks, they don’t have mid-level contracts that would help balance the respective cap sheets without breaking up their core.

If they could somehow pry Steven Adams from Oklahoma City, that might be a different story. The physical Adams would be the ideal counterweight to Joel Embiid in a playoff series. The cost would be prohibitive, if he’s even attainable at all.

The likelier route is an upgrade on the margins, such as adding another wing to bolster a bench unit that lacks scoring punch. The C’s have half a roster of young players on rookie-scale contracts and are likely to have three first round picks, including the legendary Memphis Pick that now figures to be in the middle of the first round. That’s a strong hand to play at the trade deadline.

All of this depends on whether the front office sees this season as a legitimate chance to win now. The other path, the one more likely, is to stay the course and let things play out. They have a bright future in place with Brown and Tatum and they have already accomplished their prime goals for the regular season. Why mess with a good thing?

After all, we went into this season assuming it would take another offseason to finish rebuilding the foundation. The Celtics’ window is cracked open again, that alone should be reason to celebrate their season.



bob
MY NOTE:  And at least 2 of our top players haven't even hit their prime yet.



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Not even looking at the West, the EC is filled with land mines.

The big unknown both short term and long term begins and ends in the middle.   At center.   If Danny believes that Theis, Kanter and a healthy RW provides enough quality in the middle to beat teams in the East and West then adding a shooter/scorer makes good sense even if you have to part with a draft asset.

But Danny may actually see this season as a bridge year.  They cannot afford to acquire a high profile center without moving one of our wings.  Maybe he looks to the draft to find a center that could provide more upside at that position.

In the meantime the Celtics could remain stuck in the top third of the league for several seasons.  

This is where having Jason and Jaylen locked in provides a pathway forward.  Sooner or later out questions at center will be resolve.