The Boston Celtics have certainly fallen hard from their perch, as the 2024 NBA champions might not even be a playoff team next season.
Thanks to salary cap constraints, the Celtics were forced to trade both Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday this summer, and Al Horford and Luke Kornet have departed, as well. On top of that, Jayson Tatum is slated to miss all of the 2025-26 campaign while he recovers a torn Achilles.
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While Boston isn’t exactly starting from scratch given that it still has leftover pieces like Jaylen Brown, Derrick White and Payton Pritchard, the C’s certainly don’t have a championship-caliber roster even more, and that’s even with a healthy Tatum.
With no clear path forward over the next couple of seasons, Caroline Fenton of Yahoo Sports is urging the Celtics to do the unthinkable: tank.
“You’re not going to be good anyway, so just go ahead and go all in on being bad,” Fenton said. “Potentially put yourself into a lottery pick, and be potentially in the mix for drafting a Massachusetts kid in AJ Dybansta, so why not?”
Fenton does make a salient point. Even if Boston makes the playoffs next season, it isn’t going to go very far. So is there even really a point in attempting to seriously contend?
Of course, the issue here is that tanking is not in the Celtics’ nature. They didn’t even tank after trading away Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce in 2013. So would they really consider doing it now?
And really, would Boston even be able to tank? Brown is an All-Star. White is a terrific player. Those two are probably good enough to get the C’s 30-plus wins, which would take them out of the running for a top pick (well, unless they have incredible draft lottery luck like the Dallas Mavericks).
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The only way the Celtics can realistically do this is if they trade away one of Brown or White in order to truly bottom out. But it doesn’t appear that Boston is all that interested in going that route. At least not right now.
And for reference, the C’s have not posted a losing record since the 2014-15 campaign, when they went a respectable 40-42 and actually made the playoffs.
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