Celtic Salary Shedding Summer
The Celtics have shed salary, but they may need to do something drastic
Nothing screams summer like an NBA team salary dumping a still productive and useful player to duck an arbitrary financial line. The Boston Celtics got their work done early, trading Jrue Holiday to the Portland Trail Blazers for Anfernee Simons and originally two second-round picks– the picks were removed following Portland’s review of Holiday’s medical– and then flipping Kristaps Porzingis to the Atlanta Hawks for Georges Niang and a second-round pick, with Terrance Mann and the 22nd pick in the 2025 Draft (via Atlanta) ending up in Brooklyn.
The two moves saved the Celtics a little over $27 million and signify the end of an era in Boston. Over the past four seasons, the Celtics have been the best team in the NBA. They’ve won 233 games, good for a 71% win percentage, finished no lower than third in net rating, twice finishing first, made the Eastern Conference Finals three times, the NBA Finals twice, and won a title. In an era where no team has even made the Finals in consecutive seasons since the Kevin Durant Golden State Warriors, the Celtics have been the NBA’s model franchise, and despite employing two All-Stars who have yet to hit 30, they feel compelled to blow it all up for financial reasons. Well, temporarily, at least.
Collectively Bargained Destruction
The NBA’s newest collective bargaining agreement (CBA) installed more severe penalties for exceeding the league’s luxury tax threshold and also added a first and second apron. The first apron is relatively tame compared to the second apron, and I’m not really sure why it even exists. However, the second apron has become doom personified in league circles. Venturing into the second apron of hell indicates a team is far above the luxury tax, which means they’ll be incurring heavy financial penalties, but that’s only the start.
Teams above the second apron cannot aggregate player salaries in trades, take on a penny more than they send out in trades, use trade exceptions generated in prior years, can have their first-round picks frozen at seven years out, and will see their first-round pick sent to the end of the first-round should they be in the second apron for three out of five years.
In many respects, the second apron acts as a self-destruct mechanism for high-spending teams. So while some continue to call it a quasi-hard cap, a distinction I find dubious, it is daunting enough that avoiding it like the flu, as opposed to the plague, is prudent. However you want to visualize, anthropomorphize, or humanize it, venturing too deep and for too long into it does put a real shelf life on a roster, and that’s exactly what the Celtics are experiencing.
Hot Salary-Shedding Summer
The Celtics’ hot salary-shedding summer is Exhibit A of how NBA front offices view the second apron, at least in the short term. Through their trades of Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis, the Celtics have shed $27.25 million in salary for 2025-26, dropping below the second apron, and they’re rumored to be aggressively shopping Anfernee Simmons, their lone return for Holiday, and his $27.6 million salary. While it’s always sad to see a championship contender strip-mined like the 1997 Florida Marlins, it makes a world of sense for these Celtics. They’d been in the luxury tax for the previous three seasons, will be without Jayson Tatum next season as he recovers from an Achilles tendon tear, and the two players they offloaded, Holiday and Porzingis, are on the wrong end of the aging curve and have serious health concerns going forward.
The truth is, even if Tatum hadn’t suffered a serious injury, the Celtics would have almost certainly cut costs, but his absence should give them the license to forgo shears and instead opt for a machete, because the Celtics’ financial plans were dealt a serious blow just as free agency began when the NBA subtly announced that it is projecting far lower revenue than initially expected.
Less Money, Mo Problems
The NBA’s new 11-year, $75 billion media rights deal begins with the 2025-26 season. It’s why NBC is dusting off roundball rock, Amazon is taking more of our money, and we almost kicked Inside the NBA’s vicegrip on abjectly awful commentary. The expectation, based on the staggering media rights deal, was that the salary cap would increase by the maximum 10% each season for years to come. Considering the old rights deal was for nine years and $24 billion, it wasn’t wishful thinking to believe that this deal would quickly push the league into a new economic stratosphere.
However, the national television rights deal, while the league’s biggest bit of business, isn’t the only way the league generates revenue. As more consumers “cut the cord” and ditch conventional cable, NBA franchises’ lucrative local broadcast deals have been hit hard. This is an area where revenue is expected to drop, and the uncertainty around it has the potential to be devastating, in relative terms. So, in the warm afterglow of the NBA free agency, the league decided to do a sneaky news dump of their upcoming financial projections. These are the initial expected figures (in amber red) compared to the new ones (in dark, dreary black).
The new projections won’t affect this upcoming season, but as you can see, league revenue is expected to be approximately $1.06 billion less in 2029-30 than initially expected, which adds up to the $35 million less in cap space per team. Now, these projects aren’t gospel, and there is probably a bit of hedging built into these numbers to protect the league from local television deals going belly up, but it does present teams with a real conundrum as they had been building their budgets with an expectation of explosive salary cap growth. Now, even though the Celtics have cut a tremendous amount of salary in the short term, they might still be in financial jail in the back half of the 2020s with these new figures.
What are the Celtics’ Outs?
This chart shows how much salary the Celtics have saved from their two cost-cutting moves, which mainly come in the form of getting off of Jrue Holiday’s deal. While saving $34.8 million and $37.2 million in 2026-27 and 2027-28 is great, they now have another problem to solve. Notice the roster size. If the Celtics want to continue to compete, they can’t just trust that draft picks and minimum contracts will replace two high-level starters. By 2028-29, they’ll only have four players under contract, assuming all player options are exercised, but are already at $179.3 million in salary commitments. With the cap now projected to be just $181.9 million, instead of the previous $205.8 million, the Celtics will definitely be above the salary cap and will very likely be back over the $244.4 million projected second apron level.
To further illustrate the predicament the Celtics find themselves in now, I’m going to show the Celtics’ financial situation based on the previous cap expectations compared to what it looks like now.
The Ten Percent Dream
The Grim Reality
Remember, the Celtics only have six, four, and one player under contract for 2027-28, 2028-29, and 2029-30. No matter how you slice it, the Celtics are going to be incredibly expensive going forward, but they don’t necessarily have to be.
While Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis were obvious salary casualties, the Celtics’ best route to clean books is to finally break up the Jays. Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, on the day of signing, signed the richest contracts in NBA history, and it’s going to absolutely muddle the Celtics’ books. By 2028-29, the final year of Brown’s contract, the pair will combine to earn $132 million and take up 72.6% of the salary cap.
Just for fun, let’s throw Derrick White and the four years and $111.1 million left on his deal to really hammer home the point.
Fortunately, the Celtics aren’t screwed. Tatum, Brown, and White are all desirable players who could easily be flipped for future assets and more manageable contracts. However, the best route to salary salvation would be to trade Jaylen Brown.
Brown, entering his age-29 season, has four years and a little over $235 million left on his deal. While I personally believe Brown is one of the most overrated players in the league, even if you’re a true believer, it’s hard to imagine he’ll be worth 35.7% of the cap in 2028-29, but the Celtics could let that be someone else’s problem.
Realistically, the Celtics would probably look to move Derrick White before Brown, as he’s a bit older and probably not as well-regarded around the league (Although, I can’t imagine I’m the only person who thinks he’s flat out better than Brown), but the issue there is he is on a good value deal, which negates a lot of the savings.
The Celtics’ summer of savings will continue. Chances are they’ll exhaust all of their options trying to move Anfernee Simmons, but that would only be a short-term solution since he’s already on an expiring contract. Jayson Tatum, the youngest and best of the bunch, is almost certainly untouchable, plus he’s injured, which really only leaves White and Brown as real options. Perhaps the Celtics will navigate forward with muddled books and try to solve their financial problems as they arise, but acting now could set the Celtics up to retool around Tatum when he comes back from injury.
The second apron isn’t a hard cap, but it is designed to be something that you only dip your toe in. The Celtics have avoided taking the plunge in 2025-26, but it’ll be increasingly difficult for them to do so as 2030 approaches. As long as Jayson Tatum can come back healthy and effective (a bigger if than people are willing to consider), the Celtics have another half-decade runway to compete. Resetting their books in what is likely a lost season would be a cold, calculated move, but it could be what ultimately gets them banner number 19.
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