Going back to the monster Boston Celtics trade that sent out Jaylen Brown to the Sixers, there have been hopeful whispers around the team that maybe something else was heating up. Such is the faith in team president Brad Stevens, it seems, that there has been a thought that something else is coming down the Pike, that surely he would not have traded Brown for two first-round picks and Paul George. That’s not nearly the return Boston fans expected, so the hope has been that Stevens would flip one of the picks and perhaps something else–Sam Hauser?–to use the team’s ability to add another player.
The Celtics have a traded player exception on the books worth more than $27 million from the Anfernee Simons deal, and there has been hopeful speculation among Celtics fans that they could use that in some form. The theory that Stevens had a “second trade” up his sleeve has been widespread.
But remember this: Using that would put them over the luxury tax tax. And the Celtics are not going over the luxury tax.
Celtics Focus Remains on Luxury Tax
Stevens maneuvered the Celtics under the tax last year, but are still a so-called “repeater tax” team and need to stay below the threshold for this season to create more flexibility–namely, the ability to use a full midlevel exception, which allows Boston to sign a player in the $16 million range. Getting out of the repeater tax also significantly reduces Boston’s tax bills.
Because of that, expect the Celtics to keep their powder dry all season. You’re going to see trade chatter and trade proposals, but if they add more than $2 million to the payroll, you can probably nix them.
That’s because the Celtics are less than $2 million below the luxury tax threshold and they plan to stay that way. Once the Celtics had to nuke the roster after the miserable 2025 NBA playoffs, with the loss to the Knicks and the injury to Jayson Tatum, Stevens has been laser-focused on getting under the tax.
“The tax has been the focus for them for two years now, and they’re not coming off of that,” one NBA executive said.
Brad Stevens: Building Depth a Key
That’s what Stevens was getting at back in July when he spoke at the post-Brown trade press conference with Celtics owner Bill Chisholm. The trade of Brown and the previous salary-dumps the Celtics had before that were part of a two-fold understanding on Stevens’ part: One, the team was not good enough to justify being deep into the tax and, two, getting out of the tax was the only way to add the depth needed to change that.
Indulge in whatever trade fantasies you’d like, but just know, whatever the trade machine says, the Celtics are almost certainly not doing it.
As Stevens said: “The reality in this day and age at the NBA, and you could see it obviously with the last couple of champions … you have to do a great job of building out depth that can hopefully replace the irreplaceable individual. And that’s not an easy thing to do. And that’s absolutely nothing against Jaylen. If you have Jaylen Brown on your team, you should feature him, you should use all those possessions and you should approach things that way.
“But I think the importance of depth and then obviously, we have to continue to work on ways to diversify our attack overall.”
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