The Boston Celtics made no moves at the 2020 NBA trade deadline, and it left a lot of fans scratching their heads.
With three incoming first-round picks and not enough slots to roster them, a bench too green to contribute in the regular season (never mind playoffs), a need for bench scoring and aspirations for a deep playoff run, it seemed near-certain Boston would make some kind of move.
But when the clock struck three p.m. on February 6, all 17 players on the Celtics roster remained with the team, and head honcho Danny Ainge made a point of appearing on NBC Sports Boston to explain why.
Ainge said (courtesy of MassLive’s John Karalis): “We didn’t have any good deals.”
“We had a lot of conversations over the past couple of weeks, there just weren’t any deals we felt would make us better,” he added, and truthfully there were no realistic deals to be had that would have been a slam-dunk to change the team’s likely playoff ceiling.
But what about all those incoming picks?
Danny Ainge on the Celtics' draft assets, on @Toucherandrich: "You don't just give them away, but we were willing to part with them. We talked about many deals that involved all three of our picks, one of our picks, two of our picks, even four of our picks."
— Boston.com Celtics News (@BDCCeltics) February 7, 2020
They can be combined to trade up or out of the 2020 NBA Draft, sold for cash or traded for players, and even if Boston did use them all, they’d have until the end of the offseason to get their team down to the requisite 17 players.
After the regular season ends, the allowed roster size expands from 17 (including two way players) to 20 players, and incoming rookies cannot be signed until the start of the new season, meaning the Celtics will have the space until they decide to do — and they’ll have until late October to decide.
Boston was most notably tied to Washington Wizards forward Davis Bertans, whose reported asking price of two first-round picks was too much for the Celtics. But his role might have changed considerably for Boston, a fact Ainge may have been alluding to.
“Often times people want us to get a first or second best player on another team and by acquiring that player it could be very expensive … That player will come to our team and…won’t get the same role and they won’t be able to play with the same freedom and get the same amount of shots and get the same amount of minutes.”
The awkward mix of very low and very high contracts for their players also presented a considerable obstacle for the Celtics, which made making a deal impossible in the end even if several teams were interested in getting those slightly superfluous draft assets.
The team will now survey the buyout market ahead of the March 1st deadline for players joining the team via that route to be playoff-eligible, and truth be told it doesn’t seem to bother Boston’s president of basketball operations much.
“I feel good about where we are today and that we didn’t do any of the deals that might have been tempting,” he added.
As the old chestnut goes, sometimes the best moves you make are the ones you don’t, after all.
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