All ex-Boston Celtics vs. today’s team – who would win?

HoopsHype put together a league-wide exercise of the best five players a team has recently moved on from contrasted with the best players they have now.

Whenever an NBA team like the Boston Celtics makes a trade, it is banking on whatever coming back being more of the thing a ball club needs than what they are sending out — even if — in some cases — a team is trying to accumulate draft capital or young talent in a rebuild. The same can be said for players who aren’t re-signed in favor of using a roster spot elsewhere.

So there may be times a team gets worse by design, but that doesn’t stop fans and analysts from dunking on a franchise if a player they dealt away starts playing well later. To be fair, sometimes it’s annoyingly deserved (cough cough Desmond Bane cough), but it can also be a fun exercise to look back on what might have been.

To that end, the staff of HoopsHype put together a league-wide exercise of the best five players a team has recently moved on from contrasted with the best players they have now — let’s see how they rated out the Celtics.