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Don’t expect a trade to upgrade the Boston Celtics coming any time soon, particularly while the team sticks to its winning ways.
Coming into the season, the team’s big man rotation was widely seen to be a step below what the team would need to compete for a title, with larger, more skilled big men on the Philadelphia 76ers and Milwaukee Bucks looking like insuperable barriers to a deep postseason run.
One 10-game win streak later and those qualms have subsided significantly, particularly with Boston showing it could bounce back against the equally-surprising Phoenix Suns and former center Aron Baynes on Nov. 18.
There’s still legitimate reason to doubt the team’s current frontcourt will have what it takes to get past some of the better teams in the playoffs, where opponents will have more time and impetus to gameplan ways to use size against the team.
As the Ringer’s Jonathan Tjarks notes, the Celtics elevation of two third-overall picks (in consecutive NBA Drafts), Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum, to trusted top offensive options and combining them defensive tour de force Marcus Smart (who can switch onto even the strongest and quickest bigs in the league) has somehow worked.
And not only worked, but created one of the more potent offensive two-man lineups in the league despite Tatum’s up-and-down nights and overall development.
“The Celtics are this year’s closest thing to the spiritual heirs of the Warriors,” explains Tjarks.
“They don’t have the same star power, but their key players all fit into similar roles. Kemba Walker, like Steph Curry, is a smaller guard who can bomb 3s and play on and off the ball, and they surround him with big wings who can defend multiple positions, space the floor, and create their own shot. Their best lineup, when everyone is healthy, doesn’t feature anyone above 6-foot-8: Kemba, Smart, Tatum, Brown, and Hayward.”
Tatum’s showing signs of putting things together and considering much of this has been going on without All-Star forward Gordon Hayward — out until December with a broken hand — while Kemba Walker has quietly inserted himself into the fringes of the MVP conversation.
Perhaps the wins shouldn’t be so surprising.
But the skepticism about the frontcourt remains, and quite possibly for good reason. While the Warriors indeed did not have a dominant big functioning in a rim-protecting, pick-setting, back-to-the-basket sort of center anchoring their formidable defenses, they also had a much more lethal array of shooters, arguably the greatest ever assembled in recent years.
Can Boston hope to compete for a title with such a notable step down on the offensive end? If not, is there a player who makes sense who could be had on the trade market?
According to senior ESPN writer Brian Windhorst, if there is, it won’t involve any core players — Walker, Hayward, Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum or even Marcus Smart — from the team’s core. Smart and Hayward have been floated often as potential options in recent months.
That leaves the comparatively smaller salaries of players like veterans like Daniel Theis, Enes Kanter, and rookies Romeo Langford and Vincent Poirier, all of whom make $5 million per season or less, and all but Langford happen to be bigs shoring up the already- shaky frontcourt rotation.
Finding a player worth moving so many contracts (or on a deal so cheap) that makes sense to pull the trigger on will be no easy task and with so many new signings for the team in the offseason, any such deal would likely have to wait until at least Dec. 15, when certain recently-signed deals begin to become tradable according to league rules.
For now, the strategy of the “spiritual heirs of the Warriors” will be to refine and evolve the Dubs approach to winning while small, strangely zagging back to what’s worked in the past as East contemporaries ‘zig’ big.
Will it be enough to stay in the conversation of belonging in the league’s elite?
We’ll just have to wait to find out.