Bleeding Green wrote:Cody Zeller for several years of control of Poirier, Edwards and the whatever 47th pick turns into? Does Zeller see more than 10-12 minutes if everyone is healthy? Yikes I hate trades like this. Celtics should really only make trades if they improve the top end or if it's just an obvious winning no-risk kind of trade i.e. the Tyler Zeller trade a few years ago. Why do the Celtics want to clear Poirier and Edwards? They are cheap as ****, young players. If they suck, you just replace them with more cheap as **** and equally bad players. We've barely seen what they can do and a backup big is hardly going to impact the Celtics title odds (nor will Edwards or Poirier this year of course).
And I see Kanter being a guy who can win a series if the right matchup is there and he's healthy/playing well. If he's injured or terrible or the matchup is tough, then he just straight up won't play, but if he has some kind of matchup that he can exploit and/or he's healthy/playing well, he can swing a series for sure.
Including the 3 first rounders we have 17 players under contract next year. That doesn't include Tremont Waters or Tacko Fall as they're 2-way restricted free agents. It also doesn't include the #47 pick since that doesn't come with a guaranteed deal. It also doesn't include any veteran FA additions we want to make. We simply don't have enough roster spots for everyone. Some players will have to be let go.
At the big man spot we have Theis/Kanter/R. Williams/Poirier under contract. Kanter is expected to pick up his player option which would be fully guaranteed. Theis is a team option we'll obviously pick up. R. Williams is fully guaranteed. Poirier is only partially guaranteed for $1.4M. Considering we have 3 1st round picks, it's likely IMO we take a big man with one of them. If we do take a big man, I'd expect Poirier to be one of the prime candidates to be released between his lack of earning playing time this year and his partial guarantee.
Carsen Edwards is one of the guys under contract but he's really struggled this year. Waters has looked great in the G-League and was supposedly drawing some trade interest at the deadline. Seems likely that someone offers him an NBA deal and forces us to commit a roster spot to him. I'd rather keep Waters over Edwards and I don't think we could manage both of them on this crowded roster. So Edwards is another guy I view as getting cut.
I included Semi who we have a team option on in the trade. He's a good ball of the roster player but if we want a veteran FA he has to go IMO.
Javonte Green also has a team option that I would guess we decline to free up roster space. I didn't include him in the trade.
Assuming we made the deal I suggested and signed Waters as I also suggested we'd have the following under contract.
Kemba / Waters
Brown / Smart
Hayward / Langford
Tatum / G. Williams
Zeller / Theis / R. Williams
#17/#26/#30
2-way deals: Tacko and UDFA
That's 14 players. Leaves room for one veteran signing with the taxpayers MLE as a bench scorer.
Had we not made this deal, we'd likely just keep Semi and Kanter stays on instead of Zeller. That means the players you said you didn't want to lose - Poirier, Edwards - were getting cut anyway (unless you prefer keeping Edwards to signing Waters). Semi would be hanging on unless we wanted to pursue one veteran upgrade, which on a title competing team I think we should. On the 2-way deals you'd have the #46 pick instead of an UDFA.
So to me, I just viewed this deal as getting a small upgrade - Zeller over Kanter - for players we were going to cut anyway. I don't view it as giving things up. Again, if we didn't make my deal the only difference is we'd have Kanter over Zeller and #46 on a 2-way deal instead of an UDFA, the way I see it.
Zeller is one of the better P&R screen men in the game and defensively he does a good job as well. We've seen Stevens' system take a guy like Kanter from poor to average on that end but Zeller he could improve someone who's already good at it. I think swapping out the #46 pick on a 2-way deal for an UDFA was a fair price to pay for that.
EDIT: Also, a big positive here too is that Zeller's $15M expiring vs Kanter's $5M makes facilitating a deadline deal for a big time piece very easy to facilitate. It puts us in play for a big deadline trade if opportunity knocks.