Draft picks, cap space, and “Trader Danny” Ainge, the team’s president of basketball operations, leave the Celtics in fine shape as they seek to add marquee players, co-owner Wyc Grousbeck believes, as he explained Wednesday in a radio appearance on the Felger & Mazz show on 98.5 The Sports Hub in Boston. Jimmy Toscano of CSNNE.com has the details and transcription that shows Grousbeck defending the team’s approach to rebuilding and indicating that a major free agent run isn’t the team’s preferred path.
“Free agency is the last choice and it’s when you haven’t made a trade that locks up your cap, or you haven’t developed guys enough who then are max guys to re-sign them,” Grousbeck said. “We’re not saving for free agents. It’s not like we’re saying no to expensive people. We brought in [David] Lee and [Amir] Johnson but on one year. We’re going to take a look at those guys. Two good players. We have the option to probably re-sign them next summer. We can extend some of the guys on the roster or we can make a trade in February and take on a bunch of money. So all those things. At the end of it all if there’s free agency dollars left then you can go the free agency route.”
See more from the Atlantic Division:
- DeMarre Carroll took a hard fall in Toronto’s opener Wednesday, but it turned out just to be a bruised elbow, and his ability to shrug off that and play his usual hard-nosed defense underscored why the Raptors signed him to a four-year, $58MM deal, DeMar DeRozan said, notes Josh Lewenberg of TSN.ca.
- The playoffs are still the goal for the Nets, GM Billy King told reporters this week, but he acknowledged that the team still must develop its young players, as The Record’s Andy Vasquez relays. Brooklyn owes its unprotected first-round pick to the Celtics this year.
- The contract that Jordan Railey was briefly on with the Sixers was a non-guaranteed deal for one year at the minimum, according to Eric Pincus of Basketball Insiders. Philadelphia announced Monday that it had signed and quickly waived the former Washington State center for the purpose of securing his D-League rights. The Sixers incurred a small cap hit for doing so, since the deal came after Saturday’s deadline for teams to remove non-guaranteed salary without it counting against the cap.
Now that the Celtics have a nice package of assets in place, they need to find a team looking to get rid of a star, like the Thunder were with James Harden a few years ago. All those assets only have limited value unless they can be turned into something big.