3:51pm: The Celtics will be in the market for a guard or wing if and when they receive a hardship exception, tweets Murphy.
1:48pm: The Celtics intend to apply for a hardship exception that would allow the team to add a 16th player to its 15-man NBA roster, reports Mark Murphy of The Boston Herald (Twitter link). It’s not yet known which player Boston would sign if granted that extra roster spot.
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The hardship provision – outlined in the NBA’s Constitution and By-Laws – allows a team to apply for an extra roster spot if it has at least four players who have missed three or more consecutive games, assuming those players will remain sidelined for the foreseeable future. Murphy’s report suggests that those four injured players must be projected to miss the next 10 days, though the NBA’s Operations Manual lists a time frame of two weeks.
Either way, applying for such an exception would signal that the Celtics don’t expect Kyrie Irving to return for at least the next 10-14 days. Irving would be the fourth injured Celtic, along with Gordon Hayward, Daniel Theis, and Marcus Smart. Jaylen Brown has also been on the shelf, but he’s aiming to return on Sunday, so he wouldn’t qualify as one of the club’s four injured players for hardship purposes.
Any player signed by the Celtics via the hardship exception would likely receive a 10-day contract. Boston would lose the ability to carry 16 men on their roster at the end of the regular season, or once one of their four injured players is ready to return. At that point, the C’s would have to waive their newly-added player — or keep him and cut someone else.