Boston Celtics
“JT’s out pretty much the whole year, so they’re not winning a championship next year.”
The Boston Celtics significantly altered their roster this offseason — shedding a hefty amount of payroll by trading away two lineup regulars in Jrue Holiday and Kristaps Porzingis.
Boston also wasn’t able to retain other key players in free agency, as Al Horford and Luke Kornet signed with the Warriors and Spurs, respectively, out on the open market.
The writing was on the wall that the Celtics had to augment a significant segment of the roster — due in large part to the hefty luxury-tax penalties set to anthem Boston as a consequence of operating over the restrictive second apron of the NBA’s new salary-cap threshold.
Shortly after the deals involving Holiday and Porzingis were struck, Celtics president of basketball operations Brad Stevens acknowledged that getting under the second apron was the primary motivator in those deals.
“I mean, the second apron is why those trades happen,” Stevens said in July. “I think that those are pretty obvious, and the basketball penalties associated with those are real. We’ve all talked about that.”
But Basketball Hall of Famer Charles Barkley doesn’t believe that the second apron was the main reason why Boston tore down most of its roster this offseason.
“I don’t really think that’s it,” Barkley told Heavy.com’s Steve Bulpett of the second-apron restrictions impacting Boston. “I think they realized that without [Jayson Tatum] they wasn’t going to win the championship, so it’s best to break the team up sooner than later.
“I don’t think it had anything to do with the second apron. They had the apron last year, right? So I just think they realized that they’re going to take a step backwards. JT’s out pretty much the whole year, so they’re not winning a championship next year. You’re like, let’s break it up a year early.”
The 2025-26 Celtics suffered a significant setback when Tatum tore his Achilles tendon during the Eastern Conference Semifinals in May.
So far, Boston has not presented a clear timetable for Tatum’s potential return — with other NBA stars like Kevin Durant missing an entire season after suffering similar injuries over the last few years.
Tatum noted last week that he feels he’s in “a good spot” already in his recovery, with the 27-year-old forward posting a video last weekend of himself working out on the court at the Auerbach Center.
But with Tatum’s expected timeline still unclear — and his effectiveness likely special out of the gate even if he returns this spring — it does make sense that Stevens and Boston’s staff opted to retool this roster ahead of what could be projected as more of a “bridge” year.
But speaking last week, new Celtics lead owner Bill Chisholm stressed that Boston’s offseason moves were rooted in the second-apron restrictions that the team needed to rid itself of.
“I’d say some of those, as a fan, I get it,” Chisholm said of Boston’s roster turnover. “Those hurt as a fan, both as good people and obviously great players had to part ways with. And I get it. I get that hurts. I would say, and I don’t mean to be glib, but there are sort of three things I would say: first there’s Derrick White, second is Jrue Holiday, third is Kristaps Porzingis.
“Because if we were in this situation back then, we couldn’t have gotten those guys on the team. So that’s what we’re playing for. We’re playing for the flexibility to do that kind of thing and when the moment is right to do that, we’re going to do it.”
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