The Celtics enjoyed one of the NBA’s all-time great seasons in 2023/24, racking up 64 wins and posting the fourth-best single-season net rating in league history in the regular season before winning 16 of 19 playoff games en route to the franchise’s 18th championship.
Unsurprisingly, the Celtics decided to essentially run it back in 2024/25, retaining nearly the exact same roster, with one or two minor tweaks around the edges. Boston compiled 61 more regular season wins in 2024/25 and while they finished the year as the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference, the C’s would’ve been the clear betting favorites over the No. 1 Cavaliers if they had met in a postseason series.
And it sure seemed like we were headed for a Celtics/Cavs showdown in the conference finals after no other team in the East finished within 10 games either of them in the regular season. Both clubs breezed through the first round and had plenty of momentum entering round two.
But while the Pacers were in the process of upsetting the Cavs on one side of the Eastern Conference bracket, the Celtics had their own issues with the upstart Knicks, who pulled off a pair of improbable comebacks in Boston to open the conference semifinals. Even after those two losses, the Celtics were still widely expected to take the series, especially after comfortably winning Game 3 in New York, but that early hole they dug came back to haunt them when star forward Jayson Tatum sustained a season-ending Achilles tear near the end of Game 4, another Boston loss.
The Celtics made it a little interesting by winning Game 5 at home, but without Tatum, they didn’t have enough firepower to get past the Knicks in Game 6 — their season ended that night in New York.
Whether or not the Celtics could’ve pulled off the comeback with a healthy Tatum is a moot point now. There are much bigger issues to worry about in Boston, where the team is facing a financial crunch and can’t necessarily assume that its perennial All-NBA first-teamer will be able to play at all next season. Achilles recoveries typically take upwards of a year.
With a new ownership group incoming, there’s not necessarily a mandate to slash costs, but it doesn’t make sense for a Tatum-less Celtics team to continue operating over the second tax apron in 2025/26. Maintaining a team salary in that range imposes major roster-building restrictions and generates massive tax penalties, and those restrictions and penalties only increase the longer a club stays above the aprons. That’s fine for teams with realistic championship aspirations, but the Celtics can’t honestly put themselves in that group until Tatum is back to 100%.
The Celtics’ Offseason Plan
Getting under the second apron won’t be easy for the Celtics. If we assume they retain their nine players on fully guaranteed contracts, plus Neemias Queta and Jordan Walsh (who have partial guarantees), then fill out their standard roster using their No. 28 and No. 32 picks, plus one minimum-salary veteran, they’d be at about $231.9MM for 14 players. The second apron projects to come in at around $207.8MM.
