Regardless of how their current playoff run ends, the Celtics could look substantially different next season.
With a star-studded roster that’s on track to be the most expensive in NBA history in 2025-26 between salaries and massive luxury tax penalties, Boston will look for ways to trim its payroll this offseason, ESPN’s Shams Charania reported Thursday.
“The rest of the league is bracing for some level of change to come to the Celtics from their roster this offseason,” Charania said on “The Pat McAfee Show.” “Sources have been telling me for weeks now that the Celtics will be exploring trade options in the offseason. This team, this iteration just is not going to be sustainable for this team, and no one around the organization, from players to staffers, would be surprised if there are changes coming to this roster.”
While notable given Charania’s profile, the report was not at all surprising.
The Celtics have assembled the most talented roster in basketball, and arguably the deepest. Their five starters all are set to earn more than $28 million next season, with Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown both making upward of $53 million as Tatum’s record-setting supermax extension kicks in.
With only two current rotation players in contract years (Al Horford and Luke Kornet), Boston already has a projected payroll of $227.8 million for 2025-26, per Basketball-Reference, plus a tsunami of luxury tax sanctions that would push the overall cost of the roster to around $500 million.
And cost isn’t even the most prohibitive issue. Teams above the second apron of the luxury tax are also subject to severe roster-building penalties, including the inability to aggregate salaries in trades or trade first-round picks in any of the next seven drafts. They’re also taxed more than $3 for every dollar they spend above the luxury tax threshold, and teams that remain in the second apron over multiple seasons are hit with even heavier “repeater” taxes.
Just ask Celtics owner Wyc Grousbeck, who’s in the process of selling his family’s majority interest in the team to Bill Chisholm for $6.1 billion. Grousbeck said in a recent appearance on WEEI’s “The Greg Hill Show” that it’s untenable for a team to consistently surpass the second apron.
“It’s not the luxury tax bill,” Grousbeck said in late March. “It’s the basketball penalties. The new CBA was designed by the league to stop teams from going crazy. They decided that it’s not good enough to go after the wallets because the fans can be like, ‘Hey find someone who can afford to spend $500 million a year,’ or whatever it is, like the English Premier League. … The basketball penalties mean that it’s even more of a premium now to have your basketball general manager be brilliant and lucky. Because you can’t stay in the second apron — nobody will, I predict, for the next 40 years of the CBA, no one is going to stay in the second apron more than two years.”
The question isn’t whether the Celtics will look to move key players this offseason, but rather which ones. Two potential candidates: Kristaps Porzingis and Jrue Holiday.
Porzingis is set to make $30.7 million next season in the final year of his contract. The multitalented 7-foot-2 center has been an excellent addition for the Celtics, but he’s also missed 75 out of 164 regular-season games since arriving in Boston. Holiday, acquired via trade three months after Porzingis, has two years left on the extension he signed last spring, plus a player option for 2027-28. But he turns 35 in June and is on the books for $32.4 million next season.
It seems unlikely that the Celtics would deal Tatum or Jaylen Brown after signing the two franchise cornerstones to the largest and second-largest contracts in NBA history. Boston locked up Derrick White — still regarded as one of the NBA’s most underrated players — on a four-year, $125.9 million extension last summer.
Reserve sharpshooter Sam Hauser is another trade possibility as his salary balloons from $2.1 million to $10 million next season. The Celtics undoubtedly will receive calls on NBA Sixth Man of the Year Payton Pritchard, but his contract, which pays him less than $8.5 million in each of the next three seasons, is one of the league’s biggest bargains.
This could be a transformative offseason for Boston, which will look to extend its championship window while minimizing its exposure to onerous tax penalties. But for now, the Celtics’ focus is squarely on hanging another banner with their current group.