Boston Celtics: Grading the C’s current roster by position group
By Seth Quinn
Unlike last summer, this year’s offseason has been rather crazy for the Boston Celtics.
Starting off with an overhaul of major staff members, the Cs promoted Brad Stevens to President of Basketball Operations after Danny Ainge stepped down, and hired Ime Udoka as the new head coach to replace Stevens.
They also acquired Al Horford and Moses Brown from the OKC Thunder, seemingly indicating a retooling of the roster is on the way under Stevens’s regime.
With that in mind, this article will be taking a look at the current roster construction of the Celtics (including pending free agents) and grading the roster in order to determine specifically what position groups Brad Stevens needs to improve on the rest of the offseason.
I will be going through each group (guards, wings, bigs) and assigning them letter grades, ranging from A+ to F, taking into account both the top-end talent and the depth of each group.
Boston Celtics guards: Marcus Smart, Payton Pritchard, Carsen Edwards, Tremont Waters, Yam Madar
While the Boston Celtics have quite a few guards that currently are either on the roster or are pending free agents, only Marcus Smart and Payton Pritchard played significant minutes last season.
After trading away Kemba Walker to the Thunder, the rotation is also lacking guards with top-tier talent, especially on the offensive end.
While Smart and Pritchard are both good players, Smart is more of a combo guard role player, which I feel is usually better served off the bench, and Pritchard lacks experience and the combination of size and defensive ability that usually is expected of a starter.
After those two, there’s a big drop-off in talent level.
Like Pritchard, Carsen Edwards and Tremont Waters lack experience, size, and defensive prowess to be serviceable contributors within the rotation. However, unlike Pritchard, they haven’t put together a full season of solid and consistent play.
With this in mind, it seems the best course of action for Brad Stevens this offseason would be to try and acquire a pass-first point guard, and possibly a 3-and-D shooting guard to push Smart to the bench.
That way, Smart can be the main playmaker for the second unit without sacrificing the strengths he would provide as a starter.
If a replacement shooting guard isn’t acquired, a solid alternative would be to still move Smart to the bench in favor of a bigger starting lineup and have Jaylen Brown start at the two while sliding Al Horford and Jayson Tatum down to the forward spots and Robert Williams into the starting lineup at center.
No matter what the plan is, getting a true point guard should be priority number one.
In terms of depth, Yam Madar, last year’s second-round draft-and-stash, would be interesting as a young end-of-bench piece that could provide more consistent production down the line if the Cs are able to fully sign him this offseason.
While Smart and Pritchard are good players, there’s still a lot of uncertainty in the backcourt.
The ideal scenario would be to have those two be the two bench backcourt players and bring in Yam Madar as a high upside bench piece, but that would require a lot of future moves to be made.
That is why, as of now, the current plethora of guards on the roster should be considered pretty average, but the group could look much different by the end of the offseason.
Grade: C+