All season long, Boston Celtics fans have been patiently waiting to see what exactly their favorite NBA franchise will opt to do during the 2022 trade season. Thus far, outside of the low-impact deal (at least, in the immediate future) for Bol Bol, they’ve stayed rather silent.
Now, with literally just a few days remaining until February 10th’s deadline, both fans and media pundits alike are sitting uncomfortably on the edge of their seats in hopes of seeing this front office set off some serious fireworks to try and help get the ball club back to being considered one of the upper echelon squads in the association.
While there seem to be a rather significant amount of people who believe that all the C’s need is to make a few key shakeups to their rotation, especially considering how great they’ve been playing of late, there are still plenty of others who believe Brad Stevens and co. must go all-out in order to bring on more top-flight talents to the roster.
In the past, we’ve gone about and discussed plenty of trade ideas the Boston Celtics could partake in, with ideas ranging from moves for mere role players to megadeals.
Today, we at the Houdini are going to take things a step further by discussing 3 absolute blockbusters that, be it likely to happen or not, would absolutely blow up this year’s deadline:
Trade No. 1) A multi-team deal between the Boston Celtics, Spurs, and Kings
Starting off our list of blockbusters that would blow up 2022’s trade season, we’re coming in scorching hot with this multi-team banger between the Boston Celtics, San Antonio Spurs, and Sacramento Kings.
As recent rumors have suggested, there seems to be a bit of concern about C’s star, Jaylen Brown‘s desire to stay put in Eastern Massachusetts past this year, with some reporting that, should things not improve to his liking, he could opt to request a trade elsewhere during this coming offseason.
As always, let us reiterate the fact that we would love nothing more than to see the Jays thrive in Boston and get this team back to contending for titles whilst running alongside one another.
However, just for entertainment’s sake, let’s say that things start to drastically deteriorate between both the wing and the front office, and they look to shop him as soon as Thursday’s deadline — this would unequivocally be the ideal transaction to partake in.
If the Celtics ever decide to trade away their young and talented star, they’ll undoubtedly be looking to get a monster haul in return for his services for, frankly, he’s that good.
To us, Dejounte Murray and Harrison Barnes could easily constitute as being considered a worthy enough return package.
For years now, Boston’s point guard position has been viewed as perhaps their weakest within the rotation. Since the days when Isaiah Thomas was leading the charge, this team has seen a revolving door of players trying to fill in as a long-term answer at the one.
To date, they have yet to find the player that they definitively see as being their franchise floor general.
However, a guy like Murray could easily be that long-awaited talent to have run the show for this ball club moving forward.
Currently in the midst of a career season with the lowly San Antonio Spurs, the 25-year-old finds himself putting up stellar all-around averages of 19.6 points, 9.2 assists, 8.4 rebounds, and 2.1 steals per game on 44 percent shooting from the floor.
An All-Defensive talent and a high-end facilitator, the addition of Murray alone would take a tremendous amount of pressure off of Jayson Tatum on both sides of the floor.
However, Brown for the Spurs stud straight up isn’t something Stevens should be all that interested in (not at this point in time, anyway), which is why adding Barnes to the equation would be imperative, making this hypothetical transaction go from being an “on the cusp” move to simply a no-brainer.
The 29-year-old is another savvy scorer, facilitator, and defender who’s also currently having a phenomenal campaign.
Through 50 games played with the Kings, the power forward is boasting stellar averages of 16.8 points, 6.1 rebounds, and 2.5 assists on 46 percent shooting from the floor and 41 percent shooting from deep.
With both Murray and Barnes in tow at the starting one and four, respectively, a large chunk of Ime Udoka’s desire to see more playmaking from his main guys would easily be covered, thus taking this semi-unnatural task of being a facilitator off the shoulders of Tatum and, in turn, have him revert back to focusing almost all of his offensive attention on getting into scoring opportunities which would likely go on to help elevate him closer to that highly coveted superstar status.
An added perk of all this, of course, is seeing Doug McDermott coming aboard to go about and fill the C’s need for a quality scoring option to have come off the pine (averaging 11.7 points on 47 percent shooting from the field and 43.5 percent shooting from deep).
For the Sacramento Kings, they bring on two recent lottery-selected wings in Devin Vassell and Aaron Nesmith to add to their young and promising core, Al Horford to add a veteran presence to such a youthful roster and, obviously, to serve as a salary matcher with only a partially guaranteed deal for 2022-23, and the rights to a future first-round pick.
And, as for the Spurs, they find themselves bringing Brown to town to serve as their new franchise cornerstone where they can go about and bypass a full-fledged rebuild and, instead, actually look to build around an already established young star wing.
On top of this, they also are seen taking a chance on the former No. 2 overall pick, Marvin Bagley III who, though has been viewed as a disappointment when considering where he was selected back in 2018 and who was taken after him on that very night (Luka Doncic, Trae Young, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Collin Sexton, etc.), has still shown flashes of being a solid starting big man in this league.
For his career, the 22-year-old holds averages of 19.3 points and 10.7 rebounds per 75 possessions on 49 percent shooting from the floor.