Boston Celtics ranked within top-5 of best young cores in NBA

Due to the high-end success that the Boston Celtics have managed to achieve over the last several seasons, it may be easy to forget just how young this overall core really is.

Falling just two wins shy of nabbing their 18th championship banner in franchise history, surprisingly the C’s top dogs in Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown still find themselves on the right side of their 20’s, as the former just turned 24 while the latter is still only 25.

However, while the Jays may take the bulk of attention and credit for the team’s overall triumphs–and rightly so–, by no means are they the only youthful talents who played, and will continue to play major roles within this title-contending team’s rotation.

With sharpshooter Grant Williams (23), energizer bunny Payton Pritchard (24), and, of course, their breakout stud big man, Robert Williams III (24), even outside of Tatum and Brown this Boston Celtics core is seemingly set up quite nicely for the long-haul (assuming the front office keeps them all together).

In fact, their young squad is so promising that the folks at Bleacher Report have gone about and placed them within their top-5 when ranking the league’s best young cores heading into the 2022-23 campaign, placing in at fourth overall.

Citing that their players-under-25 core is tremendously fluid on both ends of the floor and will almost certainly continue to challenge for NBA titles for the next several years to come, writer, Grant Hughes, believes it to be justifiable to list the Boston Celtics at this specific point on his rankings, even with the concept that there aren’t any other real stars outside of Tatum (because Brown will turn 26 in October, he didn’t make Hughes’s cut):

"It was Grant Williams who closed out the defending champion Milwaukee Bucks with seven threes in Game 7 of the East semifinals, and it was his defensive versatility that helped unlock some of the Celtics’ most effective switching lineups. He posted the highest Defensive Versatility score of any Boston player last year, which is saying something on a team that includes DPOY Marcus Smart along with several other elite stoppers.The presence of a fully switchable forward who shoots 41.1 percent from three-point range and shows up in big moments during his age-23 season is more than enough to distinguish this core from Miami’s. And the Celtics’ current status as youth-driven preseason title favorites justifies their high ranking—even if some of the teams we’ve already covered have a larger quantity of 25-and-under players."

Again, it’s somewhat crazy to believe that this team is still so young and just came within a couple of victories from winning the illustrious 2022 NBA Finals.

Assuming they keep the majority of their core group together moving forward, C’s fans could wind up witnessing one of the league’s newest dynasties.