The season has barely been over for a week for the Celtics, and things have quickly gone from dreaming of a championship run in a ‘gap year’, to dreaming of how the team can add Giannis Antetokounmpo.
Giannis has done everything he can without publicly asking out of Milwaukee to indicate he wants a new home, and it has even been reported that he’d prefer to play for a true title contender and remain in the Eastern Conference. There aren’t many suitors that can even check those boxes, and the Celtics are one.
It may have felt far-fetched as recently as a few weeks ago, but after crashing out of the playoffs, it feels like all options are on the table for the Celtics. Brad Stevens made it clear that the team isn’t good enough, and they need to upgrade the personnel this summer. So what would a trade for the Greek Freak even look like? There are basically three options.
Flipping Jaylen Brown for Giannis straight up
They can squabble about what picks, if any, get sent which way in this deal, but this is the cleanest iteration by far. The salaries line up almost perfectly, and an All-NBA player heads in each direction. Whether the rebuilding Bucks would actually want JB is another story, but the noise around a Jaylen trade has gotten louder than ever, and this could become a three-team deal, or Milwaukee could flip him for younger players or more picks.
Sending Derrick White, Sam Hauser, and Payton Pritchard for Giannis
There’s another path for the Celtics to get there salary-wise without including Brown, but that means trading away their three biggest contracts that aren’t the Jays. Boston would have to part with three great role players on great contracts, and likely add in picks on top of that, but they’d end up with a core of Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, and Giannis Antetokounmpo. D-White has become a Boston legend, but if ever there was a time to sell high, this is it.
Giannis for TPE salaries, Hauser, and every pick
The final path is probably the least realistic, but the Celtics do have roughly $45 million in traded player exceptions. There’s a nonzero chance the Cs could go out and add that much in expiring salary, then flip it all to the Bucks along with another ~$10 million, likely coming from Hauser.
They’d surely have to add in every pick they own, but that’s a small price to pay for keeping their entire core intact while adding Giannis into the mix.
Whether these offers are made and sufficient to secure a deal remains to be seen. But if the Celtics do get in the mix to create a legal trade, one of these iterations would have to be used. There’s also a chance that Giannis eventually puts his thumb on the scale and asks for Boston.
That would save the Celtics some draft capital and perhaps some of their better young players, but one way or another, they have to get there financially, and these are the paths.
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