The writing has been on the wall for the past month or so, but minutes before the NBA trade deadline on Thursday, the Celtics salary dumped Josh Minott to the Brooklyn Nets. Boston is making a hard push to get out of the luxury tax this season, starting with the Anfernee Simons trade, continuing with the Chris Boucher deal, and now Minott.
The Cs are now one more move away from getting out of the tax completely, meaning a Xavier Tillman Sr. dump is likely to hit the timeline any minute.
Moving these minimum deals was basically the only option to get out of the tax without surrendering a key player like Sam Hauser, so this was a no-brainer. But the Minott move hurts a little more than Boucher and Tillman.
Minott came in and lit the world on fire for the Celtics, earning his way into the starting lineup after just a handful of games and bringing an amount of energy and athleticism to the team that was badly lacking. He was electric on defense, crashing the glass like an animal, and even hitting open threes.
Celtics fans quickly fell in love and learned why he was nicknamed, The Lawnmower for his relentless motor. He was even turning heads as a small-ball center for some fun lineups, and it was easy to start imagining how he could eventually fit in with Jayson Tatum, Jaylen Brown, and others down the road.
Minott became expendable thanks to emergence of Walsh, Scheierman, and Gonzalez
It was starting to feel like Brad Stevens had done it again and brought in a rotation piece on a minimum deal. But as the season went on, Minott’s play started to slip, and then he suffered a bad ankle injury. As that was happening, other wing players like Jordan Walsh, Hugo Gonzalez, and Baylor Scheierman started to break out, and quickly made Minott expendable.
Now healthy again, Josh has only appeared in brief stints with the game completely in hand. It’s quite the fall off for someone fans were imagining may become a long-term piece, but that proved not to be the case at all.
It’s sad to see it not work out, but at least the reasoning is mostly because other, younger, homegrown players have stepped up and overtaken Minott, which allowed Stevens and the Celtics to move on at the deadline and save some money.
Not only do the Celtics get closer to the tax, but they open up roster spots as well. We’ve already seen them convert Amari Williams to a full-time contract after the Boucher trade, and hopefully, another breakout wing, Ron Harper Jr., is the next one to get promoted.